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 France, British sentry Percy Huggins was felled by a German sniper; his platoon leader Tom Gregory retaliated against that sniper, only to be outgunned by another.

This may not fit the sentimentalized image of the truce, but taking it off such a pedestal makes it relevant to our messy world. Bertrand Russell noted that to “admit in theory that there are occasions when it is proper to fight, and in practice that these occasions are rare” yields far less war in practice than to “hold in theory that there are no occasions when it is proper to fight and in practice that such occasions are very frequent.”

The truce’s breakdown in this case remained an isolated flashpoint; it held on both sides, as close as under a mile away. The influence of an “incredibly professional” duty-bound Guards Brigade kept local tensions high from the beginning, with immediate rejection of Germans’ bid for a cease-fire.

Also instructive is the clear tit-for-tat aspect, driven by retaliation for specific aggressions rather than by general warlikeness. (One sniper indicating more made a third death inevitable.) Something needs to tip the balance to make hostility spread faster than toleration. That something, in one word: Politics.

Emma Goldman contended that without the socialist movement’s turn away from direct action and toward a reliance on political means, “the great catastrophe would have been impossible. In Germany the party counted twelve million adherents. What a power to prevent the declaration of hostilities! But for a quarter of a century the Marxists had trained the workers in obedience and patriotism, trained them to rely on parliamentary activity and, particularly, to trust their socialist leaders blindly. And now most of those leaders had joined hands with the Kaiser … Instead of declaring the general strike and thus paralysing war preparations, they had voted the Government money for slaughter.” And only the tripwire pitting of national leaders against each other could turn the assassination of an archduke into a feud that would multiply the tripling of Huggins’s death five-million-fold.

In his final letter, Huggins told his family: “I long for the day when this terrible conflict will be ended. You consider war a terrible thing but imagination cannot reach far enough for the horrors of warfare that can be seen on the battlefield are indescribable and I pray this may be the last war that will ever be.” A century of advance in global communications and commerce gives today’s Hugginses ample basis to coexist without politicians and the means to verify trust. It should not take another century to reach “the last war that will ever be.”

My source here is David M. Kennedy’s Over Here: The First World War and American Society (paperback, 2004), especially chapter 1, “The War for the American Mind.” (Also see Joseph Stromberg’s “Remembering with Astonishment Woodrow Wilson’s Reign of Terror in Defense of ‘Freedom.’”)

Wilson of course was reelected president in 1916 after a campaign that reminded voters, “He kept us out of war.” But as Kennedy tells it, most of the public did not need to be dragged into war. (Germany’s resumption of submarine warfare must have had something to do with this.) Resistance did not appear widespread, and efforts to suppress dissent (and activities having nothing to do with dissent) were more virulent at the grassroots level than in Washington. At some point, American nativism kicked in with a vengeance, and the prowar fever was easily exploited to turn up the heat on immigrants and workers.

The propaganda campaign was remarkable, the repression more so, as though the policymakers feared that a little dissent could turn the whole country antiwar. “Woe be to the man or group of men that seeks to stand in our way.” That was Wilson’s warning to the war opponents two months after he asked an obliging Congress for a declaration of war on Germany. “They had no small idea, as yet, just how much woe was to befall them,” Kennedy writes.

Kennedy believes that suppression of dissent was made easier by a traditional American striving for agreement. The government’s public school — known in the 19th century as the common school — won favor out of a desire to homogenize the religiously and ethnically diverse population. The “melting pot” was a popular notion. “Those deep-running historical currents,” Kennedy writes, “darkly moving always beneath the surface of a society more created than given, more bonded by principles than by traditions, boiled once more to the surface of American life in the crisis of 1917–1918.” Social stability was seen as requiring “sameness of opinion … commonality of mind.”

It was in the preparation for war and during the war itself that the notion of “100 percent Americanism” was forged, Kennedy adds, and most people were suspicious of anyone who seemed less than 100 percent American.

