World War I 100th anniversary

[dazed&confused]

As a history buff (nerd), I plan to commemorate the 100th anniversary of World War I with regular postings of historic events/news from 100 years ago. WWI is little remembered as the great cataclysm of life that indeed reverberates in news yet today (Crimea anyone?). I'll add to the thread as dates near.

[The Oaf]

This is gonna be a great thread! Can't wait to see this one unfold!

[dazed&confused]

WWI is a dividing line. As meteorologists consider the equinox as a calendar event (winter begins December 1st instead of December 21), so must we consider the 20th century to have begun in 1914 as opposed to 1901. What preceded 1914 was still basically 19th century. The world was still in the Victorian period. Think the Gay 90's in America. Indeed, America was still reminiscing and remembering the Civil War. Modern art was just beginning to take shape. Einstein was still formulating the Theory of Relativity. Napoleonic wars were still the vogue with military planners. No one could conceive an entire world convulsed in total war. This is the environment into which the seeds of WWI were sowed. The industrial revolution was still unfolding. Industry was emerging as the new national prestige. The 19th century mind did not understand the breadth of killing power the modern industrial world had provided. War was still a pageant to many generals. Cavalry and infantry in "squares" were still in vogue. What proceeded was immensely awesome and terrible. It would take years for the general staffs to come to terms with 20th Century war power.

[halfacent]

If Von Moltke had not modified Von Schlieffen's plan, the outcome would have been vastly different, and W.W. II may not have happened, at least not in the European theatre.

[dazed&confused]

If Von Moltke had not modified Von Schlieffen's plan, the outcome would have been vastly different, and W.W. II may not have happened, at least not in the European theatre.

Perhaps. This is a popular theory among some historians. I am not so sure. Von Schlieffen's plan was only 9 years old by the outbreak of the war. It was conceived as a solution to a two-front war. With the alliance of Russia and France, Germany would be caught in the "vise." Schlieffen reasoned that the vast area of Russia and her poor transportation and communications networks would delay her troops from effective action. Therefore, Germany had to strike France hard and knock her out of the war before Russia's vast reserves could come to bear. His westward wheeling motion was the "plan" and envisioned hitting French forces in a weak flank while her strength was concentrated in the east on the German border. There are several flaws as I see it, even if Von Schlieffen's plan had been executed as originally drawn up. First, Russia mobilized and came on much faster in force in East Prussia than Von Schlieffen imagined. Prussia was the heart and head of Germany and the High Command wasn't going to allow it to be overrun. Second, the march through Belgium and then west and south of Paris would take a lot of time and energy from the attacking forces. The Germans did not have enough strength or time to complete such a vast sweep. And the armies of 1914 were still powered by horse's and soldier's feet. Bottom line, Moltke made many mistakes during the opening campaign and his field generals helped to scuttle him. But I find it hard to believe France would not have adjusted in time to still blunt or turn the German flank. If Germany had a mechanized force as it did in WWII, the story would be much different. As it was, this war was destined for stalemate sooner or later.

[dazed&confused]

