Perhaps the best recorded and successful unofficial ceasefire was the Christmas Truce of 1914 during the First World War. On Christmas Day, 1914, only 5 months into World War I, German, British, and French soldiers, already sick and tired of the senseless killing, disobeyed their superiors and fraternized with "the enemy" along two-thirds of the Western Front (a crime punishable by death). The ceasefire was a spontaneous and surprising happening that took place in different sectors at different times, along the Western Front, where British, Welsh, French and German soldiers and officers made individual unofficial truces in seasonal goodwill.
The Christmas Truce began first with the German soldier's custom of erecting Christmas trees with lit candles during Christmas Eve, along the trenches at the Western Front. …
