Reading Max Hastings' book Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War, it has struck me how suddenly history can change. He describes some of the armies going to war in August just as they had done for centuries, with trumpets blaring, banners flying, officers riding chargers and troops resplendent in blue or scarlet.
Brightly coloured uniforms were vital for fighting at close quarters when friend and foe had to be instantly distinguished. They made no sense in the war that awaited the soldiers of 1914. Troops under fire from machine guns had to hug the ground and dig in. They needed uniforms the colour of mother earth. Germany dressed its army in grey, Great Britain in khaki.
When their sons marched away in August most people probably did not think the war particularly pointless. Wars had happened for no better reason throughout history. They were part of life, an exciting rite of passage for young men who readily volunteered and were farewelled as heroes by proud families and the rest of the village.
War had codes of honour and chivalry and even stopped for intervals if, for example, soldiers on both sides needed to get their crops in. We can hardly believe this today, a supposedly more civilised era.
We marvel at the power of Christmas to stop the fighting on the western front in 1914 and bring enemies together for a few hours because it was the last time anything like that happened in a European conflict. But at the time, Hastings writes, it was nothing unusual. "Interludes of fraternisation have occurred in many wars over many centuries without doing anything to deter soldiers from killing each other afterwards."
Many, probably most, of those who went to war in the late summer of 1914 expected to be home by Christmas. A war for no reason could not last very long surely, before common sense would prevail.
Germany's armies had been driven back from the edge of Paris in September but they had dug in across northern France and Belgium and had the defensive advantage in trench warfare.
As winter turned the ground to mud and brought rain and gales to the freezing soldiers, Pope Benedict XV appealed for a Christmas truce. It was refused by governments and field commanders but on Christmas Eve, as Hastings describes it, a series of spontaneous contacts occurred at several points on the line, most initiated on the German side.
A small pine tree erected on the line in one sector inspired a meeting of German and French soldiers after midnight.
In occupied Belgium, Germans agreed to deliver Christmas cards to the families of the Belgian troops facing them across a canal.
An English soldier, Wilbert Spencer, described what happened on Christmas Day at his post near Ypres. "There was no firing, so by degrees each side began showing more of themselves and then two of them came half way over and called out for an officer. I went and found out that they were willing to have an armistice for four hours and carry our dead men half way for us to bury - a few days previous we had had an attack with many losses.
"This I arranged and then - well, you could never imagine such a thing. Both sides came out and met in the middle, shook hands, wished each other the compliments of the season and had a chat."
The war would last four more years but Christmas could not summon its spirit from the trenches again. Too much humanity had been lost.
