 Many accounts of the truce involve one or more football matches played in no @-@ man 's land . This was mentioned in some of the earliest reports , with a letter written by a doctor attached to the Rifle Brigade , published in The Times on 1 January 1915 , reported " a football match ... played between them and us in front of the trench . " A wide range of similar stories have been told over the years , often naming specific units or a precise score . Some accounts of the game bring in elements of fiction by Robert Graves , a British poet and writer who reconstructed the encounter in a story published in 1962 ; in Graves 's version , the score was 3 – 2 to the Germans . 
