Pte Frederick Davies of the Royal Welsh Fusiliers wrote home about life on the western Front, in correspondence donated to the Imperial War Museum

A poignant description of British and German soldiers sharing meagre rations across no man’s land during the famous 1914 Christmas Day truce of the first world war is contained in a newly revealed collection of letters.

Frederick James Davies, a private in the 2nd Battalion Royal Welsh Fusiliers, wrote home about giving “cigs, jam and corn beef” to the frontline enemy during the celebrated impromptu ceasefire, which saw some soldiers play football.



Davies, from Lampeter, Wales, told his mother how both Germans and British soldiers climbed out of their trenches in northern France to exchange gifts and messages of goodwill. He had “a good chat with the Germans on Xmas day,” he wrote, in letters recently donated to the Imperial War Museum.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Davies’s war injuries led to him leaving the army in 1915. Photograph: Jane Oliver/PA

“They were only fifty yards away from us in the trenches. They came out and we went to meet them. We shook hands with them,” he wrote. “They also gave us cigars but they didn’t have much food. I think they are hard up for it. They were fed up with the war.”

He described coming out of the trenches “since Sunday for a few days rest. It’s nice to have a night’s sleep from the wet but we still sleep in our clothes but I am happy through it all. It’s no use being otherwise”.



He added: “Don’t you worry about me. You buck up till I’ll come home”, before signing off “from your loving son Fred”.



In another dispatch he wrote: “It’s a grand sight to see the shells bursting of a night, it’s just like fireworks,” and said he was sending pressed flowers home to his mother.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest A page of a letter written by Frederick Davies. Photograph: Jane Oliver/PA

The letters were discovered by his granddaughter, Jane Oliver, after the death of her mother, who was Davies’s eldest daughter.



The Christmas truce is said to have begun when British troops heard German soldiers singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along the German trenches. On Christmas Day, in some parts of the western front, soldiers emerged from their trenches and met in no mans’s land. They exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played football.



The temporary truces offered the chance to repair trenches and bury the dead. These informal truces were not observed along the whole of the front line and it is estimated that 81 British soldiers were killed on Christmas Day 1914. General hostilities resumed on Boxing Day.



Davies died, aged 61, at a military hospital in Cardiff in 1959. During the war a trench caved in on him, shattering his spine. He was invalided out in 1915, and, confined to a chair, he was unable to work properly after.



He later married Hannah Isaacs, a munitions factory worker, and had three daughters, settling in Porthcawl, but as he was unmarried when he left the army so was not eligible for a pension for his wife and children.



His youngest daughter, Audrey Trenchard, now 86, but just 17 when her father died, said he had never spoken about his war experiences, and “being the youngest I hadn’t heard of any of this. It’s wonderful for me to find out about it”.



The letter was a reminder “that the German’s weren’t all bad, they were family men like ours were. It’s very important to keep this sort of thing alive,” she said.

