Christmas carols and tobacco – not football – the real forces for peace in the trenches

Last April, UEFA announced that they had invited the heads of state of Germany, France, Belgium, Britain, Ireland and Italy to a commemorative event they planned to hold near the Belgian village of Ploegsteert.

European football's governing body had commissioned a monument to celebrate the Christmas Truce of 1914, when, in the words of The Farm's 1990 hit All Together Now, the warring soldiers on the Western Front joined together and decided not to fight. The Farm didn't mention football in their original lyrics, but in the popular imagination, the truce has come to seem as though it was mostly about football.

“This rare and extraordinary moment of peace and human fraternity – when football emerged as a common language among men of different nationalities – is considered as one of the first unstructured expressions of the European idea that emerged in concrete form after the second World War,” UEFA declared. The website story came with a picture of Great War soldiers playing football, though it was apparent from the uniforms that they were all British soldiers.

On December 11th, Michel Platini was joined by the mayor of Ploegsteert, Gilbert Dileu, to unveil UEFA's monument. "I find it particularly moving to imagine those young men 100 years ago finding a common language in football to express their shared brotherhood," Platini said. "Today football is a universal language which opens our hearts, which enables contact between cultures and brings people together . . . All those years ago, football provided a vital bridge for the spontaneous expression of humanity."

Praising football

Prime Minister

David Cameron

couldn’t make it to Ploegsteert, but he issued a statement praising football’s role in the truce: “Every war is cruel, but this was a war unlike any other. . . Yet there was this unique moment, when the guns fell silent and football united people.”

French president François Hollande wasn’t there either, but his statement took up the theme: “The shelling and shooting stopped. Just for a few hours, but long enough for . . . soldiers to exchange looks and smiles, and to play a spontaneous game of football. This universal sport briefly gave those soldiers a chance to lay down their arms. . . This story is the greatest tribute that could ever be paid to sport and to football.”

In the UEFA version of history football seems to be the most powerful force for peace ever invented. In reality, the Christmas Truce had almost nothing to do with football.

Like to brag

Football administrators like to brag about the game’s potential as a “universal language”, but football was well down the list of things that the soldiers had in common, behind the universal misery of life at the front; the common European tradition of Christmas; a similar repertoire of Christmas carols; a widespread dislike of the Prussians; and a mutual love of alcohol and cigarettes.

In some places the trenches were very close together, close enough that soldiers on opposing sides could hear each other across no man’s land. The language that first brought the troops together was not football, but music.

On Christmas Eve, British sentries were startled to see the Germans decorating their trenches with Christmas trees and candles. Graham Williams of the Fifth London Rifle Brigade recalled the reaction in the British trenches when the Germans opposite started to sing Silent Night.

"They finished their carol, we applauded them, and we thought, we must retaliate in some way. We replied with The First Noël. When we finished, they all began clapping. Then they struck up another favourite carol of theirs, O Tannenbaum . .. and so it went on, the Germans singing one of their carols and we singing one of ours. Until we began singing O Come All Ye Faithful, and the Germans immediately joined in, singing the same thing with the Latin words, Adeste Fideles. .."

Meet in the middle

It wasn’t long before individuals on each side had clambered up into the open and come forward to meet in the middle, followed by a general exodus from both sets of trenches. The soldiers joked, traded supplies and souvenirs and took photographs with the cameras none of them were officially allowed to have at the front.

Many soldiers found it hysterical to be joking around with the enemy. Pte Leslie Walkington recalled: “it made us roar with laughter, we thought of the generals going purple in the face, and there was nothing they could do.”

The then 17 year old’s intuition about the reaction back at base was accurate. Commanders on both sides ensured that later years would see no repeats of the spontaneous truces, declaring that fraternisation with the enemy would be punished by court-martial.

What did football have to do with it? There certainly were some kickabouts, mostly involving tins or rag-balls standing in for proper footballs, and at least one organised match, played according to the rules, which pitted the Scots of the 93rd Battalion against the 133rd Royal Saxon Infantry Regiment. The Germans overcame their shock at seeing their opponents wore nothing under their kilts to win 3-2.

But football was a by-product of the peace, rather than, in any sense, a catalyst. For every mention of the game in the contemporary accounts of the truce, there must be a thousand mentions of cigarettes. It turns out that smoking, not sport, is the true language of peace. If any contemporary organisation should be boasting about their role in that brief and beautiful truce, it’s not UEFA, it’s British-American Tobacco.