This was Christmas 1914, just a few months after the outbreak of hostilities. A lot of these troops were green, not yet bloodied by the horrors to come.
At the Imperial War Museum in London, historians like Alan Wakefield say the bitterness and hatred had not yet taken hold.
“The war hadn’t got that sort of, as you say, dirty at that stage,” said Wakefield. “It’s really 1915 that things like poison gas comes along. Zeppelin airships are bombing London, Germans sink the liner Lusitania with civilian casualties. And the propaganda machine hasn’t really fed on that and actually created those sort of hatreds between the two forces.”