But what about the next day?
Dorothy Searle considers the remarkable ‘truce’ held by some soldiers at Christmas in 1914
I first heard the story of the Christmas day truce of 1914 in a Methodist Sunday school, when I was about nine or ten. Even then I felt, instinctively, that this was an appalling tale, not the one of wonderful humanity that the teacher so obviously valued.
Surely, normal human beings will kill other people only in extreme circumstances, when they see it as the only way of preventing their own death or that of someone close to them. For that to happen, they need to see their opponent as an individual in front of them and posing an immediate threat. They are in one-to-one combat and know why they are doing it, and that it’s necessary.
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