Andropov4 wrote:I have no idea where the truces actually happened. I do know that the soldiers typically met in the no-man's-land between the trenches for all events (because, somewhat ironically, everyone felt safer there than somewhere else). I've never actually seen anything delineating where the truces occurred, where fighting continued, which groups did what Christmas activities, or anything of that sort. But I think that would be a really fascinating avenue of research, to try and determine what, if anything, dictated who stopped or where fighting stopped.
Also, I hadn't considered this before, but I feel dumb for not having done so. The Eastern Front had no Christmas truce because not everyone was Christian (hello, Ottomans!), and not all the Christians celebrated Christmas at the same time, as both the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches celebrate Christmas later than most Protestants and Roman Catholics. So, yeah. D'oh.
Yup. That also hints at the difference between the WWI and WWII in Europe and WWII in the Pacific. Looking at the source that is Wiki (I know, I know... either the worst of the best, or the best of the worst) it was Brits, Germans, and French.
My great-grandfather told very few stories about WWI, but I remember them vividly. I think he told so few stories because it was, decades later, far too vivid and immediate for him. We tend to see it through a black-and-white lens (literal and figurative), while the reality was far more visceral.
The browns and grays that we see in black-and-white photos aren't far from the truth. Where trenches were dug, which was basically along the entire front (WWI being a very European war), everything was turned to mud. There was no such thing as strategic bombers dropping 500-pounders from afar; there were no aircraft carrier groups waging proxy battles in the oceans. WWI was a face-to-face war waged in mud... endless mud of grey and brown.
One story was that they used to high-five corpses that were piled against the walls of the trenches. Picture that - a hand sticking-out, shoulder-high because it's stacked on the bodies below. Trench humour.
I think that we observe of every war that it's the worst yet - where technology and tactics collide with young men who find their mortality instantly. WWI was a particularly horrible case, and that is against the plethora of horror that was the twentieth century.
Machine guns, which have not advanced drastically since, were brutally effective. Artillery, which really is advanced cannons (shaping shells, making them spin to increase accuracy, packing-in explosives, and using all of the same to deliver mustard gas - yeah - that too) changed the game, yet it was still men with guns running at each other with the aim of killing each other. On the ground, there was no armored cavalry - there were dudes on horses, in the grey-brown mud, making red of each other.
It really should have been the war to end all wars, at least from a carnage perspective, but it wasn't. I am very selfishly happy that I wasn't alive then. That's not to minimize the horror of anything since, but rather, it's to point-out that WWI is perhaps a too-distant memory.
Eh, sorry - I'm waxing something-something here... and doing it out-loud.
A quantum state of signature may or may not be here... you just ruined it.