Kennedy notes that Wilson was well suited for the role he assumed

He had all his life been a moralizing evangelist who longed with a religious fervor to sway the public mind with the power of his person and his rhetoric. The war furnished him with a wider stage for the ultimate performance of the act he had long been perfecting.… He subverted the more or less orderly processes of politics by stirring and heating the volatile cauldron of public opinion. Therein lay both his great political genius and a major source of his eventual downfall.

But Wilson’s public reversal on the war caught many people by surprise — particularly the Progressive intelligentsia, which, led by John Dewey and the New Republic, converted to war-boosterism with relative ease — to Randolph Bourne’s horror. (See Murray Rothbard’s classic “World War I as Fulfillment: Power and the Intellectuals.”) But, Kennedy adds,

some of those persons of sensitive conscience would indeed find the passage from neutrality to war impossible to negotiate. The steadfast pacifists — like those who held to the original anti-war principles of the American Union Against Militarism — increasingly found themselves isolated in a wilderness of opposition from which nearly all their countrymen had fled by the end of 1917.

Just as the Eastern Progressives hoped that they could harness the unpleasantness of war to their reformist aims (Progressives further west were skeptical), conservatives and others also “sought to invest America’s role in the war with their preferred meaning and to turn the crisis to their particular advantage,” Kennedy writes. “All, of course, mantled their activities in the raiment of patriotism. But that loose garment could be stretched to many sizes and shapes, and the struggle to define the war’s meaning often cloaked purposes far removed from Wilson’s summons to a crusade for a liberal peace and democracy.”

Thus the demand for solid support for the war bolstered groups that were already suspicious of immigrants and workers showing an interest in unions. Thus opponents of war could be further stigmatized as foreigners and socialists. (Recall that avowed socialists condemned the Great War as a “capitalist war” in which the world’s workers had no interest.)

Washington’s efforts to disseminate a particular view of the war — democracy versus German authoritarianism — reached into the schools, and local school officials obliged by stepping up the effort, for example, by outlawing the teaching of German. “Ninety percent of all the men and women who teach the German language are traitors,” Kennedy quotes one Iowa politician as saying.

By executive order, Wilson created the innocuously named Committee on Public Information, a propaganda mill headed by Progressive muckraking journalist George Creel. Kennedy portrays Creel as a man who believed that the American way of shaping opinion “shunned coercion and censorship.” But apparently not everyone agreed.

Kennedy finds parallels between the American propaganda effort and themes found in George Orwell’s 1984.

The American experience in World War I … darkly adumbrated the themes Orwell was to put at the center of his futuristic fantasy: overbearing concern for “correct” opinion, for expression, for language itself, and the creation of an enormous propaganda apparatus to nurture the desired state of mind and excoriate all dissenters. That American propaganda frequently wore a benign face, and that its creators genuinely believed it to be in the service of an altruistic cause, should not obscure these important facts.

At the grassroots level, vigilantism — including lynching — was not uncommon and too often was more or less countenanced by people in power and prominent members of the of legal community, including a future U.S. attorney general, Charles Bonaparte.

The Justice Department under Attorney General Thomas Gregory encouraged citizen surveillance through its link to the American Protective League, “a group of amateur sleuths and loyalty enforcers,” in Kennedy’s description. Said Gregory, “I have today several hundred thousand private citizens — some individuals, most of them as members of patriotic bodies, engaged in … assisting the heavily overworked Federal authorities in keeping an eye on disloyal individuals and making reports on disloyal utterances.” Kennedy says that by the end of the war, the APL had 250,000 members.

This was also the period in which the United States got the Espionage Act and amendments known as the Sedition Act. Under the authority of the Espionage Act, Postmaster General Albert Sidney Burleson banned publications from the mail or stripped them of their second-class mailing permits for even suggesting that Wall Street or the arms industry controlled the government. Criticizing the government was regarded as aiding the enemy.

Wilson, Kennedy writes, meekly and privately objected to the heavy-handedness of his underlings on occasion but never did anything about it. His true feelings were revealed after the war, when he advocated a new sedition act to take the place of the soon-to-expire wartime amendment.

