Going Over The Top: Whizz-bangs, Mills bombs, and artillery. It was a Silent Night

[AndyC]

Discuss @David Flin 's latest article here

 

[Alex Richards]

I do wonder how much the frequent refrains in that first bit of the year about it being 'all over by Christmas/done before the leaves fall' contributed to the fact that the Christmas Truce was very much a one-time only affaire- presumably by 1915 everyone knew it was going to be a slog to the bitter end no matter how long it took.

 

[Redolegna]

My first guess is that Christmas 1914 still had a degree of innocence about it. People hadn't been stuck in trenches for long, the toll of attrition and nervous exhaustion hadn't taken place, there hadn't been the huge efforts to see if flesh and blood can power through machine guns if the next big effort, and - as you say - there was still the view that a short(ish) war was still possible.

Even so, there was already a stark divide between those who had been fighting since August or sometimes September and those who were coming later to make up for the staggering losses. At least on the French side, two months of the trenches, while welcomed in saving lives, had brought utter misery. And in Champagne, the winter offensive had already begun, to general disgust and horror among the soldiers and the officers in the field. All the nationalist enlistees who were hoping for glory had been utterly disabused of the notion by December.

As you point out, besides sometimes agreeing not to shoot for the day (and the artillerymen probably would have ignored it, provided they had enough shells), there were no attempts at being comrades on the French-German part of the front.