In one LGW section today we discussed the Christmas Truce of 1914. We will actually read a story about this in a few weeks, but we touched on the fact that the British grocery store chain Sainsbury’s had used the story for an advertisement in 2014, the 100-year anniversary. The extent of the truce is debated by scholars, but this imagines it rather fully.
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The Christmas Truce of 1914 really emphasizes the humanity in WWI. When reading All Quiet, we read multiple chapters of dense gore that was lacked a level of sensitivity and feeling, simply because that’s just how it was throughout the war. This reminded me of that artwork we viewed either the first or second day of class, the one where you can barely distinguish the humans from the machines. For most of the book, the men at war are painted as these sort of ruthless war machines. However, the Christmas Truce of 1914 reminds us that these “men” are simply a generation of young boys, forced off to fight to claim and uphold their masculinity. This part of the war definitely evoked the most emotion from me because it hurts me knowing that an entire generation was stripped of their youth either by death or by lifelong trauma.