ON December 25 1914, British and German troops on the Western Front stopped firing at each other, put down their guns, climbed out of their trenches and met in no-man’s land. The bloody slaughter of World War I had been halted.

Thousands of men ignored the patriotic propaganda of their governments, shook hands, and embraced in friendship. They shared food and drink, showed each other photos of their families back home, and even played impromptu football matches together. “It is wicked that we should be shooting each other,” said William Eve, a rifleman in the Queen’s Westminsters regiment.

He wasn’t the only one who felt that way. The fraternisation between British and German troops was hailed by Lenin, then exiled in Switzerland, as a practical example of how to fight the imperialist war.

Today, the 1914 Christmas truce is portrayed by the media as a spontaneous single outburst of Christian charity. But this deliberately hides the reality of what really happened on December 25 1914. 

The motivation of the soldiers on both sides was clear. They defied their officers and joined together in a spirit of unity and comradeship across national borders. And they would have done it again, were it not for a harsh crackdown on fraternisation by commanding officers on both sides.

World War I was almost five months old at Christmas 1914. Even in that short time, the death toll was approaching one million. On the Western Front, which stretched over 400 miles from Belgium to the Swiss border, the two sides had reached a stalemate in which men lived and died in the mud and blood of the trenches. 

When Christmas Day dawned, fatigue with the senseless carnage of the war spilled out and overcame the months of fear and propaganda. Soldiers on both sides shouted across no-man’s land and came out of their trenches to meet each other. 

Frank Wrentmore, a rugby league player before the war, reported how the Germans “helped us to bring in our dead, and we did the same for them. … The Germans and ourselves climbed out of the trenches and we shook hands with each other. We stopped firing from five o’clock until midnight, and we visited each other’s trenches.”

Elsewhere, Private Deakins of the East Kent Regiment remembered how “the Germans came out of their protective holes, fetched a football, and invited our boys out for a little game. Our boys joined them and together they quickly had great fun, till they had to return to their posts.” 

Similar scenes were repeated up and down the Western Front. Sergeant-Major Naden of the 6th Cheshire Regiment told the Daily Dispatch how both sides “fraternised, exchanging cigars, cigarettes and souvenirs. The Germans also gave us some of their sausages, and we gave them some of our food.” 

Most significantly, Naden said the Germans told him that they were tired of the war and wished it was over.

This was what the generals feared and the fraternisation between British and German troops was met with fury by their commanding officers. In his memoirs, Sir John French, commander in chief of British forces on the Western Front, recalled that when he heard the news, “I issued immediate orders to prevent any recurrence of such conduct, and called the local commanders to strict account.” 

The commanding officer of the Second Army, Horace Smith-Dorrien, ordered that “informal understandings with the enemy are to cease. Officers and NCOs allowing them are to be brought before a court martial.” This was no idle threat. By the time the war ended, the British had executed 306 of their own troops who had been court-martialled for desertion, more than any other belligerent nation.

In Germany, the High Command was even quicker to respond. Four days after the Christmas truce, it banned all fraternisation and approaches to the enemy as acts of high treason. After Karl Liebknecht had been the only man in the Reichstag to oppose Germany’s war budget at the start of December, the German rulers had to move swiftly to snuff out opposition to the war. 

As the historians Malcolm Brown and Shirley Seaton discovered, there were numerous other examples during the war of orders banning fraternisation being issued every December. Any repetitions of the 1914 Christmas truce would have been met by firing squads. 

Nevertheless, the soldiers’ refusal to fight shone like a beacon in the dark bloody night of World War I. In Britain, the Labour Leader, newspaper of the Independent Labour Party, carried the front-page headline “Governments Refuse a Christmas Truce, But the Soldiers Take it!” and detailed half a dozen eyewitness reports of troops meeting in no-man’s land. 

Each one was a practical example of how the fight against the war could begin. They would be repeated in 1917 when Russian workers decided that enough was enough and ended the war through revolution. 

Today, as the world teeters on the edge of new imperialist wars, the memory of how those ordinary soldiers defied their army bosses to impose their own peace is more relevant than ever. 

As Lenin said when he heard the news of the 1914 Christmas truce: “Should we perish as blind and helpless slaves in a war between slave-holders, or should we fall in ‘attempts at fraternisation’ between the slaves with the aim of casting off slavery?”

Tony Collins’s latest book is Raising the Red Flag: Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism, 1884-1921.