Most historians trace the origin of WWI to the outcome of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. With all apologies, following is from Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Franco-Prussian War or Franco-German War (German: Deutsch-Französischer Krieg, French:Guerre franco-allemande), often referred to in France as the War of 1870 (19 July 1870 – 10 May 1871), was a significant conflict pitting the Second French Empire against the Kingdom of Prussia and its allies in the North German Confederation, as well as the South German states of Baden, Württemberg,Bavaria and Hesse-Darmstadt.
The conflict emerged from tensions regarding German unification. In his memoirs written long after the war, Prussian Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck wrote: "I always considered that a war with France would naturally follow a war against Austria...I was convinced that the gulf which was created over time between the north and the south of Germany could not be better overcome than by a national war against the neighboring people who were aggressive against us. I did not doubt that it was necessary to make a French-German war before the general reorganization of Germany could be realized." Bismarck adroitly created a diplomatic crisis over the succession to the Spanish throne, then rewrote a dispatch about a meeting between the Prussian King and the French foreign minister to make it appear that the French had been insulted. The French press and parliament demanded a war, which the generals of Napoleon III assured him that France would win. On 16 August 1870, the French parliament voted 101 to 47 to declare war, and the war was declared on 19 August.
The German coalition mobilized its troops much more quickly than the French army, and rapidly moved into northeastern France. The German forces were superior in numbers, had better training and leadership, and made more effective use of modern technology, particularly railroads and artillery. A series of swift Prussian and German victories in eastern France culminating in the Battle of Sedan, saw Napoleon III and his whole army captured on 2 September. Yet this did not end the war, as the Third Republic was declared in Paris on 4 September 1870 and French resistance continued under the Government of National Defence and Adolphe Thiers. Over a five-month campaign, the German forces defeated the newly recruited French armies in a series of battles fought across northern France. Following a prolonged siege, Paris fell on 28 January 1871. The German states proclaimed their union as the German Empire under the Prussian king, Wilhelm I, uniting Germany as a nation-state. The final Treaty of Frankfurt of 10 May 1871 gave Germany most of Alsace and some parts of Lorraine which became the Imperial territory of Alsace-Lorraine.
Following defeat, a revolutionary uprising called the Paris Commune seized power in the capital and held it for two months, until it was suppressed by the regular French army at the end of May 1871. The unification of Germany into an empire in its own right, with the new industrialization of the nation, shifted the European balance of power and Otto von Bismarck maintained great authority in international affairs for two decades. France's determination to regain Alsace-Lorraine would subsequently be a major factor in France's involvement in World War I.

[dazed&confused]

It is June 1914. Europe is embarking on it's summer holidays. Despite tensions, there has been peace on the main continent for 40 years. The industrial revolution is causing both turmoil and prosperity. But the Balkans are a virtual soup of anger and resentment. The Archduke Francis Ferdinand, heir to the Crown of Austria-Hungary, is planning a visit to Sarajevo to review the troops. What could go wrong?

[Paladin]

The Balkans are still a soup of anger and resentment today. BTW, one of my Grandmothers was from Alsace- Lorraine. She was French and married a German-American who fought in the war. Alsace-Lorraine considers itself STRONG French country and always has.

[dazed&confused]

