There have been disputes, however, about the detail of what occurred. Apparently, it has been argued that the idea of soccer games being played during the truce could not be true since there wasn't enough time to organise such an event.

Games don't start with organising committees.  Games start when someone has an impulse to catch or throw or kick a ball and someone else – in this case, a soldier in a German uniform – forgets he's in the middle of a battlefield because this childish light clicks on in his head and says: "I'm being invited to play!" One of the Christmas truce soccer games was played with a tin can.

German historians say that a more structured game was played on a stretch of frozen ground, the rest of the bomb-ravaged landscape being knee-deep in mud. The goals were marked with caps and the German historians say Germany won 3-2. The argument that a match of such historic consequence could not have been organised within the available time may have something to do with the scoreline.

The front-line trenches at some points were only 30 metres apart. There are accounts of soldiers in both trenches singing hymns on Christmas Eve. A letter written by an English soldier years later recounted hearing a German soldier sing Silent Night across that blasted, wintry landscape with its guns miraculously stilled.  The hymn was sung in German but neither the Englishman nor his mates had heard it before. Then, together, the men in both trenches sang, O Come All Ye Faithful.

The 1914 Christmas truce is a story for the ages, but I didn't expect to find it done in a powerfully new way by a sporting organisation like the European football association, UEFA. Only five minutes, this short film is a classic. Eight big names from European football read letters written by soldiers who witnessed football matches (there were a number of them) during the truce.

After an introduction by former French captain Michel Platini, England and Manchester United legend Sir Bobby Charlton reads first. Sir Bobby was born in 1937; he would have absorbed the catastrophic aftermath of World War I with his mother's milk. The armies of the British Commonwealth lost 880,000 men. Then there were the far more numerous wounded and permanently maimed who limped and were carried home. Sir Bobby looks like a man watching a bad film he wishes would stop and has a slight tremble in his voice.

Didier Deschamps reads next. He struck me as a warrior when he played, a more restrained Gallic version of Roy Keane. He captained France to World Cup victory in 1998, and managed them at the last World Cup. There is force in his expression but a sense of destiny, of the terrible waste that is to follow, also informs his words.

Paul Breitner played for West Germany in the 1970s. He is remembered for turning up to training with a copy of The Little Red Book, Chinese Chairman's Mao Tse Tung's guide to revolutionary thought and action. The way Breitner reads, it's like the guns are pounding in his head.

Most dramas relying on sportsmen as actors fail.  Most sportsmen can't act. Whoever put this short film together, however, coaxed some great performances from the players – all  approach the words with frankness. Next is Wayne Rooney.

It's brilliant casting.  Who could be more typical of the British Army in 1914 than a kid from Liverpool with a rough head and an Irish name? Rooney reads his letter with a Scouse accent, the words going up and down like an old fairground ride. Rene  Meulensteen, the Dutch coach who worked at Old Trafford with Sir Alex Ferguson, recently did an interview in which he said he liked Rooney, describing him as humble and honest. In that spirit, he reads his letter.

The four other readers are French captain and Tottenham Hotspur goalkeeper Hugo Lloris; Bayern Munich pair and German internationals Bastian Schweinsteiger and Philipp Lahm; and Wales' Real Madrid star Gareth Bale. Bale is the high-minded young man with the sporting instincts of a gazelle confronted by the abysmal reality of modern industrial warfare.

All too quickly, the Christmas truce ends.  Rooney says:  "Cheerio Fritz." He gets the tone exactly right.  He's saying, "I wish you well, but tomorrow I may kill you or you may kill me". The big blond head of Bastian Schweinsteiger fills the screen. He responds in a similar spirit:  "Auf  Wiedersehen, Tommy."

The Christmas truce of 1914 did not happen again in 1915, nor in the two years of appalling warfare that followed. Just as a German corporal named Adolf Hitler disapproved of the truce, the upper ranks of both armies forbade the practice because they understood that getting to know people makes the business of killing them that much harder, if not impossible.