"Blessed be the Lord my rock, who trains my hands for war and my fingers for battle."



Something happened on Christmas Eve in 1914, in the trenches, World War One, during the Battle of Ypres. World War One was the most sickening of wars as far as I can tell—a world of death and destruction and fire and pain and mud, and suffering.

And as a British prepared for an attack that Christmas Eve, they heard the Germans, their enemy, across the way. And they listened to the Germans laughing and singing Christmas carols. And eventually, the Germans called out, "Come on over Tommy," which was slang for a British soldier, and they said, "we won't fire at you." And eventually the British, cautiously, started to head over. And the Germans came out and started to head over. They head toward each other, and eventually, they all met in No Man's Land.

When they got there, they talked, laughed, sang, joked and told stories. And the legend is that they even played some soccer. And most important, at that moment, they saw each other as humans; As fellow human beings.

And eventually, as the morning came on, they all went back to their trenches. And when they got back to their trenches, they put down their weapons. They sat there, and they yelled jokes back and forth, and they didn't fight. And for a couple days, there was peace. And the soldiers thought to themselves. What are we even fighting for? How did we end up here, and why are we killing each other?

And these soldiers on both sides, the Germans and the British, realized that their supposedly monstrous enemy were just other men; other men with different backgrounds and different cultures, and different languages. But they realized that their enemy were just men, like them. They realized that they were all people.

And on the third day, the Germans were ordered from high command to shoot their machine guns. And so the Germans told the British what time they were going to shoot. They said they were going to shoot high, so the British should get low and take cover around that precise time to make sure nobody got hurt.

And that's what happened. The Germans shot high, and no one got hurt. And another couple of days of peace went by. But then an order came from the British headquarters. And it said that anyone found fraternizing with the enemy would be court-martialed. If they were not fighting the enemy and they were found guilty, they would be executed. And the generals got their way. They got what they wanted.

And that night, the war, the horrendous war on that patch of land, commenced again. The bombs and the mortars and the fire and the bullets they all came to extract their toll. And destroy and maim and kill these men, on both sides. And that is an awful end to a beautiful story; it takes that beautiful story and turns it into a nightmare.

But in that story, there's a glimpse of hope. The hope is that we, as human beings, can see other people as human beings. And I know we can. And I know it's not always easy, but we need to do this on both sides of the trenches.

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