The Christmas Truce, which occurred primarily between the
British and German soldiers along the Western Front in December
1914, is an event the official histories of the "Great War" leave
out, and the Orwellian historians hide from the public. This
remarkable story begins to unfold on the morning of December 19,
1914:
"Lieutenant Geoffrey Heinekey, new to the 2ND Queen's Westminister
Rifles, wrote to his mother, 'A most extraordinary thing
happened... Some Germans came out and held up their hands and began
to take in some of their wounded and so we ourselves immediately
got out of our trenches and began bringing in our wounded also. The
Germans then beckoned to us and a lot of us went over and talked to
them and they helped us to bury our dead. This lasted the whole
morning and I talked to several of them and I must say they seemed
extraordinarily fine men.... It seemed too ironical for words.
There, the night before we had been having a terrific battle and
the morning after, there we were smoking their cigarettes and they
smoking ours."
As night fell on Christmas Eve the British soldiers noticed the
Germans putting up small Christmas trees along with candles at the
top of their trenches and many began to shout in English "We no
shoot if you no shoot." The firing stopped along the many miles of
the trenches and the British began to notice that the Germans were
coming out of the trenches toward the British who responded by
coming out to meet them. They mixed and mingled in No Man's Land
and soon began to exchange chocolates for cigars and various
newspaper accounts of the war which contained the propaganda from
their respective homelands. Many of the officers on each side
attempted to prevent the event from occurring but the soldiers
ignored the risk of a court-martial or of being shot.
Some of the meetings reported in diaries were between Anglo-Saxons
and German Saxons and the Germans joked that they should join
together and fight the Prussians. The massive amount of
fraternization, or maybe just the Christmas spirit, deterred the
officers from taking action and many of them began to go out into
No Man's Land and exchange Christmas greetings with their opposing
officers. Each side helped bury their dead and remove the wounded
so that by Christmas morning there was a large open area about as
wide as the size of two football fields separating the opposing
trenches. The soldiers emerged again on Christmas morning and began
singing Christmas carols, especially "Silent Night." They recited
the 23rd Psalm together and played football. Again, Christmas gifts
were exchanged and meals were prepared openly and attended by the
opposing forces. Weintraub quotes one soldier's observation of the
event: "Never... was I so keenly aware of the insanity of
war."
Peace. 
