Christmas day football game during war

The English officers felt the same way about it. Thus Christmas, the celebration of Love, managed to bring mortal enemies together as friends for a time. Gradually, news of the Christmas Truce made it into the press. Just how many soldiers participated in these informal holiday gatherings has been debated; there is no way to know for sure since the ceasefires were small-scale, haphazard and entirely unauthorized.

A Time magazine story on the anniversary claimed that as many as , people took part. Have you no German sense of honor left? Neither was high command pleased with the festivities. On Dec. So when a truce spontaneously broke out, the leaders of all the armies were reportedly horrified. British General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien wrote in a confidential memorandum that "this is only illustrative of the apathetic state we are gradually sinking into.

For the rest of World War I—a conflict that would ultimately claim roughly 15 million lives—no Christmas Truces appear to have occurred. But in , these curious holiday get-togethers reminded all those involved that wars were fought not by forces but by human beings. For years after, the Truce became fodder for everything from artwork to made-for-TV-movies to advertisements and popular songs. England won What stands out most today, however, are the memories of the soldiers themselves, preserved in their own penmanship.

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The symposium considers whether a Christmas truce football match took place, and why the truce has attained such iconic status in British popular culture. You can count on one hand the number of accurate accounts about football during the truce. There are plenty of hearsay accounts, and a few fantasist accounts too — for example, an officer named Peter Jackson claimed to have played, but in was rumbled and admitted he had made the whole thing up — and there are a number of hearsay reports, of people having heard about a match, but there are only four pieces of evidence from soldiers who either played or witnessed the match.

After researching the Christmas truce for 15 years, I can usually spot the real accounts from the fakes. Until this year, I, like Mark, believed there was not enough concrete evidence to say that any football took place.

Two were accounts by men who said there was no football, the third — after 15 years of looking — was an account by a Norfolk corporal who said he played. Sure enough, in that pile were three very important sheets of paper — a letter written by Corporal Albert Wyatt of the Norfolk regiment, published in a newspaper in , who said he had played a match in Wulverghem, Belgium. So here we suddenly have two people in the same place saying they had played a game of football.