Christmas truce
Enemies leave the trenches to sing carols and play football
At Christmas 1914, five months into the war, British, French and German soldiers on many sectors of the front stopped shooting without orders. They met in no man's land, swapped food and souvenirs, sang carols together and, by many accounts, played football.
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On one stretch of the front, the Christmas truce of 1914 was struck for the sake of the post: Belgian soldiers asked the Germans to pass their letters on to families living in occupied Belgium. Share →
Meanwhile around the world (±25 years)
Whole world
- 1914–1918 World War I — same year
- 1918–1920 Spanish flu pandemic — 4 years later
- 1920 League of Nations founded — 6 years later
- 1939–1945 World War II — 25 years later
Eastern Europe & Russia
- 1917 October Revolution — 3 years later
- 1917–1922 Russian Civil War — 3 years later
- 1917 February Revolution — 3 years later
- 1929–1933 Collectivization in the Soviet Union — 15 years later
- 1936–1938 Great Purge — 22 years later
Middle East
- 1908 Oil struck at Masjed Soleyman — 6 years earlier
- 1915–1917 Armenian genocide — 1 year later
- 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement — 2 years later
- 1916–1918 The Arab Revolt — 2 years later
- 1917 Balfour Declaration — 3 years later
Africa
- 1897 The British sack Benin City — 17 years earlier
- 1904–1908 The Herero and Nama genocide — 10 years earlier
- 1922 Discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb — 8 years later
- 1935–1937 Italy invades Ethiopia — 21 years later
Asia
- 1894–1895 First Sino-Japanese War — 20 years earlier
- 1896–1898 Philippine Revolution — 18 years earlier
- 1911–1912 Xinhai Revolution — 3 years earlier
- 1923 Great Kantō earthquake — 9 years later
- 1931 China floods — 17 years later
Americas
- 1910–1920 Mexican Revolution — 4 years earlier
- 1913 Ford's moving assembly line — 1 year earlier
- 1914 Opening of the Panama Canal — same year
- 1914 Death of Martha, the last passenger pigeon — same year
- 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression — 15 years later
Oceania
- 1893 New Zealand women win the vote — 21 years earlier
- 1893 Overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom — 21 years earlier
- 1911 Amundsen reaches the South Pole — 3 years earlier
- 1912 The death of Scott's polar party — 2 years earlier
- 1936 Death of the last thylacine — 22 years later
Alive at the time
- Thomas Edison (aged 67)
- Nikola Tesla (aged 58)
- Marie Curie (aged 47)
- Mahatma Gandhi (aged 45)
- Vladimir Lenin (aged 44)
- Ernest Rutherford (aged 43)
- Winston Churchill (aged 40)
- Joseph Stalin (aged 36)
- Albert Einstein (aged 35)
- Pablo Picasso (aged 33)