The courts were no friendlier to dissenters and government critics. Kennedy says the

courts construed the [wartime censorship] laws broadly, convicting persons, for example, for even discussing the constitutionality of conscription, or, as happened in New Hampshire, for claiming ‘this was a Morgan war and not a war of the people’ (a remark that earned its author a three-year prison sentence).

An antiwar speech could get you indicted, tried, and sent to prison. Socialist leader Eugene V. Debs went to prison for delivering a speech against the war, although he did not call on young men to defy conscription.

“The Supreme Court,” Kennedy writes, “did not review any Espionage Act cases until after the Armistice. By then, of course, the damage was done.”

When District Judge Learned Hand ordered Postmaster General Burleson to stop closing the mails to dissenting magazines, an appeals court overturned the order and the Supreme Court let the appellate decision stand. In 1919 the high court heard three cases brought under the Espionage Act. In one, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. declared that in wartime, speech or written work that is “such a hindrance” to the government’s effort may be prohibited.

It was in this opinion that Holmes enunciated the “clear and present danger” standard for when speech and press may be controlled. But Kennedy notes that Holmes and his fellow justices violated their own standard. For example, the court refused to overturn the conviction of a German-American “who had published articles questioning the constitutionality of the draft and the purposes of the war.”

Holmes also sustained Debs’s conviction, writing ominously, “if a part of the manifest intent of the more general utterances was to encourage those present to obstruct the recruiting service … the immunity of the general theme may not be enough to protect the speech.” Kennedy found only one case in which Holmes, in dissent, used the “clear and present danger” test to oppose a conviction.

Holmes, strangely, has a reputation as a great civil libertarian. One perceptive observer was not fooled; H.L. Mencken demolished the renowned jurist in a 1930 book review that reminded readers of Holmes’s wartime opinions.

We are indeed fortunate that speakers, writers, and publishers who today communicate antiwar messages are no longer treated as they were during World War I. That they were not so treated after the 9/11 attacks — considering the other appalling policies and practices the Bush administration engaged in — we might chalk up to the devout respect for freedom of speech and press that is nurtured by hardworking organizations and civil libertarians dedicated to protecting those freedoms.

Kennedy ends his chapter on a note that today’s progressives ought to heed. Eastern Progressives supported Wilson’s war hoping it would advance reform while avoiding the domestic excesses that war can produce. They miscalculated, however. Dewey was wrong. Bourne was right.

The devotees of Barack Obama, who has prosecuted more whistleblowers under the same Espionage Act than all previous presidents combined, still have not learned their lesson.

That would have been bad enough, but the conflict was merely Act One in a much bigger war. The “peace” settlement vindictively branded Germany uniquely culpable and imposed border adjustments that made Act Two a virtual certainty. The so-called Second World War, which began after the 21-year intermission from 1918 to 1939, claimed at least 60 million lives, at least 19 million of which were noncombatants.

Act Two culminated in President Harry Truman’s two gratuitous atomic bombings of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the 69th anniversaries of which are also observed this week. As has often been pointed out, without World War I (and especially Woodrow Wilson’s entry into it in 1917), there would have been no World War II — nor any of the other major consequences that inflicted so much death and mayhem to the 20th century and beyond: among them the Bolshevik Revolution, which brought Lenin and then Stalin to power; Hitler’s rise in Germany; the Holocaust; China’s fall to communism and Mao Zedong; and the Cold War. (For an example of how the world still suffers the consequences of the Act One, see my “The Middle East Harvests Bitter Imperial Fruit.”)

With so much having been written in the last century, what’s left to be said about the “Great War” at this late date? I think what gets overlooked is that the war is the clearest possible lesson about the omnipresent danger of government power. Governments — politicians and monarchs — went to war, some perhaps more reluctantly than others. All shared responsibility for the carnage and devastation. (Historians will debate the relative shares of responsibility forever.)

