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December 24: “Let’s kill the shit out of each other.” December 25: “Let’s take a break from blowing each other to bits and play football.” December 26: “Okay, back to the killing.” Close to 10 million people died in World War I, but they were mostly doing what they were told by people who never got near a battlefield. For one day of the horror, soldiers on both sides proved they were merely pawns in the murderous games of their leaders.
--On This Day in History Shit Went Down: December 25, 1914--
It was the first year of the war, waged since the summer. This was a new way of making war, and hostilities quickly devolved into a stalemate, with soldiers huddled in trenches on both sides fighting back and forth over the same patches of ground. The situation resulted from advances in killing technology and because there was almost an entire continent at war, which made flanking one’s enemy almost impossible. Prior to Christmas, the fighting had lulled as commanders tried to figure out how the fuck they were going to break the stalemate and get back to the good old days of brilliant generals conducting fancy maneuvers to outwit their opponents and force a surrender.
After only five months of fighting the soldiers hadn’t grown to really despise each other quite yet. And so, on Christmas Day of 1914 there were a series of unofficial truces up and down the Western Front. Soldiers from both sides spontaneously wandered into no man’s land—named so because on any other day if you took a stroll out there someone machine-gunned your ass—to greet and exchange pleasantries with their enemies.
British, Belgian, and French soldiers put down their weapons and met with their German adversaries to exchange souvenirs and food, sing carols, and even play games of football. The Americans wouldn’t arrive on the front for another two-and-a-half years, so it’s not right to call it soccer.
The pope had called for a Christmas truce a few months earlier, but the leaders were all nah fuck that guy. It’s uncertain how it all started, and not everyone participated. In some areas there were still hostilities, and in others the truce only allowed for burial details for the corpses rotting in no man’s land. One hypothesis is that carol singing on both sides is what prompted the sudden truce and peaceful meeting of enemies on the battlefield, but it remains a subject of debate. As many as 100,000 men participated up and down the line.
The following Christmas, truces were explicitly forbidden by high command; they worried soldiers would come to view their enemy as actual human beings and adopt a “live and let live” mentality. By 1916 the two sides hated each other so much any thought of a Christmas truce was impossible.
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