Select Page

Today we visited the Christmas Truce field, where the alleged football match between German and British soldiers took place on Christmas Day 1914. This site was commemorated with a donation box and a statue of an old 1914 football. It surprised our young people to learn that the truce was not, in fact, a singular event, but spanned many different areas across Belgium, where many German and British folk would sing Christmas Carols in their trenches and eventually went to no mans land to exchange gifts and stories to one another. Bruce explained to the young people that this football match would have been a small-scale match in which post would have been made out of makeshift shirts and the ball would most likely have been a bundled cloth. The time would also have been spent grabbing the dead and wounded and tending to those who required assistance in no man’s land.

After learning that the truce began with the German soldiers singing Stille Nacht, we decided to sing Silent Night (Stille Nacht).