http://online.wsj.com/articles/world-wa ... TopStories

World War I: The War That Changed Everything
World War I began 100 years ago this month, and in many ways, writes historian Margaret MacMillan, it remains the defining conflict of the modern era.
By
MARGARET MACMILLAN
Updated June 20, 2014 10:54 p.m. ET
A hundred years ago next week, in the small Balkan city of Sarajevo, Serbian nationalists murdered the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary and his wife. People were shocked but not particularly worried. Sadly, there had been many political assassinations in previous years—the king of Italy, two Spanish prime ministers, the Russian czar, President William McKinley. None had led to a major crisis. Yet just as a pebble can start a landslide, this killing set off a series of events that, in five weeks, led Europe into a general war.
A Vast Legacy Beyond the Trenches
The U.S. under President Woodrow Wilson intended to stay out of the conflict, which, in the eyes of many Americans, had nothing to do with them. But in 1917, German submarine attacks on U.S. shipping and attempts by the German government to encourage Mexico to invade the U.S. enraged public opinion, and Wilson sorrowfully asked Congress to declare war. American resources and manpower tipped the balance against the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary, and on Nov. 11, 1918, what everyone then called the Great War finally came to an end.
The cold numbers capture much of the war's horror: more than 9 million men dead and twice as many again wounded—a loss of sons, husbands and fathers but also of skills and talents. Graves in the north of France and Belgium and war memorials across the U.S. bear witness to the 53,000 American soldiers who died. Thousands of civilians died, too, during the war itself, whether of hunger, disease or violence. And then, as the guns were falling silent, a new pestilence struck humanity in the shape of a virulent influenza. As troops returned home, they unwittingly helped carry the disease around the world. It has been estimated that 50 million died.
Many of the now-familiar political boundaries in Europe and the Middle East still reflect the peace settlements that followed the war. These resulted in a smaller Russia and Germany and wound up the great multinational empires of Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans. New countries appeared on our maps, with names such as Yugoslavia and Iraq.
What is harder to pin down and assess are the war's long-term consequences—political, social and moral. The conflict changed all the countries that took part in it. Governments assumed greater control over society and have never entirely relinquished it. Old regimes collapsed, to be replaced by new political orders. In Russia, czarist autocracy was succeeded by a communist one, with huge consequences for the rest of the century.
The scale and destructiveness of the war also raised issues—many of which we still grapple with today—and spread new political ideas. President Wilson talked about national self-determination and making the world safe for democracy. He wanted a League of Nations as the basis for international cooperation. From Russia, Lenin and his Bolsheviks offered a stark alternative: a world without borders or classes. The competing visions helped fuel the Cold War, which ended just 25 years ago.
Before 1914, Russia was a backward autocracy but was changing fast. Its growth rate was as high as any of the Asian tigers in the 1960s and 1970s; it was Europe's major exporter of food grains and, as it industrialized, was importing machinery on a massive scale. Russia also was developing the institutions of civil society, including the rule of law and representative government. Without the war, it might have evolved into a modern democratic state; instead, it got the sudden collapse of the old order and a coup d'état by the Bolsheviks. Soviet communism exacted a dreadful toll on the Russian people and indeed the world—and its remnants are still painfully visible in the corrupt, authoritarian regime of Vladimir Putin.
The war also destroyed other options for Europe's political development. The old multinational empires had their faults, to be sure, but they enabled the diverse peoples within their boundaries to live in relative harmony. Both Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans were trying to work out ways of encompassing the demands of different groups for greater autonomy. Might they have succeeded if the war had not exhausted them to the point of collapse? We will never know, but since then, the world has suffered the violence and horrors of ethnic nationalism.
The armistice of 1918 ended one gigantic conflict, but it left the door open for a whole host of smaller ones—the "wars of the pygmies," as Winston Churchill once described them. Competing national groups tried to establish their own independence and to push their borders out at the expense of their neighbors. Poles fought Russians, Lithuanians and Czechs, while Romania invaded Hungary. And within their borders, Europeans fought each other. Thirty-seven thousand Finns (out of some 3 million) died in a civil war in the first months of 1918, while in Russia, as many as a million soldiers and many more civilians may have died by the time the Bolsheviks finally defeated their many opponents.
The war had brutalized European society, which had grown accustomed during the largely peaceful 19th century to think that peace was the normal state of affairs. After 1918, Europeans were increasingly willing to resort to other sorts of force, from political assassinations to street violence, and to seek radical solutions to their problems. The seeds of the political movements on the extremes of both the right and the left—of fascism and communism—were sown in the years before 1914, but it took World War I to fertilize them.

