ASSESSMENTS

Remembering the Christmas Truce

Dec 25, 2020 | 16:21 GMT

Remembering the Christmas Truce
British and German troops are pictured during the Christmas truce in the trenches of the Western Front.

(Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

SUMMARY

Editor's Note: This analysis originally ran on Dec. 25, 2014.

One hundred years ago, on Dec. 25, six months into the Great War, some British, German, Indian, Austro-Hungarian, French and Russian soldiers along parts of the Eastern and Western Fronts in Europe observed an unofficial Christmas truce. The truce was not the first unofficial cessation of hostilities in World War I, but it was unparalleled in terms of scale and spontaneity. Truces and cease-fires have been a part of warfare for as long as there has been conflict, but as World War I continued, the belligerents became increasingly war fatigued and unsympathetic, worn down by the conflict's magnitude and the horrors that were exacerbated by advances in industrial warfare.

The Christmas truce was an impromptu agreement between combatants. A century later, truces and tenuous cease-fires are mostly negotiated, often influenced from outside powers, and generally bitterly accepted by the belligerents. Nonetheless, temporary cessations of hostilities still happen, and enemies sometimes abandon attacks for a night of calm, if only for a brief period. 

A century ago, during the first winter of the Great War, an unofficial cease-fire was observed sporadically across the Eastern and Western Fronts....

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