The Christmas Truce of 1914 remains a moment of enduring fascination more than a century after the day the First World War guns fell silent. 

Christmas Truce by the Men Who Took Part: Letters from the 1914 Ceasefire on the Western Front is the largest collection ever drawn together of letters sent home by the officers and soldiers who laid down their guns and shook hands with their foes. 

 The stories of men from English, Irish, Scottish and Welsh regiments who played and joked, sang and danced, swapped gifts and shared food and drink with the enemy before returning to war on the Western Front. 

The eye-opening accounts of the unofficial armistice between German and British forces capture the trepidation and exhilaration, the curiosity, anger, joy and despair of that first Christmas on the unforgiving battlegrounds of the Great War.