Topic: Britain, Germany Meet In Friendly Match To Commemorate WWI Yuletide Truce

[BlueAlphaZero]

On Christmas Eve in 1914, British and German troops who were previously locked in bloody combat along the Western Front (Belgium, northeastern parts of France, and then German-held Alsace-Lorraine) decided to cease fighting, if only for the Yuletide season.

At first, the soldiers sang carols behind their own lines but they eventually crossed into no man's land to bring in their dead. That led to the British and Germans bartering food, tobacco, and alcohol; they also exchanged headgear and other pieces of their uniforms as souvenirs. Before long, some troops began kicking around a football in a friendly match. Although this moment of peace inevitably gave way to the harsh reality of war, none of the men involved would ever forget how enemies became brothers, even for a little while.

One hundred years later, British and German troops assigned to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) contingent in Afghanistan took to an improvised football field to play a game in honor of the Christmas Truce of World War I while their comrades watched and cheered from the sidelines.

http://www.dw.de/german-and-british-troops-commemorate-1914-christmas-truce-football-match/a-18150798

[naruto789544]

a fitting testament that there is always hope even at the most impossible time...

[BlueAlphaZero]

a fitting testament that there is always hope even at the most impossible time...

I wholeheartedly agree. I believe it was mentioned elsewhere but it's worth noting that the 1914 Christmas truce on the Western Front was spearheaded by the rank-and-file soldiers themselves rather than the commissioned officers. The superior officers, in fact, warned their men against fraternizing with the enemy at that time.

A bit of trivia about the Christmas truce: there was a German infantry corporal who was vehemently opposed to any sort of ceasefire with the British and the French despite the occasion. His name? Adolf Hitler. 

[naruto789544]

this was the article which mentioned those parts...

http://time.com/3643889/christmas-truce-1914/

Yet for many at the time, the story of the Christmas truce was not an example of chivalry in the depths of war, but rather a tale of subversion: when the men on the ground decided they were not fighting the same war as their superiors. With no man’s land sometimes spanning just 100 feet, enemy troops were so close that they could hear each other and even smell their cooking. The commander of the British Second Corps, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien, believed this proximity posed “the greatest danger” to the morale of soldiers and told Divisional Commanders to explicitly prohibit any “friendly intercourse with the enemy.” In a memo issued on Dec. 5, he warned that: “troops in trenches in close proximity to the enemy slide very easily, if permitted to do so, into a ‘live and let live’ theory of life.”

Indeed, one British soldier, Murdoch M. Wood, speaking in 1930, said: “I then came to the conclusion that I have held very firmly ever since, that if we had been left to ourselves there would never have been another shot fired.” Adolf Hitler, then a Corporal of the 16th Bavarians, saw it differently: “Such a thing should not happen in wartime,” he is said to have remarked. “Have you no German sense of honor?”

[BlueAlphaZero]

"Ol' Schicklgruber" (a derogatory nickname given to Hitler) really had it in for the British and French, he did.