We've heard an awful lot this Xmas about the 1914 Christmas Truce, even the queen got in on the act making it a central feature of her speech. Some of this coverage, particularly that in her speech, has bothered me more than a little. To listen to them one would think the Truce was a picturesque incident in a costume drama, a little nod to Christmas spirit worthy of supermarket ads to sell mince pies and plum duff, a tiny temporary moment of humanity between too implacable foes. It has become sanitised, mythologised, turned into a football match, made a respectable part of the establishment version of our history, the Gove and Cameron school of thought. The real Christmas Truce, if one reads the letters and diaries of those who took part and the official documents of the time was very different. The spontaneous cease fire by the troops, the meeting and mingling in no mans land caused near panic amongst the upper echelons of the army and in figures such as the Queen's Saxe Coburg Gotha relatives, there was consternation and panic in Buckingham Palace and Downing St., they were terrified that the troops would now refuse to fight, that having recognised their "enemy" as so similar to themselves and with the point of the war so utterly incomprehensible to them they would refuse to start killing each other again. On the ground these sentiments were being openly discussed, many of the troops on both sides were promising not to start shooting again, plans were being bounced around to extend the truce indefinitely, orders were being ignored, most expected it would go on for days at least, perhaps weeks, maybe for good...not just for a drink of schnapps and a game of footie. The truce ended when the "high ups" of both sides enforced their orders by ordering artillery to shell their own men and made it clear to the junior officers who'd been swept up in it all that they had to bring their troops back in line...or else. As far as they were concerned it was the suppression of a mutiny, a mutiny with overtones of the Socialist International's efforts earlier in the year to stop the war from breaking out by getting the working class of the combatant nations to refuse to fire on their brother workers in the cause of some imperialist quarrel that did not concern them. Popular depictions of the Great War used to understand this, they are now dismissed by revisionist historians who seem incapable of seeing the conflict from the perspective of those at the bottom of the class ridden British social pile. Frankly it disgusts me.