Today is Remembrance Sunday (November 10th, 2024). Whitehall is packed around the Cenotaph and there is a service in our local church this afternoon. One way or another football has played its part in war. This image represents the Christmas Day Truce, when the two opposing armies had a "Truce", allowing them to play a friendly football match. Result? Who cares. I published this Blog last year but it has the same effect as any year ON THIS DAY.
"Last Survivor", by C.N. Norman, is a story that recalls Christmas 1915 and the battlefield soccer match, played between the British soldiers and the Germans. On Christmas Day 1915, soldiers from both sides of the trenches in World War One met up in No-Man’s-Land for a game of football. Nothing official was kept of this brief meeting on Christmas Day between the enemy, so our knowledge of what took place has always been somewhat patchy. However, the death in 2001 of one of the men who took part in this match resurrected memories of the occasion.
Bertie Felstead, the last survivor of that football match, died in July 2001, aged 106 years. Felstead, pictured at right, was a member of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers. On Christmas Eve, he was stationed in northern France with his colleagues near the village of Laventie when he heard the Germans in a trench 100 metres away singing “Silent Night”. In reply, the Royal Welch Fusiliers sang “Good King Wenceslas”.
On Christmas Day, after some shouting between both trenches, he and his colleagues got out of their icy trench and greeted the Germans. Bertie Felstead recalled that the Germans probably were already out of their trench before the British got out. He claimed that nothing was planned and that what happened was entirely spontaneous.
Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches.
The following day, British and German soldiers met in "no man's land" and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football. They also buried casualties and repaired trenches and dugouts. After Boxing Day, meetings in no man's land dwindled out.
The truce was not observed everywhere along the Western Front. Elsewhere the fighting continued and casualties did occur on Christmas Day. Some officers were unhappy at the truce and worried that it would undermine fighting spirit. After 1914, the High Commands on both sides tried to prevent any truces on a similar scale happening again. Despite this, there were some isolated incidents of soldiers holding brief truces later in the war, and not only at Christmas.
In what was known as the 'Live and Let Live' system, in quiet sectors of the front line, brief pauses in the hostilities were sometimes tacitly agreed, allowing both sides to repair their trenches or gather their dead. Want more? https://www.iwm.org.uk/history/the-real-story-of-the-christmas-truce
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