Differences Of War And Religion In The Great War

War and religion have never mixed well. In fact, religion is often the primary reason countries go to war. As John Terraine, the lead screenwriter for his documentary The Great War, states, "Wars of religion - like civil wars - are commonly considered to be the most merciless, the most cruel, the most destructive. Divine sanction or divine instruction has generally tended to increase this savagery, casting a holy glow over what might otherwise be looked on simply as barbaric deeds." (781). The Crusades of the medieval period exemplify this idea. But these Christmas truces across the Western front seem to do the opposite of what religion has done to wars in the past. While religion often gave soldiers a reason to kill, Christmas gave the soldiers of World War I a reason to stop killing.

The Russian and German soldiers were never able to come to an agreement about a ceasefire because the Russians didn’t celebrate Christmas, and therefore had no reason to question why they were fighting. But the truce wasn’t all the soldiers’ idea. Pope Benedict XV had asked the countries for Christmas to be a day of peace, yet the countries decided against the idea. World War I was one of the first modern wars. It introduced larger vehicles and deadlier weapons like chemical warfare for the first time, and was also one of the first wars to utilize trenches. Trenches allowed enemies to have camps within half a mile of an enemy’s, which was a frightening idea, but it also sparked the curiosity of the soldiers. World War I was the first war that allowed enemy soldiers to hear each other, and was the first war that soldiers realized how similar their enemies were to