Christmas Every Day

The spontaneous Christmas truces on the Western Front during the Christmas season of 1914 are famous but they were not universally observed. Fighting continued at many points along the line. A total of 149 Allied soldiers died on 25 December 1914, seventy-eight of them in France and Belgium. Some men died in base hospitals and casualty clearing stations from previously acquired wounds but a fair few of them were killed in action on Christmas Day. And the fighting was savage enough for the bodies of thirty-two men to be unrecoverable – eighteen of these men with no known grave are commemorated on the Le Touret Memorial, eight on the Ploegsteert Memorial, and six on the Menin Gate.

Snipers remained active too; in fact Sergeant Frank Collins of the Monmouthshire Regiment was killed by a sniper. He was returning from No Man’s Land after exchanging cigarettes with the Germans when he was shot in the back. An unofficial truce was meant to have been in operation at the time but the man who went out to help him was shot and killed too. He is buried in the Calvaire military cemetery in Belgium. His wife Frances chose the inscription “Peace Perfect Peace” for his headstone.