The Christmas Day Truce.
On Christmas Eve 1914 soldiers hunkered down in trenches no further than 150 meters away from the enemy in a network of channels and human trough lines stretching across the north of France all the way to Switzerland.
Separating the warring sides was No Man’s Land, and it doesn’t matter what side initiated the ceasefire, what matters is it happened. The fighting stopped. The 1914 Christmas truce was not the first unofficial truce of this great conflict, but certainly one of the last.
The sound of the other side’s conversations, laughter, groaning and singing replaced the falling of shells and the rain of steel.
Most accounts say it was the Germans that started the Christmas celebration as their clocks would have indicated it was Christmas back home
one hour earlier than the British and French again, it really doesn’t matter. What does matter, at least for this writing, is soldiers looking across No Man’s Land and not seeing carnage, but rather seeing tiny Christmas trees with candles pop up on the German side
or Allied soldiers holding up cigarettes and waving their caps. The sound of music and laughter filled the lifeless void their world had become. Initially, both sides planned to deploy their burial and body retrieval squads before the next day’s fighting took place as that