[Christmas day – see footnote1.]
Had walk round town with Father before dinner. Had roast pork and onions for dinner. Ernie came in for dinner and stayed a short while. I set him up to the station. We were rather too soon and walked about town talking. Played the piano and played a few games amongst ourselves at night. Went to bed about mid night. British Air Raid on Cuxhaven 2 by 7 aviators. 4 machines lost but all the men safe.
While ALL routinely included brief notes on War events in his diary entries, often writing them on the date they had happened and not necessarily on the date he became aware of them, he never made any reference to the ‘Christmas truce‘. Histories of WW1 which mention a truce generally say that any such events, with or without impromptu games of football or exchanges of gifts, were localised, informal and strongly deprecated by Army commanders. ALL’s silence may be interpreted either as confirming that censorship of news about truces, if not complete, was fairly successful, or as suggesting that if anything was known about them, it was not considered significant in Britain at the time. The former seems the more likely explanation. ↩
The Cuxhaven Raid was a British ship-based air-raid on the German naval forces at Cuxhaven on Christmas Day, 1914. ↩