The war aided the rise of extremism by weakening Europe's confidence in the existing order. Many Europeans no longer trusted the establishments that had got them into the catastrophe. The German and Austrian monarchies were also overthrown, to be succeeded by shaky republics. The new orders might have succeeded in gaining legitimacy in time, but that was the one thing that Europe and the world didn't have. The Great Depression at the end of the 1920s swept the new regimes away and undermined even the strongest democracies.
The war had made many Europeans simply give up on their own societies. Before 1914, they could take pride in Europe's power and prosperity, in the knowledge that it dominated the world through its economic and military strength. They could boast that European civilization was superior to all others. Now they were left with a shattered continent that had spent down its wealth and weakened itself, perhaps mortally. As the great French thinker and poet Paul Valery said in 1922, "something deeper has been worn away than the renewable parts of the machine."
Church attendance plummeted, but night clubs were jammed by those who could afford them. Cocaine stopped being a medicine and became a recreational drug along with alcohol. Before the war, a new generation of writers and artists had already been mocking the old classical traditions and inventing their own. Now, in the 1920s, the jumbled perspectives of the cubists, the atonal compositions of new composers such as Arnold Schoenberg or the experimental poetry and prose of writers such as Ezra Pound or Marcel Proust seemed prescient—new forms that captured the reality of a fractured world.
While the Europeans were coming to grips with what they had done to themselves, the rest of the world was drawing its own lessons. The European empires had called on their colonial possessions to support the war effort, but in so doing they had hastened the coming of their own end. Empires had always rested on a giant confidence trick—where the ruled agreed, or at least didn't actively dispute, that their colonial rulers were more civilized and advanced and thus entitled to rule.
The soldiers from Africa, Canada, India, Australia or New Zealand had now seen for themselves what their European masters were capable of. The waste, the muddle, the brutality with which Europeans fought each other and the sheer incompetence of much of the European war effort exploded the old myths of European superiority. Throughout the empires, assertive and impatient national movements—often led by those who had returned from the war—pushed the empires toward their end. Mohandas Gandhi, who in the South African War of 1899-1902 had set up an ambulance corps to support the British, now led a movement to oust them from India.
The end of hostilities in 1918 also brought the challenge, one we still face, of how to end wars in ways that don't produce fresh conflict. The first World War didn't directly cause the second, but it created the conditions in which it became possible. President Wilson was for a peace without retribution and a world in which nations came together for the common good; his opponents, such as Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, thought that only a decisive victory over Germany and its allies would lay the groundwork for a lasting peace. They may have been right. Certainly after 1918, Germany's right-wing elites and many ordinary Germans persuaded themselves that Germany hadn't really lost the war.
In fact, Germany had been defeated on the battlefield in the summer of 1918, and, as its allies fell away, a panicked German high command had demanded that the civilian government in Berlin ask for an armistice. The war had stopped before Germany itself was invaded, however, so few Germans behind the lines experienced defeat firsthand. The German army had marched home in good order. "We greet you undefeated," said the German president, while members of the high command such as Gen. Erich von Ludendorff hastened to spread the poisonous myth that the army had been stabbed in the back by traitors at home, whether Jews, socialists or liberals.
As a result, the Treaty of Versailles—which imposed a whole range of penalties on Germany, from the loss of territory to reparations for war damage—was widely held by Germans to be illegitimate. The promise to break it apart became an important part of the Nazis' appeal. In World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had been in Wilson's government as assistant secretary of the Navy, was determined that this time there should be no doubt about the outcome of the war. The Allied policy for the Axis powers was a straightforward "unconditional surrender."
Even on the winning side, the peace settlements after World War I bred resentment. Italians complained of "a mutilated peace" because they didn't get all the territory they wanted. Like Hitler, Mussolini found a handy grievance to help him and his black-shirted fascists on the road to power. The French felt they had sacrificed much—the country had lost 40% of its industrial capacity and suffered the highest proportion of casualties of all the powers—and gained little. To their east, the French saw a Germany relatively unscathed by war, with a larger economy, and a bigger population.
Britain and the U.S. had promised to guarantee France against German attack, but, as rapidly became clear, the guarantee was worthless. So France looked for allies in the center of Europe, but countries such as Poland, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia weren't strong enough to counterbalance Germany. French attempts to build alliances there merely fueled German fears of being encircled. As for Britain, it had more than enough problems trying to manage its vast empire with its depleted resources, and so it withdrew, as it had so often done before from entanglements on the Continent.
In the Far East, nationalists in Japan, which had been on the Allied side, felt their country had been used and then contemptuously scorned by the "white" powers who refused to write a clause on racial equality into the Covenant of the League of Nations. That helped to propel Japan down the road of militarism and imperialism, and eventually to confrontation with the U.S. at Pearl Harbor.
Of equal significance for the future was the growing disillusionment with the West in China. China, too, had been an ally, supplying more than 100,000 laborers for the Western front. Two thousand of them lie buried in France. Yet when the powers met in Paris, they didn't give China what it most wanted—Germany's territorial and other concessions in Shandong province—but handed them over to Japan, another ally. It was cynical power politics: Japan was stronger and therefore more important to the West.
In the resulting nationalist fury, key Chinese liberals gave up on the West and Western-style democracy. "We at once awoke to the fact that foreign nations were still selfish and militaristic," said one student demonstrator. As fate would have it, an alternative model now presented itself—in Russia, where the new communist leaders were promising to build a new, fairer and more efficient society. The Chinese Communist Party was founded in 1920, and many of those who had demonstrated against the West in 1919 became members. The consequences of that turn are still with us today.
On the other side of the world, the U.S. now challenged a declining and divided Europe for leadership of the world. In the course of the war, financial dominance had moved across the Atlantic from London to New York, as the U.S. became the world's largest creditor. It was also much more powerful in other ways. The war had boosted American industry and speeded up the conversion of U.S. economic strength into diplomatic and military power. By the end of the war, the U.S. was the world's largest manufacturer and had the largest stock of gold to back its dollar. Its navy rivaled the British, up until then the world's biggest.
American exceptionalism—that sense of being both different and better than the rest of the world—had also been reinforced. As Wilson once said, "America is an idea, America is an ideal, America is a vision." In his great speech to Congress in April 1917, when he asked for the declaration of war on Germany, he made it clear that the U.S. wanted nothing for itself from the war, that its goal was to defeat militarism and build a better world. He would, he repeatedly said, do his utmost to move international relations away from the sort of secret diplomacy and deals that the European powers had engaged in for centuries and that, in his opinion and that of many Americans, had led to the war. The U.S. was entering the war as an "associate" and not as an "ally." Its war aims were different from those of the Europeans: to build a peaceful and just international order, not to acquire territory or other war booty.
The U.S. delegation came to the postwar peace conference with a contempt for old Europe and a sense of moral superiority. That was only reinforced when the making of peace proved difficult. The protracted and bitter battle between Wilson and his opponents resulted in Congress rejecting the newly founded League of Nations and heartened those who wanted the U.S. to stay out of foreign entanglements.
As postwar problems mounted in Europe, many Americans reacted with dismay, anger and a feeling that somehow they had been suckered into the wrong conflict. That in turn played into the isolationist impulses of the 1920s and the 1930s, again with dangerous consequences. We can never know, but it remains at least an open question: If the U.S. had joined the League and been prepared to work with other democracies against the aggressive and undemocratic powers, could World War II have been averted?
Such questions about alternate paths that might have been followed in the past century make World War I of enduring interest. We should not see it merely as something of historical interest, a series of sepia photographs showing people who are quite alien to us. We are still living with the results of that war, and we face similar concerns. How, for example, does the world deal with powers whose leaders feel they must have their place in the sun? For Germany then, read Russia now. Or how can we rebuild societies after deeply damaging conflicts—in Europe then, but in Central Africa, the Middle East or Afghanistan today?
A century after the assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke in the streets of Sarajevo, it may be that looking back to World War I can still help us toward a more peaceful future.
—Dr. MacMillan is the warden of St. Antony's College, Oxford University, and the author, most recently, of "The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914."

