On Christmas Eve 1944, in the frozen Ardennes, Sergeant Harry Mitchell of the 101st Airborne and German private Klaus Weber sat on a log in no-man's land and played chess. They had carved the pieces from birch branches with their pocket knives, drawn the board in the snow.
Neither side had ordered the ceasefire. It just happened. Men from both units wandered into the clearing, cold and exhausted, and for a few hours, no one told them to come back.
They played three games. When finished, they shook hands and walked back to their sides. Thirty-eight years later, Mitchell found Weber in Munich through the Red Cross and sent him a chess set. Weber replied with a photograph: he was still holding his birch king, with the inscription: I still have our king. Do you still have mine?