Book Review: The Christmas Match – Football in No Man’s Land 1914 – Pehr Thermaenius

 

Blurb:

After four months of intense fighting, the war in Flanders between German and British soldiers fell silent on Christmas Eve 1914. The soldiers started singing instead of shooting. On Christmas Day they came out of their trenches and met in No Man’s Land. Some chased rabbits. Some played football. This true story is about two footballers and soldiers, one Saxon and one Scot, who were in units that played a match in a field between the French villages Houplines and Frelinghien.

Scotsman Jimmy Coyle had played professional football before the war. Saxon Albert Schmidt played in the third team for his local club. On Christmas afternoon they each got the chance to defeat their opponents without weapons. Pehr Thermaenius has tracked both Jimmy’s and Albert’s stories through military archives; from mobilization in August to the hard frozen mud in that field in Flanders that became a football field on Christmas Day. The story of the football match is a light in the darkness as the world remembers the tragic waste of a hundred years ago.

Strengths and Weaknesses:

A few of you know I have being working on a series of anti war books with my friend, fellow poet and artist Nick Armbrister since 2013 which we called Europa and through that and I have learnt a lot about various individual stories in the Second World War, most of which terrible and heartbreaking.

The First World War however apart from one brief poem in Europa in 2014 is a part of history I have yet to really delve into with my work in Europa (but I will). The one poem covered the above topic, the Christmas Match in 2014 and has proved a topic of interest ever since to me.

This book it has to be said I discovered by accident recently picking it up at a second hand bookshop and thought hmmm.. this could be a interesting read, and well it was interesting.

It was clear from the beginning that this book was a labour of love by the writer who is a Swedish journalist. Apparently he worked for many years for Dagens Industri (a Swedish financial, daily newspaper) and has long been interested in the First World War.

In this book you can see the attempt by the writer to tell the story over a Scottish and a Saxon Soldier who may well have played in this match but while told whole hearteningly, I was left a little distant in this book by the way these two characters were built up which were left very two dimensional instead of fully formed and took me a lot out of the whole narrative.

Originally published in Sweden, whether this was a language barrier or the style of the writing is a bit trickier not really engaging me throughout the book. Thankfully, either way, the book is mercifully brief in a fairly large format totalling in just over 200 pages and proved easy enough to read through in a few days but it is little more than an introduction than what felt to be a decent, full sized study of an incredible moment in likely one of the most cruel wars in modern history.

8/10 – The historial element of the book.

6/10 – The actual telling of the book.