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In the trenches, the Christmas season was anything but merry. "A high wind hurtled over the Flemish fields," remembered the war correspondent Philip Gibbs, "but it was moist, and swept gusts of rain into the faces of men marching through the mud to the fighting-lines and of other men doing sentry on the fire-steps of trenches into which water came trickling down the slimy parapets.... They slept in soaking clothes, with boots full of water.... Whole sections of trench collapsed into a chaos of slime and ooze."

At a point where British and German lines were so close that each side could hear the squelching of the other's boots, Gibbs reported a conversation in shouts over the parapets:

"How deep is it with you?" shouted a German soldier....

"Up to our blooming knees," said an English corporal, who was trying to keep his bombs dry under a tarpaulin.

"So?...You are lucky fellows. We are up to our belts in it."

As Christmas Day approached, all British units were given strict orders that there be no repeat of the spontaneous fraternization of the previous year. But even without a truce, something else had already started to happen, without reference to any holiday. At a number of places on the front where Allied and German trenches had been fixed in place for so long, there evolved a tacit system of "live and let live." If, for example, you fired trench mortars at the Germans while they were having lunch or dinner, they would do the same to you, so sometimes firing stopped at mealtimes. At a safe moment like this, a soldier might even signal the other side—perhaps by climbing briefly above the parapet and pointing to his shoulder, where an officer's insignia would be—when a commander was about to visit. Then troops on both sides would begin a barrage of rifle and machine-gun fire, and British and French infantrymen quickly learned that if they aimed too high, the Germans would do the same. A similar informal understanding sometimes also covered no man's land, where soldiers were ordered to go on dreaded night patrols to repair barbed-wire barricades and reconnoiter enemy defenses. One young British officer typically described leading several men on such a mission when "we suddenly confronted, round some mound or excavation, a German patrol ... we were perhaps twenty yards from each other, fully visible. I waved a weary hand, as if to say: what is the use of killing each other? The German officer seemed to understand, and both parties turned and made their way back to their own trenches. Reprehensible conduct, no doubt."

In some places, the front-line trenches were far apart and the cratered expanse of no man's land might be several hundred yards wide. This allowed the rise of a curious and persistent legend. No man's land was not empty, some soldiers claimed, but populated by deserters who found shelter in shell holes and caves as well as abandoned trenches and dugouts. After every skirmish, when darkness fell, they would come out to rob the dead and dying of their food and water. As time passed these spectral survivors grew long beards and their uniforms turned to rags—until they took new ones from the dead. They were the source, it was said, of mysterious noises heard at night. And this roving community in no man's land was international, men were convinced, with deserters from both sides. The generals had forbidden fraternization, but they couldn't prevent it from happening in myth.

No war in history had seen so many troops locked in stalemate for so long. The year 1915 had begun with the Germans occupying some 19,500 square miles of French and Belgian territory. At its end, Allied troops had recaptured exactly eight of those square miles, the British alone suffering more than a quarter-million casualties in the process. Still an endless stream of wounded flowed home, and still the newspapers were filled with lists of those killed or missing.

For Rudyard and Carrie Kipling, messages of sympathy arrived from all over the world, from Theodore