For over half a century, the ‘imagining’ of the Great War in the UK has been framed by the existence of two Western Fronts, one literary and the other historical. The authors and illustrators of children’s picture books, whose work has traditionally reflected a society’s values and pre-occupations, have remained remarkably faithful to the literary construct of the war as a futile and meaningless conflict that destroyed a generation. This article analyses four children’s picture books dealing with the Christmas Truce of 1914, which has become an historical touchstone for adherents of the literary imagining. Using methods grounded in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), visual grammar and art theory, the authors explore how text and image combine to create moving and insightful morality tales that use the particularities of an historical event to communicate a vision of humanity rather than a work of historical scholarship.

在半个多世纪的时间里，英国大战的“想象”一直以两个西方阵线的存在为框架，一个是文学方面，另一个是历史方面。儿童图画书的作者和插画家的作品传统上反映了社会的价值观和关注的焦点，他们仍然非常忠实于战争的文学构架，因为这场徒劳无益的冲突摧毁了一代人。本文分析了四本涉及1914年圣诞节休战的儿童图画书，这已成为文学想象者的历史试金石。使用基于系统功能语言学（SFL），视觉语法和艺术理论的方法，