Could the men responsible for the war have wrought anything like the horrors they inflicted had they not controlled a state apparatus — an army, a navy, a compulsory revenue-collection agency, and a bureaucracy to conscript (enslave) the nation’s young males? (The draft was fittingly called the blood-tax.) It wasn’t just the European state system that is implicated. Three years into the conflict, a purported constitutionally limited republic — the United States — joined the orgy of violence and determined the tragic outcome. That the Great War brought to an end the halting, imperfect journey toward genuine liberalism merely compounded the catastrophe.

This was no noble war, not by a long shot. It was a war driven by imperial rivalries (Germany was the relatively new player in the empire game); balance-of-power politics; the alliance system, which hid obligations to go to war from the people who would pay the butcher’s bill; petty, vainglorious rulers; and nationalism, that pernicious invention of ambitious rulers. “It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round,” Ernst Gellner wrote in Nations and Nationalism.

The Great War was a struggle for political aggrandizement, territory, domination, and economic advantage. The politicians’ solemn declarations to the contrary notwithstanding, it had nothing to do with democracy, self-determination, or a wish to “end war,” that marvelous means to national greatness, masculinity, and enforced collectivization. (Collectivist pacifists like William James lied those features, but hoped for a “moral equivalent of war.”)

Moreover and most disturbingly, the war demonstrated how easily populations can be incited to eagerly shelve their normal lives, leave their homes and loved ones, and lunge for the throat of the Other, or die trying. (The Left was stunned that average people put nation before class. This revelation drove Mussolini from the universalist totalitarian Left, Marxism, to the nationalist totalitarian Right, fascism.) Dehumanization of the enemy plumbed sickening depths. The idiotic willingness to take sadistic orders in the prosecution of the futile and lethal insanity of trench warfare hardly complimented a generation of young European men. (The hope engendered by the spontaneous Christmas truce was short-lived.)

But as we’ve seen from America’s experience in 1917 and beyond, this was not unique to Europeans. What induces young people and their elders to believe politicians who suggest that the noblest thing is to die for your country (meaning the government)?

In this connection I always think of the words Paddy Chayefsky wrote for his protagonist Charlie Madison (James Garner) in the movie The Americanization of Emily, spoken to a woman who preferred to pretend that war had not taken her husband and son:

I don’t trust people who make bitter reflections about war, Mrs. Barham. It’s always the generals with the bloodiest records who are the first to shout what a Hell it is. And it’s always the widows who lead the Memorial Day parades.… We shall never end wars, Mrs. Barham, by blaming it on ministers and generals or warmongering imperialists or all the other banal bogies. It’s the rest of us who build statues to those generals and name boulevards after those ministers; the rest of us who make heroes of our dead and shrines of our battlefields. We wear our widows’ weeds like nuns and perpetuate war by exalting its sacrifices.… Maybe ministers and generals blunder us into wars, Mrs. Barham, the least the rest of us can do is to resist honoring the institution.

Madison goes on to say that since war brings out the best in the people in combat — bravery and all — it’s “cowardice that will save the world.”

War isn’t hell at all. It’s man at his best; the highest morality he’s capable of.… It’s not war that’s insane, you see. It’s the morality of it. It’s not greed or ambition that makes war: it’s goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons, for liberation or manifest destiny, always against tyranny and in the interest of humanity. So far this war, we’ve managed to butcher some ten million humans in the interest of humanity. Next war it seems we’ll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity. It’s not war that’s unnatural to us; it’s virtue. As long as valor remains a virtue, we shall have soldiers. So, I preach cowardice. Through cowardice we shall all be saved.

Another source of insight about war, the Great War in particular, is Paul Fussell, who dedicated himself to examining “some of the literary means by which [the war] has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized.” War changes people and societies, so Fussell looked closely at

the way the dynamics and iconography of the Great War have proved crucial political, rhetorical, and artistic determinants on subsequent life. At the same time the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating new myth, and that myth is part of the fiber of our own lives.

(See his The Great War and Modern Memory as well as Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War.)

