The Artois region in France still carries the scars of bitter fighting and loss from the trenches of World War One. So why shouldn't one moment of camaraderie between enemies be celebrated and remembered, asks French film director and screenwriter Christian Carion in this article for BBC News.
Memories of World War One can be seen everywhere in the quiet part of the Artois region in northern France where I was born. The war left a trail of cemeteries with well-tended lawns in the midst of fields. Crops now grow around the edges of these spaces where 20-year-old kids from Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Great Britain and other countries lie.
Forty nations buried their sons in the earth of my homeland. While still a kid, I learnt the names and flags of these countries. I was able to revise my geography while learning about the history of this war.
Every autumn, my father and I collected artillery shells which had been brought to the surface by ploughing. We carried them in our arms and laid them down at the entrance to our fields. A Renault 4 from the Prefecture came to load them up like potatoes and spirit them away. Researchers have estimated that the earth will continue to give its own unique account of the Great War for a further seven centuries.
Every year, kids still try to unscrew these shells covered in dirt and rust to see what is inside. As a result, they lose a hand, their eyesight or even their lives. The survivors of these unplanned explosions are treated as "war casualties" and receive a pension based on 1914 rates and converted into today's euros.
Every 11 November, my schoolmates and I sang the Marseillaise under the icy stare of a statue infantryman perched on a column engraved with names, each of which we had to read out loud.
None of the houses we inhabited were built before the 1920s and none of our furniture pre-dated that decade. Our grandmothers' wardrobes were no more.
Sometimes, one of these houses would subside as it was built over an old tunnel dug by soldiers. These incidents were treated as war damage and the family was granted government compensation.
1914-1918 was more than just a date written in my school exercise book. It provided the backdrop to my childhood.
I later realised that this war was the most important event of the 20th Century. It carried the seeds of the next war while heralding the Soviet era and American hegemony since Europe had pressed the self-destruct button.
In 1992, I learned from Yves Buffetaut's book, Battles of Flanders and Artois, that enemy soldiers on opposing sides fraternised with each other over the Christmas period of 1914. I read that some French soldiers applauded a Bavarian tenor, their enemy a German, on Christmas Eve while others played football with the Germans the next day.
Joint burials also took place in no man's land with Masses read in Latin. Soldiers visited each others' trenches to compare working conditions. Some evenings when the Scotch whisky had been flowing, soldiers fell asleep in the opposite trench and left the following day, apologising to those who "lived" there.
I neither wanted nor was able to believe any of that. This was so contrary to the war I had learnt about at school, full of suffering, selflessness, and courage in the face of the enemy.
I met with the author of the book to ask him for evidence. He took me to the Imperial War Museum in London and showed me British soldiers' letters, sketches and photos - yes photos. They show smiling faces, comrades standing arm-in-arm and a real sense of joie de vivre. I felt the tears welling up. What a shock.
Perhaps the Tommies were able to relax in this way because they were not fighting on their own land to win back lost provinces.
Any remaining doubts disappeared when I visited the French army archives at the Chateau de Vincennes. Thanks to Yves Buffetaut, I was able to access accounts by French soldiers who were involved in fraternisation. I should point out that this was no easy task back then.
Without the historian's knowledge of the habits and customs of such facilities placed under military authority, I am sure I would never have been able to read these reports and accounts.
To obtain, for example, the archives from the month of December 1914 where one can find the accounts of the fraternisations, it was necessary to justify the request on the pretext of working on the French attack of 17 December.
I rounded off my research in the World War One German Army archives in the Bibliotheque de Documentation Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC) in Nanterre.
Germany must be given back a memory which belongs to it.
The documents I consulted expressed the same desire to meet up, sing songs on Christmas Eve and swap addresses with the intention of meeting after the war.
When I returned home, several things dawned on me. A large number of soldiers of all nationalities in various locations along the front were involved in fraternisation over Christmas 1914. As one British officer wrote, "No man's land became everyman's land."
These "overspills" took the top brass by surprise. They attempted to restore order by moving "contaminated" units, as one senior officer described them at the time. Some Scottish volunteers were sent home after two weeks of drinking tea and playing football with the Germans.
No-one faced the firing squad for fraternisation as too many men had been involved.
However, fraternisation and particularly its memory, from a French perspective, had to be broken. Had an entire population not been raised to surrender its young to the "field of honour" when the time came? All this work had been undone in the space of an evening by singing from the opposite trench, the sound of a harmonica or bagpipes, or a candle lit to guide those walking unarmed through no man's land.
It made no sense that these men who set out on 3 August would simply forget about Christmas.
The newspapers in Great Britain and Germany gave accounts of the phenomenon of fraternisation. Photographs were posted by the press on the banks of the Thames.
In France, not a word was written on the subject. The newspapers had become tools enabling the army and authorities to spread propaganda.
In the country that had given the world human rights, the press was no longer free.
There was no question of fraternisation being covered in newspapers which were in the pay of a government run by Raymond Poincare whose home town was acquired by Germany in 1870.
But why did no-one talk about it after the war? There are no books or research on the subject.
Read more of this article from BBC News.
See also: Postcards from the WW1 frontline: 'I have lost courage and I will go to bed in tears'