[dazed&confused]

June 28. 100 years ago today, the 20th Century really began. Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife, Sophie, are assassinated in Sarajevo by a Serb Nationalist. At the time, it was merely a dispatch of news. A curiosity that seemed not to threaten the world. Even the ruler of Austria, Franz Joseph, lamented the death by saying it was some weird form of Divine Providence. For Sophie was not of royal blood and she was detested as a usurper to the throne. Hardly anyone that day knew that adventurers and military opportunists would use the incident to inflame the world in a war that has consequences that reach into, and even shaped, today's world. Red letter day for history buffs!

[dazed&confused]

August 4, 1914. Germany's armies are finally on the march, beginning their movement through neutral Belgium. This small country, whose only grievance for the German's is that she lays in the way of of a sweeping flank of French forces, bravely tries to resist. The fortress city of Liege goes down in military lore. The Belgians don't stand a chance but hold up the German advance for several days. This becomes crucial in giving extra time for the Allied armies to recover from the blow and stop the German advance at the Marne in early September. Also, Germany's attack on nuetral Belgium brings England and her Empire into the war, something not guaranteed at first. It is their first fatal calculation in this war. Imagine you are a citizen of any of the countries at the time witnessing the spectacle of onrushing armies with speed unimaginable at the time! It must surely have looked like the onset of Armeggedon. It is a rapid collision of forces that had not been seen before or since.

[dazed&confused]

One hundred years ago today, the French Sixth army, with reserves hauled from Paris in taxis, struck the First German army in the flank. The Germans with drew in confusion from the attack and dug in behind the River Aisne. This First Battle of the Marne stopped the German advance through France and set up trench warfare and stalemate that would persist for the next four years, confounding te Generals and staff on both sides. This led to the deaths of millions of soldiers in wasting attacks against fortified positions until the Autumn of 1918. Truly one of the great tragedies of modern history, yet little remembered by distracted citizens today. Pity!

