Christmas 2014 marks the centenary of the most famous truce in military history.

One hundred years ago, on the Christmas Day of World War 1, British and German troops put down their guns and celebrated peacefully together in no-man’s land between the trenches.

The war, briefly, came to a halt.

In some places festivities began when German troops lit candles on Christmas trees on their parapets so the British sentries a few hundred metres away could see them.

Elsewhere, the British acted first, starting bonfires and letting off rockets.

Both armies had received lots of comforts from home and felt generous and well-disposed towards their enemies in the first winter of the war, before the vast battles of attrition began in 1915, eventually taking 10 million lives.

All along the line that Christmas Day 1914, soldiers found their enemies were much like themselves and began asking why should we be trying to kill each other.

The generals were shocked. High Command diaries and statements express anxiety that if that sort of thing spread it could sap the troops’ will to fight.

The soldiers in khaki and grey sang carols to each other, exchanged gifts of tobacco, jam, sausage, chocolate and liquor, traded names and addresses and played soccer between the shell holes and barbed wire. They even paid mutual trench visits.

Private Oswald Tilley of the London Rifle Brigade wrote to his parents:

“Just you think that while you were eating your turkey, etc, I was out talking and shaking hands with the very men I had been trying to kill a few hours before! It was astounding.’’

Anglican Church Christmas services

Monday December 22

7.30pm: St Matthew’s West Bogan

Tuesday December 23

7.30pm: St Faith’s Hermidale (Tennis Club.

Christmas Eve

8pm: St Mark’s Nyngan

Christmas Day

9am: St Mark’s Nyngan