A new finding of bloodshed in WWI’s “Christmas truce” on the cusp of its hundredth anniversary strengthens, rather than undermines, its example for peace. The UK’s Telegraph reports (“Christmas truce of 1914 was broken when German snipers killed two British soldiers,” December 22) the incident, pieced together from historical records. On the front lines in…

There’s always plenty for libertarians to complain about in our troubled world, but in many respects, things could be much worse. I’m thinking particularly of how the U.S. government punished dissent before, during, and even after America’s participation in World War I. Although it will be a few years before we observe the centenary of…

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the start of the First World War, the four-year bloody nightmare that claimed 16 million lives — 7 million of them noncombatants — and wounded over 20 million people. That would have been bad enough, but the conflict was merely Act One in a much bigger war. The…

Yesterday I read Cormac McCarthy’s wonderful 2006 novel, The Road. The book tells the story of an unnamed man and his son, as they move through an apocalyptic landscape in the hope of finding a safer place to live. McCarthy doesn’t specify the nature of the apocalypse, although nuclear war is strongly hinted at. The…

Il ventiquattro dicembre di novantanove anni fa ci fu la cosiddetta Tregua di Natale del 1914, una tregua spontanea invocata dai soldati che si trovavano sul fronte occidentale francese e che in alcuni punti continuò anche dopo il giorno di Natale. I soldati francesi, britannici e tedeschi, attratti dal suono dei canti di Natale che…

Today is the 99th anniversary of the Christmas Truce of 1914, a spontaneous soldiers’ truce that broke out on Christmas Eve all along the Western Front in France, lasting in places until the day after Christmas. French, British and German soldiers, intrigued by the sound of Christmas carols from the enemy trenches, first tentatively refrained…