Posted by: Kim_Hamilton on 12/26/2014 10:47 AM
Updated by: Kim_Hamilton on 12/26/2014 10:47 AM
Expires: 01/01/2019 12:00 AM
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Letter to the Editor~by Erick Gutierrez
One hundred years ago this last summer, all of Europe went nuts and began fighting. The plan was to get to Paris by Christmas, then business as usual. (They ALWAYS say that, and the functioning of the plan depended on it.) By this season one hundred years ago, the struggle was entrenched along the Western Front and would stay so for four more years....
On Christmas night, soldiers on either side of No Man's Land stopped lobbing bombs and bullets at each other and instead, they sung Christmas carols that the other side might hear. This continued until completely informal truces were made all over the front. For the next day or two, soldiers on both sides exchanged supplies, played football and put king, country and kaiser aside. The higher ups were of course more than slightly perturbed that the little war of theirs might be over if ordinary men agreed it be so. (John & Yoko couldn't have imagined up a stranger story even if they'd smoked a bunch of happy stuff and wrote a Christmas song about it.) Eventually, officers had to begin shooting those standing around No Man's Land, and everybody had to return to their own sides. This sort of common man's truce never happened again.
After The Great War, everything changed. New borders, new technologies, new ideologies (including Communism). Traditional empires began receding and the foundations were laid for Round Two. Additionally, monarchs and old social orders disappeared. Some changes were for the better, but also human civilities such as the possibility of a Christmas truce between men... that all was annihilated in a modern world. I've heard that if a clear line can be made between the old and new, that line would straddle Christmas 1914. This Christmas, one hundred years ago, is considered the delineation to the real beginning of the 20th century.
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