Christmas Truce of 1914
It was the final days of 1914.
World War 1 had broken out only a handful of months before, and dozens of countries were already involved in brutal warfare.
Soldiers cowered in trenches, evading machine gun fire. Gas masks were at the ready in fear of a poisonous gas attack. Disease was rampant. In short, it was hell.
But then Christmas rolled around, and something happened that came to be known as the Christmas Truce.[1]
In many areas across the Western Front of the war, both sides ceased fighting.
Soldiers left their trenches and went and interacted peacefully with the men they had been trying to kill for the previous months.
The opposing British and German troops came together and played soccer and sang Christmas carols to each other.
They shared food and drink and tobacco, and warmed themselves by the same fires.
For a few days at the end of 1914, the war ceased to exist. Instead, there was peace.
On these days, these men knew something that many people seem to have forgotten nowadays:
We don’t have to fight.
Men don’t have to kill other men.
There can be peace, if only people refuse to fight.
In modern times, this knowledge is beaten, suppressed.
Governments force and coerce people to go to war. They tell people that without killing, they will be killed themselves.
But that’s not true.
We’re all humans. In that way, we’re all the same. And we don’t have to fight each other. Over anything.
We can choose peace.
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