Christmas war truce a hoax?

The world is a far, far different place than it was in the early 20th Century.

World War One was based loosely on the Gentleman's Art of Warfare. They had rules and most kept to them.

WWI was pretty much the changing course in how wars were fought. By its end, battlefields were treated much differently than in all wars leading up to it.

Understand this is the era when the car was still a new invention, Planes were cutting edge, and made out of cloth and sticks. Previous wars had been fought on horseback.

Up until Automatic Weapons, which wasn't seen widely at the onset of WWI, men would form nice neat orderly lines to shoot at each other instead of using trench warfare. And with most guns you had to get close enough to see the face of your enemy.

By the middle of WWI weapons technology had opened up the space to where your enemies face was at best a blur - thus dehumanizing who you were shooting at.

These factors of seeing your enemy as a person, having ridiculously primitive machines (compared to what we have now) and practicing the art of war in an old fashion method set the stage to allow a real truce to take place.

These conditions were never seen again, thus we haven't had a real Christmas truce ever since.

The US practice is to fight on Christmas day, but all deaths are recorded as either dying on the 24th or the 26th... Sort of 'respecting' the spirit of Christmas in a terrible way.

Thus its not too hard to imagine a time when the world actually did respect the holiday enough to call a day of truce.

thanks for your reply, interesting points.