Over from the enemy trenches, just nine months into the First World War, there came a German voice asking the urgent question: Who won the FA Cup?
The moment Tommies and Jerries briefly united in their love of football has been revealed in a cache of letters that has come to light 107 years later.
Sapper Thomas Winter of 456th (West Riding) Field Company, Royal Engineers, told his sister Mary about it in one of a series of letters he wrote to her from the Western Front between May 1915 and October 1916.
He wrote from Ypres: “The other night the British and the Germans were shouting across to each other and a German soldier asked who had won the English Cup.”
The game he refers to was the FA Cup final between Sheffield United and Chelsea in April 1915 – the last to be held until the competition resumed post-war in 1919.
Still a teenager at the time, he did not spare her his more harrowing accounts of the war. In the first letter in the collection he wrote home to Rotherham, South Yorks, about a dramatic near miss at the second Battle of Ypres.
He told Mary: “A shrapnel shell burst dead overhead and bullets fell in a shower all round the five of us, and never touched one of us. I was laid flat for 6 hours and daren’t get up for fear of being blown to pieces with shell fire.”
He and his comrades were eventually able to flee to safety on their bicycles.
Spr Winter was killed two-and-a-half years later, aged 21, in the Third Battle of Ypres in November 1917.
His trench letters now have emerged for sale, valued at £500, from a military collector with auctioneers Henry Aldridge & Son, of Devizes, Wilts.
Auctioneer Andrew Aldridge said: “Most soldiers who fought are dead and forgotten, but in these words they live on and they can be remembered.”
