"Silent Night"

Alfred Anderson, "the last veteran from any nation to have served in 1914," died yesterday.

Alfred Anderson was 18 when British and German soldiers crossed no-man's land on the first Christmas Day of the war to exchange handshakes and cigarettes and play an impromptu game of football with bully-beef cans, using their own steel helmets for goalpoasts. ...

As December 25 arrived he was billeted in a dilapidated farmhouse behind the trenches and never joined in the famous game of football. But only last year, the old soldier recalled: "All I’d heard for two months in the trenches was the hissing, cracking and whining of bullets in flight, machine-gun fire and distant German voices.

"But there was a dead silence that morning, right across the land as far as you could see. We shouted ‘Merry Christmas', even though nobody felt merry. The silence ended early in the afternoon and the killing started again. It was a short peace in a terrible war."

No, really, the football game — soccer, in American parlance — really happened. Historian Stanley Weintraub has written a book about it, and NRO interviewed him four years ago. He describes football as the "working-class religion."

Lopez: Can you imagine circumstances where something similar might happen again during such a bloody struggle?

Weintraub: I can't imagine such massive concentrations of troops again in a future war, nor can I imagine such collisions of similar cultures. Sadly, I can envision future conflicts with such culturally different opponents as Islamic forces. To see a common humanity in likely future opponents seems unlikely. A Christmas truce could not happen again without a mutual respect for the values of Christmas.

Emphasis mine. Hellfire Corner has a several first-hand accounts of the Christmas Truce.