In The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell wrote,

Every war is ironic because every war is worse than expected. Every war constitutes an irony of situation because its means are so melodramatically disproportionate to its presumed ends. In the Great War eight million people were destroyed because two persons, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand and his Consort, had been shot.… [T]he Great War was more ironic than any before or since. It was a hideous embarrassment to the prevailing Meliorist myth which had dominated the public consciousness for a century. It reversed the Idea of Progress.

Fussell was fascinated by war’s capacity to create absurd juxtapositions: one moment a British soldier quietly enjoys his tea and biscuits in a trench in France; in the next his skull is blown open by a German shell and the human debris injures his friend nearby. Fussell’s virtue is in demythologizing “good” wars, showing that, regardless of what patriotic poets and novelists may say, there is no glamour, no romance, no redemption in the whole bloody business.

Everyone knew what Glory was, and what Honor meant. It was not until eleven years after the war that Hemingway could declare in A Farewell to Arms that “abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.”

I don’t like it when the Great War is described deterministically. The war was not really caused by the Serbian plot in which Serbian nationalist Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, Sofie, in Sarajevo, Bosnia, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire but coveted by Serbia. The rulers of Austria-Hungary, Serbia, Russia, Germany, France, and Great Britain did not have to do what they subsequently did — the ultimatums, the mobilizations, the honoring of secret alliances. At every stage, fallible persons operating under perverse incentives (they’d never be on the front lines) made choices — poor choices with respect to most people. War was never inevitable. It was a product of human agency.

The world should keep this in mind as the politicians make choices today with respect to mythologized Ukraine and demonized Russia. This time the great powers have nuclear weapons. Who can be confident that these similarly flawed “leaders” learned anything from the Great War?

A nuclear apocalypse is something we see as solidly in the realm of somewhat antiquated science fiction. The Fallout series of video games is set in a “retrofuturistic” future, that is, a future as imagined from the 1950s, and takes as its central premise a central anxiety of that decade, nuclear war. We are now occasionally treated to declassified government plans for dealing with such a catastrophe, such as the recent declassification of a speech written for Elizabeth II in the event of nuclear war. Such artifacts are treated as relics of the past, reminding us of fears now allayed. Now instead of The Day After, the 1983 TV movie on the aftermath of a nuclear war, we fret about biotechnology in Rise of the Planet of the Apes or climatological catastrophes in 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow. But the demons of the past are not dead.

According to the Arms Control Association, nearly 14,000 nuclear weapons exist in the world today, including more than 3,000 at this moment sitting atop missiles ready for launch. These weapons are a mortal threat to every man, woman, and child on this planet. At any moment, everything we have built, all our art and science, all our lives and all our loved ones, could be snuffed out at the whim of a politician, or even more chillingly, by accident.

The history of nuclear near-misses is well worth examining, but during this centennial year of the outbreak of the Great War, the whims of politicians deserve our focus. For all their careful pretense of competence, history reveals that the great statesmen are as inept at war and peace as they are at running the DMV. During the July Crisis of 1914, the wise statesmen of Europe each entirely misjudged the others and stumbled blindly into a catastrophic war. A minor crisis in a comparatively obscure (to the West) corner of Europe became, by stumbles and errors, a cataclysm.

Last summer, a war between the United States and its allies in Western Europe and Syria, a Russian ally hosting a small Russian military base, was narrowly averted. At this moment, Russia and the West are jockeying for influence and control over Ukraine, and shots have already been fired in Slovyansk. Our leaders have confidently unleashed war on Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, and Pakistan just over the last ten years, and casually discuss possibly attacking Iran and Syria while aggressively “confronting” Russia today. When we talk about war, we gamble with the end of our civilization. Such an end seems remote now, just as a world war seemed to most Europeans in July, 1914. But the missiles are still armed. If one crisis runs out of control, if one of these eminently fallible politicians feels cornered or spiteful or just like his bluff won’t be called, everything we have built in the West since the last time we inadvertently destroyed our own civilization in the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era could be lost, to say nothing of the millennia-old civilizations of Asia and Africa.

