This makes sense, and has happened in other wars, such as the Civil War. Here, it seems like it was more prevalent because of the nature of the war, and the close proximity of the trenches. The men understood they were more than killing machines, and reached out to the men close to them. The author states, "In various place they fraternized, even playing soccer, singing, and talking together" (Kolko 134). This indicates the men recognized each other as human beings first - trapped in a war not of their making. It also shows that the men were larger than what they were fighting, and larger than the countries that created the war. They could see the humanity of the "enemy," and understand they were simply men caught up in an impossible situation. This is interesting, since the text notes that so many of the soldiers were peasants, who many felt were uneducated "chattel." It seems that had more humanity than those with more
This is also not something heavily publicized about the war, and the fact that so many thousands of soldiers, on all sides, finally simply left their units tells much about the feelings of the soldiers as the war waged on. Clearly, the war weighed heavily on the soldiers, and they felt hopeless and trapped. So many soldiers died in the trenches, they probably thought they would never survive, and that they were fighting a war that would never end. As the author notes, "the soldiers were scarcely revolutionary but simply expressing their grievances and responding to military defeats" (Kolko 137). War is hell, and always has been, and these facts just point that out more clearly.
References
Kolko, Gabriel. Century of War: Politics, Conflicts, and Society Since 1914.…