[dazed&confused]

The race to the sea. As the armies entrench, they push to extend their flank beyond the other side. Brussels falls to the Germans. But the reality of stalemate confronts the combatants. Wilhelm Kaiser told the departing German army in Berlin , "You will be home before the leaves fall from the trees." The army will not return home until the leaves fall four times. And it will be under less than happy circumstances. Sir Edward Grey, the English Foreign Secretary is more prescient. "The lamps are going out all over Europe. They shall not be lit again in our lifetime." In a sense, they are still not lit.

[chiefs]

The Balkans are still a soup of anger and resentment today.

Yeah, that'll never change. As if the people living there didn't have enough reason to hate those different from them in the beginning, the reign of Tito as well as the atrocities in the wake of Yugoslavia's dissolution has made things even edgier. Not as much in the west, but there is still tons of cutthroat hatred between the Serbs and Albanians today. My dad's family comes from Zadar, Croatia and I plan on visiting in the summer of 2017.

Back to the thread, awesome idea man and thanks for the posts thus far. World War I is one of my favorite wars to be nerdy about.

[dazed&confused]

The Balkans are still a soup of anger and resentment today.

Yeah, that'll never change. As if the people living there didn't have enough reason to hate those different from them in the beginning, the reign of Tito as well as the atrocities in the wake of Yugoslavia's dissolution has made things even edgier. Not as much in the west, but there is still tons of cutthroat hatred between the Serbs and Albanians today. My dad's family comes from Zadar, Croatia and I plan on visiting in the summer of 2017.

Back to the thread, awesome idea man and thanks for the posts thus far. World War I is one of my favorite wars to be nerdy about.

Nerdy? Ouch!

[dazed&confused]

http://mentalfloss.com/article/60869/ww ... truce-1914

In December 1914 the world was reeling from the trauma of five months of horrifying bloodshed, which spread death and sowed hatred on a scale almost beyond comprehension. As a particularly fierce winter blanketed Europe in snow and ice, civilians on the home front found their worries compounded by the first shortages of food and fuel. Worst of all, most people now realized that there was no end in sight: the war would probably go on for years.

But in the midst of all this misery humanity still somehow prevailed, if only for a moment, creating one of the most powerful cultural memories and moral examples of the Great War.

The famous Christmas Truce of 1914, when exhausted foes put down their guns to enjoy a brief evening of peace and camaraderie, began with music. It started on Christmas Eve, when British and German soldiers huddling in the cold, damp trenches tried to cheer themselves up by singing Christmas carols and songs from home – then were amazed to hear their enemies applauding and responding with songs of their own. William Robinson, an American volunteer in the British Army, recalled the strange scene:

"During the evening the Germans started singing, and I heard some of the most beautiful music I ever listened to in my life. The song might start just opposite us, and it would be taken up all along the line, and soon it would seem as if all the Germans in Belgium were singing. When they had finished we would applaud with all our might, and then we would give them a song in return… The men were getting along well with it, when someone in the German trenches joined in singing in just as good English as any of us could speak."

There were many talented musicians on both sides, who now paid tribute to their foes by playing their national songs, showing that the national hatreds were far from universal even among men on the frontline, who had the most reason to embrace them. Phil Rader, an American volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, described one such exchange:

"After dinner we heard a blast of music that thrilled us. A little German band had crept into the trenches and announced itself with a grand chord. Then came the unexpected chords of the 'Marseillaise.' The Frenchmen were almost frantic with delight. George Ullard, our Negro cook, who came from Galveston, got out his mouth organ and almost burst his lungs playing 'Die Wacht am Rhein.'"

The exchange of songs across no-man’s-land built trust and encouraged curiosity, leading to shouted verbal exchanges, followed by men poking their heads over the parapets – normally a suicidal move – only to find their erstwhile enemies looking back at them, waving and beckoning. When it became clear that neither side was going to shoot, in a matter of minutes soldiers were climbing out of the trenches and crossing no-man’s-land to meet the men who had been shooting at them a few hours before (top, British and German troops fraternize).

