The Christmas Truce of World War 1

Whilst I all ways try to learn stuff about the two great wars. We're lucky here that we have quite a strong link.

We regularly walk in the new forest and explore what's left of the airfields and such.

But what I can never learn or begin to understand is what life was like for the soldiers in ww1 also life at home during the second war.

That was a nice video. I knew of the football game. And the meet up on no man's land that Xmas but not the other stuff.

I never realised we had trenches so close they could talk to each other.

Thank you

I think in our generation here in Britain it was almost the status of a folk memory ...... I'm blowed if I can remember where/when I first learned of it.

(My parents were too young to fight in the Great War but were old enough to remember it clearly)

I think my earliest knowledge of it came from this crap music video,from 1983.

Lead me to do a bit more research.

My parents were born in 1907 and 1909, my dad lost his dad when he was 5 and his mum (I think) when he was 14, he was the youngest of their family and they suffered badly during that war, he lost several members of his family, a period that he didn't want to talk about.

My mums dad died when I was 2, and her mum when I was 5, so I never really had any grand-parents that could have told me anything about this war.

Apart from the dates, they didn't tell us much about WW 1 at school either.

I do know more about the 2nd WW as my family had a very hard time during the war, and my dad told me plenty about that.

Peter.

Just to add to my previous post, I owe my existence to one of my grandad's horse's. It was normal practice for the lead horse to be ridden and one day my grandad noticed his lead horse was off it's food so he opened the horses mouth to find an enormous shell splinter in the roof of it's mouth. The old boy told me that if the shell splinter had not lodged in the horses mouth then in would most likely have brought about his demise and so my father would not have been nor would I
Phil

It was certainly part of my kid's schooling. Not a good idea imo. Stories like this may have a grain of truth but the reality they try to obscure is of jumped up "betters" sending millions of plebs to their deaths, their military planning based on having more expendable millions of oiks to send to their deaths than the other side and slogging it out with little regard for the expendable lower classes that suffered the brunt of the slaughter.
Footy on Christmas day? Pah!