This picture an readily be found on the internet when one searches under 'Christmas truce'. It is used on several web sites and blogs but none seem to tell one exactly when or where it was taken. What were the circumstances in which these two soldiers of opposing armies shared a cigarette? Who took it? How did the photographer come to be there? It was once known, and somewhere perhaps still is, but for most viewers it is now unknown. Yet the picture has undoubted emotional power.
It is as if the internet is turning our recent past into the state of our knowledge of long distant societies, from which evocative but little understood artefacts surface after successions of unsystematic and unrecorded archaeological digs that have detached them irrevocably from their context and meaning.