The end of a civilization is a difficult thing to contemplate. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road does an excellent job, as does the aforementioned Fallout series. But for a more concrete example, Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization is superb. While much recent scholarship, following Peter Brown’s classic The World of Late Antiquity, has emphasized continuities between classical antiquity and the medieval world that followed, Ward-Perkins emphasizes the human costs of the collapse of classical Mediterranean civilization. The disintegration of trade networks and the concomitant collapse of the division of labor led to a dramatic decline in quality of life as well as population levels- in less antiseptic terms, mass suffering and death. Progress in the West was set back dramatically; a thousand years would pass before Europeans could build anything like the Pantheon and nearly two thousand before medicine surpassed the achievements of the Greeks and Romans. Countless works of art, literature, philosophy, science and mathematics were lost, as well as much priceless practical knowledge- clean, fresh water would not become a regular feature of urban life in Europe again for centuries.

When the politicians and their media minions begin to bloviate about the need for “resolve,” for “action,” they are betting everything we as a species have achieved on their latest pet concern. Many terrible things are happening and will happen around the world. But whenever any nation, especially a great power, bares its teeth at another, we hope that this latest crisis du jour won’t be the last thing we get to fret about over a printed newspaper or a tablet screen. The end of everything is what we talk about when we talk about war.

I soldati francesi, britannici e tedeschi, attratti dal suono dei canti di Natale che venivano dalle trincee nemiche, cominciarono timidamente a smettere di spararsi tra loro. Dalle trincee tedesche fu lanciato uno stivale, che poi risultò pieno di dolci e salumi. Man mano che acquistarono fiducia, i soldati cominciarono ad avventurarsi nella terra di nessuno tra le trincee, fino ad entrare nelle trincee stesse sul lato opposto per scambiare piccoli regali ricevuti da casa come caffè, sigarette, alcolici e giornali. Celebrarono il Natale giocando a calcio nella terra di nessuno. Soldati di entrambe le parti condivisero le loro razioni, cantarono assieme canti di Natale e posarono per le fotografie di gruppo.

Già prima di Natale le forze alleate e le potenze centrali avevano invocato alcune tregue per seppellire i morti, ma solo con l’approvazione dei rispettivi comandi supremi. Questa tregua di Natale, invece, non era stata autorizzata da nessuna delle parti, una violazione della disciplina a tutti gli effetti (fraternizzare con il nemico significava la corte marziale, tanto per intenderci). Ovviamente i capi delle forze tedesche e alleate erano profondamente sconvolti all’idea di ciò che questo fatto implicava; più sconvolti di quando, dopo l’armistizio del 1918, una unità francese in attesa impaziente della smobilitazione organizzò un soviet. Rimuginarono alla ricerca di un sistema per costringere gli uomini, con le minacce o con l’imbroglio, a tornare nelle trincee e uccidersi l’uno con l’altro.

Ma i soldati non ne volevano sapere. Il 26 dicembre, all’ordine di riprendere il fuoco, risposero sparando negligentemente in aria invece che in direzione del nemico. Tutto finì quando i comandi supremi mandarono al fronte truppe fresche che non avevano conosciuto la tregua. A Natale del 1915 e degli anni seguenti fu ordinato un fuoco di sbarramento continuo. Quando un ufficiale appena accennava ad una tregua veniva trattato in maniera esemplare. Un capitano britannico che autorizzò una tregua per seppellire i morti, seguita da un’ora di fraternizzazione, fu deferito alla corte marziale.

I governi e i comandi militari di Gran Bretagna, Francia e Germania erano giustamente spaventati dagli sviluppi. Era facilissimo per la propaganda ufficiale demonizzare il nemico agli occhi della popolazione civile a casa, come dimostrano le storie diffuse dalla stampa britannica sui soldati tedeschi che uccidevano i bambini belgi a baionettate. Ma i soldati che entravano in contatto con il “nemico” al fronte capivano subito che si trattava di persone normali come loro, con un lavoro e una famiglia a casa, persone che erano state abbastanza stupide da credere alle bugie raccontate dai politici.

