WWI Diary Reveals Truth Of Christmas Truce

It might be one of the few celebrated events of the First World War, but evidence shows the Christmas truce was not universally followed along the Western Front.

A World War One diary, never displayed in public before, has revealed that fighting continued in some parts of the line, despite the legendary festive entente.

An extract from a journal belonging to Lieutenant Fredrick Brown recounts the death of a 39-year-old postman from Monmouthshire, Sergeant Frank Collins, as he tried to deliver cigarettes to a German trench.

"Presently a Sert. Collins of my Regiment stood waist high above the trench waving a box of woodbines above his head," Lt Brown wrote.

"German soldiers beckoned him over, and Collins got out and walked half way towards them, in turn beckoning someone to come and take the gift.

"However, they called out "prisonier" (sic) and immediately Collins edged back the way he had come.

"Suddenly a shot rang out, and the poor Sergt. staggered back into the trench, shot through the chest. I can still hear his cries: 'Oh my God, they have shot me', and he died immediately."

Tragic it might have been, but Frank Collins wasn't the only man killed on 25 December 1914.

According to records supplied by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, 105 Commonwealth soldiers were killed in Belgium and France on Christmas Eve and 79 on Christmas Day. A similar number of German soldiers died.

"Many men lost their lives on Christmas Day and the days surrounding it, on both sides. It was by no means the complete 'silent night' across the whole of the front," explains historian Chris Baker.

"For some men it was the end of their lives in a bitter period."

As for the fabled football matches, there is no photographic evidence of any games and very few first hand accounts.

Indeed only around 10 pictures of the day exist at all, and there isn't a football in sight in a single one of them.

Rather, most recollections are hearsay.

"There are mentions of football in people's accounts but they are generally mentions like 'I heard that a football game went on between somebody down the line from here'," said Paul Cornish from the Imperial War Museum.

"There's no eyewitness account of a serious game of football anybody actually witnessed and it would have been very difficult on the rock solid piece of ground that is strewn with shell holes, empty tin cans, dead bodies, because a lot of the truce was spent doing mutual burying of dead."

Let us not shatter one of the few bright spots of an otherwise grim conflict.

A Christmas truce was observed, gifts were exchanged, the guns did fall silent. Who could take issue with history if it's allowed the memory to distort slightly to make up for the inhumanity of every day that preceded and followed?

Mr Baker said: "The context of the truce is really important - it came out of necessity.

"There had been weeks of heavy fighting in horrendous weather. Just before Christmas, the conditions improved and morale lifted.

"The fighting stopped and it was a chance to bury the hundreds of dead who were lying in no man's land. Some fraternising happened while this was going on."

Two weeks later, such was the slow travel of news delivery, the truce made headlines around the world.

"Foes became friends," reported The Daily Mirror.

But by the time these words were being read in London, Berlin, Paris, Washington and elsewhere, the two sides were at each other's throats again.

The Christmas truce wouldn't be repeated again. It would be another five years before the firing stopped once and for all and peace came to Europe.

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