I once read an article that explained how soldiers from all sides of the war would go AWOL and try and survive together in no man's land to avoid being executed for desertion, living in abandoned dugouts, scavenging for food at night, and that these groups consisted of soldiers from both The Allies and The Central Powers living together. Unfortunately the article never showed a source and I haven't been able to find it since. Does anyone know if this was actually something that happened or was it just a myth?
It sounds extraordinarily unlikely.
No mans land as defined by the land between the two opposing trench lines, at least in the western front, could vary from a few hundred metres to within grenade throwing distance.
There would therefore not be an awful lot of space to hide a multinational community of fugitives even if it were not for the fact that no mans land was under constant surveillance with any movement prone to attract the attention of snipers or artillery, and subject to frequent raids and the activities of wiring parties from either side.
In addition, there would be little to no food, no clean water and certainly no medical supplies.
Living in no mans land would have been an impossibly dangerous and downright pointless thing to do for an individual, let alone a whole community of fugitives.
To get a good feel of what things were like, I'd recommend reading Tommy by Richard Holmes for an all round description of life in the trenches, while Storm of Steel by Ernst Junger gives some good first hand descriptions of trench raiding.
I too have heard of these communities of deserters living between the lines in abandoned trenches but I have never found anything that solidly confirmed the existence of said communities. I did a quick search and it revealed this article from the Smithsonian Magazine which quotes a number of works that speak of these communities and besides one memoir of a British Lieutenant Colonel who says he was told such communities existed and the autobiography from a British Army captain who said “that the General Staff could find no way of dealing with these bandits until the war was over, and that in the end they [the deserters] had to be gassed,” all the works are works of literature and not of a scholarly nature.
While I will not go as far as saying that such tales are impossible, I will point out that the existence of such communities in No Man's Land would be rather unlikely due to the incredibly inhospitable nature of the location. Even moving around at night, the chances or being shot would have been ridiculously high. The question of where these communities could have gotten their food from raises more problems, attempting to pilfer occupied trenches would have been even more dangerous and fresh, clean water would have been all but impossible to come by.
As I said, I will not go as far as saying that these stories are untrue but it is worth noting that the article I linked was written by the Smithsonian curator for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and specialises in folklore and he only ever refers to the stories as just that, stories. If these tales were true, I would expect for them to be better known, especially when there are claims of chemical weapons being used on deserter communities. As an aside, there is a scene in the Australian miniseries Anzacs that features a group of deserters and the show makes it out that the existence of such groups was quite widely known amongst the fighting men who viewed them as shirkers and traitors.