They shook hands, embraced, and tried to communicate as best they could, helped by informal translators, who in many cases had lived in the enemy’s country before the war. One British junior officer, Edward Hulse, met a German counterpart who had lived in Britain for years and lost everything he loved when the war started:

"He came from Suffolk where he had left his best girl and a 3 ½ h.p. motor-bike! He told me that he could not get a letter to the girl, and wanted to send one through me. I made him write out a postcard in front of me, in English, and I sent it off that night. I told him that she probably would not be a bit keen to see him again… They protested that they had no feeling of enmity towards us at all, but that everything lay with their authorities, and that being soldiers they had to obey…"

The truce continued into the next day, as junior officers took advantage of the break in hostilities to get some important tasks done – above all, burying the dead. Victor Chapman, an American in the Foreign Legion who would later become the first American pilot killed in the war, recalled:

"Christmas morning a Russian up the line who spoke good German, wished them the greetings of the season, to which the Boches responded that instead of nice wishes they would be very grateful to the French if the latter buried their compatriot who had lain before their trenches for the last two months… The burying funeral performed, a German Colonel distributed cigars and cigarettes and another German officer took a picture of the group."

Indeed, as it was Christmas, it was only natural to exchange presents, which not only demonstrated goodwill but allowed men on both sides to get things they lacked. Edward Roe, a British corporal, recalled: “They gave us bottles of wine and cigars; we gave them tins of jam, bully [beef], mufflers, tobacco etc. I annexed a tin of raspberry from the sergeant’s dugout and gave it to a stodgy and bespectacled Saxon. In return he gave me a leather case containing five cigars… The line was all confusion [with] no sentries and no one in possession of arms.”

In some places the truce continued into December 26, “Boxing Day,” and even as late as December 27 – but inevitably it was bound to come to an end. Senior officers on both sides were livid when they heard about the informal ceasefire, which they believed threatened to undermine morale and discipline; after all, as some German soldiers told members of 2nd Royal Dublin Fusiliers: “We don’t want to kill you, and you don’t want to kill us. So why shoot?” British war correspondent Philip Gibbs summed up the contradiction in simple, damning terms: “The war had become the most tragic farce in the world. The frightful senselessness of it was apparent when the enemies of two nations fighting to the death stood in the grey mist together and liked each other. It became so apparent that army orders had to be issued stopping such truces.”

It’s worth noting, however, that the truce wasn’t universal. According to British eyewitnesses, German troops from Saxony were often eager to fraternize, perhaps because of their shared ethnic heritage with the Anglo-Saxons, whereas Prussian troops were much less likely to make any friendly gestures, if only because they were under the stern supervision of committed Prussian officers. Meanwhile, on the Allied side, French troops were understandably also less inclined to fraternize with invaders occupying their own homeland – indeed, in some cases, their own homes. And regardless of nationality, some individuals simply seemed unable to put aside their personal hatred of the enemy. A Bavarian dispatch runner, Adolf Hitler, voiced strong disapproval of the truce, according to one of his fellow dispatch runners, who later recounted: “He said, ‘Something like this should not even be up for discussion during wartime.’”

Although some men held back, the Christmas Truce still delivered an unambiguous message to the world that the ideal of a universal humanity, along with basic values like human kindness, had not yet fallen victim to the war. The war would continue, but that declaration would not be effaced, lasting until the present day. Back in the trenches Roe captured the wrenching sense of sadness among soldiers who would have to continue fighting, knowing neither they nor their enemy wanted to:

"Would the Spirit of Christmas be maintained?... Would ambitious Statesmen and Warlords, who only think of the Regimental officer and common soldier in terms of mathematics, cast aside their ambitions, stupidity, pride and hatred and allow the angel of peace, instead of the angel of death, to spread his wings over stricken and bleeding humanity. I, or any of my comrades, as far as I can ascertain, bear no malice or hatred against the German soldier. He has got to do as he is told, and so have we… I’m afraid I’m a darn bad soldier. I’m preaching peace in the spirit of Christmas."