One hundred years ago, four million soldiers were facing off in frozen trenches stretching over 800 kilometers (500 miles), from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. By December, 1914, World War I had killed or wounded 85,000 British, 850,000 French and 677,000 German soldiers on the Western front.
As Joseph Stalin later said, the world socialist misleaders betrayed the working class and made the slaughter possible: “On the very eve of the war,…the workers were given a new slogan — to exterminate each other for the glory of their capitalist fatherlands.”
One soldier remembered, “In Christmas time, on the 24th of December… [we] were not at all unfriendly…against the enemy. There was a feeling in the air: ‘we can’t go on killing each other today.’ And this was a mutual feeling on both sides.”
Rank-and-file soldiers began spontaneous, unofficial truces all along the battle line. Lance Corporal George Ashurst, of the 2nd Lancashire Fusiliers recalled: “It started by ‘Well, Merry Christmas, lads!’ You know, talking in the trench. We can hear Jerry [German soldiers]…chatting quite loudly….singing a Christmas carol, you know, in German. And damn good singing, too. We’re shouting: ‘Go on, Jerry!’…. ‘Encore!’ we’re shouting. And a fellow comes next, playing a cornet…. It was beautiful to hear him play it. And we were shouting: ‘Hurray!’ And there was no more shooting.”
Once it stopped, they came out of the trenches and met.
German artillery officer Richner remembered: “The fraternization between the both lines came to a climax when at about 3 o’clock in the afternoon about ten or twelve soldiers of our trenches and about the same number of French soldiers came to the middle of the two lines. The trenches were about 300 meters from each other, and [they] met there on the barbed wire and had champagne and wine and cigarettes to exchange, and then they came back.”
But fraternization continued. Ernie Williams, of a Cheshire regiment reminisced: “Somehow, this football appeared,….But we didn’t form a team.… It was a kick-about, everybody was having a go. … Boy, it was grand.… Kicked it about on top. Just to keep warm, of course.… And do you know, there were fellows walking about on top of our trench,….at tea time, and not a shot had been fired.”
….The soldiers began talking….One began to think that these chaps, who were like ourselves, whom we liked, and who felt about the war as we did…”
As the soldiers met, they questioned what they were being told and realized they had more in common with the working-class soldiers across the battlefield than with their own capitalist politicians and commanders.
Ernie Williams remembered: “I was thinking it was altogether wrong that we were having this war. Them fellows don’t want to fight us…. They’re ordinary people, like me. And they don’t want to fight. It’s the generals and them people that started this scrapping.”
The military command on both sides moved quickly to end the Christmas truce.
George Ashurst remembered: “We got orders: ‘Get back in your trenches, every man!’ The generals behind must have seen it and got a bit suspicious. Oh! We were cursing them to hell. Cursing the generals…. ‘Want to get up here in this stuff? Never mind your big giving orders in your big chateaux and driving about in your big cars.’  Yes. We hated the sight of bloody generals. We always did, all through the war! They gave orders for a battery of guns behind us to fire and the machine gun to open out…. Officers fired their revolvers at the Jerries, you know. Course, that started the war again.”
The 1914 Christmas truce demonstrated both the immense potential of the working class — able to halt a ferocious world war after five months of bitter combat — and the cruel weakness of spontaneous, unorganized action.
In 1917, Russian soldiers through the Bolshevik revolution exposed to communist refused to continue the war against Germany. But later, turned their guns against the Russian tsars and formed a workers’ state on one-sixth of the earth’s surface. It is only by organizing a revolutionary communist party that the working class can realize decisive victories over the ruling class.


(Note: All of the men who fought in World War I are now dead. This article is based on oral history recordings made after the war.)