Oggi i governanti hanno molte più ragioni per essere spaventati. Da quando si è diffuso internet e la connessione è praticamente diventata ubiqua in gran parte del mondo, ed i social-media hanno cominciato la loro rapida diffusione, è cresciuto esponenzialmente il numero di americani che comunica, da persona a persona, con cittadini delle nazioni “nemiche” contro cui gli Stati Uniti fanno le guerre. Non solo abbiamo accesso a canali d’informazione come Al Jazeera, che mostra i cadaveri carbonizzati e smembrati dagli attacchi americani, ma con il cellulare chiunque può caricare immagini o video sui social-media.

Novantanove anni fa i soldati dovettero camminare fino alle trincee opposte per capire che le truppe “nemiche” erano esattamente come loro, e che i loro veri nemici li avevano a casa, a Londra, Parigi, Berlino. Oggi sempre più civili lo capiscono prima ancora di sparare un singolo colpo.

Traduzione di Enrico Sanna.

French, British and German soldiers, intrigued by the sound of Christmas carols from the enemy trenches, first tentatively refrained from firing on one another. A German boot tossed into the British trenches turned out to be filled with candy and sausage. Soldiers, with increasing confidence, began to venture out into no-man’s land and into each other’s trenches to exchange small presents like coffee and cigarettes, spirits, and newspapers from home. They celebrated Christmas by playing football on no-man’s-land. Soldiers from opposing armies shared rations, sang carols together and posed for group photographs.

The Allies and Central Powers had previously called temporary truces as Christmas approached, in order to bury their dead — but only with approval from their respective High Commands. This Christmas truce, in contrast, was completely unauthorized by commanders on either side, a violation of discipline in just about every imaginable respect (fraternization with the enemy — a court-martialable offense — just for starters). And needless to say, the German and Allied leaderships were utterly terrified by the implications — even more terrified than after the Armistice in 1918 when a British unit in France, impatient for demobilization, organized a soviet. They racked their brains to come up with a way to threaten or trick the men in the trenches into ending the unauthorized truce and getting back to killing one another.

The soldiers weren’t having any of it, though. Directly ordered to resume fire on December 26, they perfunctorily fired their rifles into the air rather than at the enemy. Finally the High Commands ended the truce by bringing in fresh troops from the rear who had not experienced the truce. In Christmas 1915 and subsequent years, truces were prevented by ordering continuous artillery barrages from the rear, and making conspicuous examples of officers who even hinted at allowing another Christmas truce. A British captain who authorized a local truce for burying the dead, followed by half an hour of fraternization, was court-martialed.

The governments and military commands of Britain, France and Germany were rightly afraid of this development. It was fairly easy to demonize the enemy to the civilian population at home with official war propaganda, like the stories in the British press about German soldiers bayoneting Belgian infants. But soldiers who came into direct contact with the “enemy” on the front quickly learned that they were just regular people like themselves with jobs and families at home, who had been stupid enough to believe the lies their politicians had told them.

Today our rulers have much more reason to be afraid. Since the rise of the Internet and near-ubiquitous connectivity in much of the world, and the rapid growth of social media networks, there’s been at the very least an order of magnitude increase in the number of Americans who have direct person-to-person communications with citizens of “enemy” nations whenever the United States goes to war. And we have not only easy access to media outlets like Al Jazeera showing the charred and dismembered bodies from U.S. air strikes, but ordinary people uploading images or videos to social media via cell phone.

It took a physical trip into the opposing trenches ninety-nine years ago for soldiers to discover that “enemy” troops were just like them, and their real enemies were back home in London, Paris and Berlin. Today a large, and rapidly growing, portion of the civilian public knows that before a shot is ever fired.

Translations for this article:

• Spanish, La Tregua de Navidad de 1914.
• Italian, La Tregua di Natale del 1914.