Yuletide fighting – Was there a truce on Christmas Day?

Saturday, January 30 – 1915
Telling how he spent Christmas Day in the trenches, Private Joseph Jackson (28), 1st Royal Warwicks, of Ward Street, agreed that the fighting at Yuletide was not so severe, but, to use his own words, was “quite hot enough to make things uncomfortable.”

There might have been a truce in some parts of the firing line – in fact, he had read accounts of how the British and Germans played football between the trenches – “but truce or no truce,” “I wasn’t fool enough to risk my head above the trench.”

Gifts in plenty were received from friends at home, and generally the soldiers were well looked after.

His Christmas fare consisted of tinned beef, some good old plum-pudding, and dozens of cigarettes. On Boxing Day the artillery were going at it hard and fast, the Kaiser’s men sending over the ‘Jack Johnsons,’ and we…