“It was all done independently,” says William Spencer, a military specialist at the British National Archives. “It was little bits and pieces, dotted. It wasn’t a blanket decision made, ‘We will all get out of our trenches and fraternize with the enemy.'”
In the weeks leading up to Christmas, life was miserable on the front lines, says historian Alan Wakefield of the Imperial War Museum. The weather was wet and frigid. The trenches were basically large ditches, collapsing and filling with water.
“So they do small-scale truces where they actually get out of the trenches and do repair work within sight of each other,” says Wakefield, who wrote a book called Christmas in the Trenches. “Nobody’s firing at each other, because they’re both just trying to make life a bit more bearable. This is the first chance you’re really getting to see the enemy, because normally in trench war, you’re under the ground.”
That was mid-December. Then, Christmas arrives.
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