The most beautiful moment of the beautiful game?
Christmas Day, 1914. Suddenly, across the trenches, the guns fall silent. In no-man’s-land a real football appears – produced from who knows where – and a game is played between the British and German soldiers…
Like no-man’s-land itself, this story always seemed to exist for me in a liminal space, somewhere between myth and reality – could it really be true?
Researching this Letter, to my great delight, I find out that it happened. Here is one of the real photographs, from a camera smuggled into the trenches by one of the English soldiers. A German solider stands with our troops. There it is in black and white – a cold, hard fact. Or rather, a gentle moment in the midst of the cold, hard reality of a truly terrible war.
But how to write about such a moment without sentimentality, without sounding like a Sainsbury’s advert? (which it was improbably made into!).
First, on Christmas Eve, the British troops notice strange points of light appearing above the German lines, soon identified as Christmas tree lights, poking out above their trench. Then, the Germans begin to sing ‘Holy Night’ in German. Recognising the tune, the English soldiers start to join in, in English.
How close the opposing trenches were to one another, and not just geographically.
Then, the football game, more like a knock about, with a real football, but also with improvised balls, rolled up uniforms and tin cans. This is all beautifully captured by the letters home from the Front, and from eye witness testimony, as seen here, in this short video produced by The Imperial War Museum:
