CNN
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It was one of the strangest episodes in military history, an event so unusual that it was first treated as a myth.
At 8:30 pm on Christmas Eve of 1914 in the dank and muddy battlefields of northern Europe during World War I, a British soldier dispatched a report to headquarters: German soldiers have illuminated their trenches and are singing carols while wishing British soldiers a merry Christmas.
British officers ordered their men to be silent, but it was too late. A British soldier responded with his own chorus of “The First Noel.” A German soldier called out across No Man’s Land – the barbed wire-strewn, deadly middle ground separating the armies – “Come out, English soldier; come out there to us.”
The soldiers climbed out of their trenches and met in the middle. So did others, gathering to exchange chocolate, wine and souvenirs. They even organized a soccer game, which the Germans won 3-2.
Most of the soldiers who shook hands on that fog-shrouded Christmas Eve would be dead before the war ended four years later. But letters from survivors and grainy black-and-white photographs prove it was no myth. An estimated 100,000 soldiers on both sides simply refused to fight because they were too exhausted and jaded. The Christmas Truce even lasted until New Year’s in some places.
“By December 1914, the men in the trenches were veterans, familiar enough with the realities of combat to have lost much of the idealism that they had carried into war in August, and most longed for an end to bloodshed,” according to an account of the Christmas Truce in Smithsonian Magazine.
More than a century later, there’s little chance that Russian and Ukrainian soldiers will shower each other with gifts this winter. But the Christmas Truce story is an example of a peculiar feature of war that offers a warning to the beleaguered Russian army in Ukraine:
There are moments throughout history where entire armies suddenly stop fighting, though they are evenly matched or even numerically superior to their enemy.
What causes armies to lose the will to fight? And how might that play out with the Russian army in Ukraine?
This is the question that CNN asked combat veterans and military historians. While history is full…
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