Fraternization in the Peninsular War
“How different were our feelings” wrote a Scottish sergeant, “from many of our countrymen at home, whose ideas of the French character were drawn from servile newspapers and caricatures in print shops.”
Perhaps the best known instance of wartime fraternization in our history is Christmas Day, 1914, when on one sector of the Western Front British and German soldiers ceased fire for the day. Besides burying their dead, they exchanged souvenirs and cigarettes, showed family photographs, and then sang carols, all joining in Auld Lang Syne. The occasion stands out as a rarity in a war of exceptional bitterness and slaughter.
A century before, the soldiers of Wellington’s army, fighting to and fro across Portugal and Spain for six years on end, would have been far less surprised by such an event than were the First Hundred Thousand, because in their war, fraternization took place with comparative frequency.
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