[Colt .45]

I thought that in the spirit of Christmas with our country at war, it would be nice to remember another time in the distant past when warriors chose to stop fighting for one day and to find a common humanity in the midst of the fight. I believe that the soldiers then and now can appreciate this more than any who've never served.

It brings me to this small excerpt of a WW1 poem by Lt. Alan Seeger -

"For that high fellowship was ours then
With those who, championing another's good,
More than dull Peace or its poor votaries could,
Taught us the dignity of being men." - The Aisne

Merry Christmas to all fellow Freepers

[RAY]

Peace is harder to make than war

Agreed, however, sometimes disputes are settled only by war - or at the least, an opposition resulting in the need to fight!

[drt1]

Think this is on the History Channel right now.

[Fiddlstix]

BTTT

[SamAdams76]

So the "Snoopy's Christmas" song by the Royal Guardsman is rooted in truth!

[Defiant]

Back when Europeans were Christian. They're so over that, now.

[AnAmericanMother]

Merry Christmas.

My granddad was in WWI. He was commissioned in the Engineers, never saw combat. So was our next door neighbor when we first married. He was infantry and was gassed in the Argonne Forest. It crippled him for the rest of his life - he died of emphysema and lung cancer.

A sad retelling of the tale of the Christmas Truce:

[KellyAdmirer]

There was a Christmas bombing truce early in World War II, too, apparently initiated by the Germans. There is a good if somewhat vague reference to Christmas truces in the movie "A Midnight Clear," a fine WW II movie.

[x]

“... This western-front business couldn’t be done again, not for a long time. The young men think they could do it but they couldn’t. They could fight the first Marne again but not this. This took religion and years of plenty and tremendous sureties and the exact relation that existed between the classes. The Russians and Italians weren’t any good on this front. You had to have a whole-souled sentimental equipment going back further than you could remember. You had to remember Christmas, and postcards of the Crown Prince and his fiancée, and little cafés in Valence and beer gardens in Unter den Linden and weddings at the mairie, and going to the Derby, and your grandfather’s whiskers.”

...

“... This kind of battle was invented by Lewis Carroll and Jules Verne and whoever wrote Undine, and country deacons bowling and marraines in Marseilles and girls seduced in the back lanes of Wurtemburg and Westphalia. Why, this was a love battle—there was a century of middle-class love spent here. This was the last love battle.”

-- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night

The British and German soldiers came from quite similar backgrounds, and there was no quarrel between them. They'd gone to war because their countries had a very distant and abstract disagreement, not an ancestral or passionate hatred. And the two peoples had much respect for each other.

Thus, when British and German were thrown against each other there was an impulse to come together, if at all possible. This was probably weaker and fraternization less common where the Germans faced the French or the Russians, for feelings were more embittered between those countries.

Coming together across the lines at Christmas was certainly amazing, but it simply highights how ghastly the rest of the war was. In most wars, animosities can be used to justify the killing, and indeed, both sides tried to stir up war feeling to the highest possible degree. But perhaps, where such feelings really don't exist the killing and the waste look even worse, if possible, than they otherwise would be though.

"Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown."

Thomas Hardy, "The Man He Killed"