A damn interesting article from Damn Interesting!

The Christmas Truce of 1914

The Great War was joined in fervor. It had only been a few months, but by December 1914, soldiers of the Central Powers could see the war wasn’t going to be as short as promised. It was the rainy season in Belgium, which reduced the ground to a gluey gray mud; bad enough in itself, but worse for the men digging the trenches used to hide from machine gun fire and artillery. The land was crisscrossed with barbed wire, and the technology of warfare had evolved faster than tactics, making it an extraordinarily brutal war. No wonder why the area between the opposing trenches was dubbed “No Man’s Land”.