Yes, this.  &quot;The enemy&quot; was just the men previously living normal lives and working normal jobs the previous year, just like you were, before they were bundled off to fight for their country.<p>War is incredibly destructive to the frontline soldiers in so many ways even <i>beyond</i> killing them -- psychological ruin, destruction of land, homes, livelihoods, infrastructure....  It&#x27;s something that soldiers can be very gung-ho about -- in the abstract.<p>In non-desperate times, normal adults do not resolve conflicts by fighting to the death; when people do kill in anger, it&#x27;s usually a matter of rash action, deeply regretted afterward.<p>Imagine a regular working class man in Germany, told &quot;there&#x27;s a family that lives a few hundred kilometers that way -- shall we go kill them, and take over their house &amp; land?&quot;  What do you think he&#x27;d say?<p>But at a macro scale, it&#x27;s somehow legitimized.  And the soldiers are told whatever they need to be told to transform them from humans to game pieces -- <i>we&#x27;re</i> under attack, or threatened, or disrespected, or we need to revenge some past wrong... Keep it abstract - here&#x27;s your gun!<p>On the other side, micro-scale again, imagine hearing that a man and a few friends have the idea that you&#x27;ve harmed them somehow, and are coming to aggressively confront you.  Should you... hide in the woods with a gun and shoot them on sight?  Or assume it&#x27;s a misunderstanding, and try to find a way to communicate and resolve it peacefully?<p>At human scale, it&#x27;s obvious; violent death is awful, and completely final.  We take it seriously.<p>The Christmas Truce is about some of the poor &quot;regular folk&quot; removing their blinders for a few days, and the tragedy of it is that the juggernaut didn&#x27;t even really stumble; the soldiers that we&#x27;re &quot;weakened&quot; by fraternization with the enemy -- e.g., doing what humans naturally do to resolve conflict -- were quickly shuffled out of the way (or in later cases, court-martialed), and the war went on.<p>And there is no Christmas Truce story in WWII.