December 23, 2021
It’s almost time to get to work on The Year in Pics 2021, but before we do, “let’s take a holiday, take some time to celebrate, just one day out of life, it would be so nice,” right?
And a holiday hat tip to Smithsonian Magazine for their fine write up of the Christmas Truce of 1914. You can read all about it here. So whether you celebrate Christmas, Hanukkah, Festivus, Solstice, or None of the Above, we here at the Gazette wish you health, happiness, and time to be with those you love during this holiday season.
The Christmas Truce of WWI
“Several factors combined to produce the conditions for this Christmas Truce. By December 1914, the men in the trenches were veterans, familiar enough with the realities of combat to have lost much of the idealism that they had carried into war in August, and most longed for an end to bloodshed. The war, they had believed, would be over by Christmas, yet there they were in Christmas week still muddied, cold and in battle.” Read the rest at Smithsonian Magazine.
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Let love shine
And we will find
A way to come together, we can make things better
We need a holiday
Here’s an eyewitness account of that legendary Christmas Truce, as filed by Phil Rader via UPI for the Riverside Daily Press, Volume XXX, Number 74, on 27 March 1915.
CHRISTMAS TRUCE BETWEEN LINES AS SEEN BY AMERICAN VOLUNTEER
“For twenty days we had faced that strip of land forty feet wide, between our trench and that of the Germans, that no man’s land, dotted with dead bodies, crisscrossed by tangled masses of barbed wire. That little strip of land was as wide and as deep and as full of death as the Atlantic Ocean; as uncrossable as the space between the stars; as terrible as human hate.”