Christmas truce

Another one was an officer in the Royal Sussex Regiment.

He'd been in the Queen's Westminster Rifles in 1914, taken part in the Christmas Truce as an ordinary soldier, then got commissioned.

He too served in the Machine Gun Corps, but as an officer, and then in the interwar period.

He was a farmer in Sussex and was commissioned in the Royal Sussex Regiment Territorials and then went across with them in 1939 and served in that 1940 campaign and a few of the others were in the Pioneer Corps.

And initially, like everybody went into World War I thinking it would be like an easy and quick war, but then they were confronted with the way that technology had changed the, the, the, the nature of war at that time, and it became way more brutal and intractable, and it quickly ended up settling into trench warfare and just lots and lots of people dying due to the use of machine guns and things like that.

But then later on in December, there was this really special and unique moment that occurred that's often talked about in history books, which is the famous Christmas Truce where during, um, Christmas basically, a little bit after I think when Venus was like stationing direct, um, the soldiers at Christmas time who'd been like fighting this ter- these terrible battles and like, and murdering each other for months now spontaneously had a ceasefire around the Venus direct station.

And what happened is they started crossing over the trenches into no man's land and exchanging gifts and singing carols together and basically having a really brief, very brief peace in what was otherwise like a really brutal context of this, this terrible war, of, of literally the First World War which had just started months earlier and they were still in the very early stages of.

So that's one of my favorite, you know, little positive examples of, of a little truce for just a matter of like a day or two, um, that did not last very long, but nonetheless it was one for the history books.

desensitizing people to the violence that they were doing and also like separating them further, you know, with further weapons technologies, that sort of thing.

just wild stuff learning that like there was something that was obviously upsetting to so many of these infantrymen like even if they recognized or felt like there was just cause they still were like but these are this is my fellow man and like you would see that in the stories of like the Christmas Armistice and stuff like that where like people from opposite sides would come together and share a meal and play a game of footy or whatever like i don't know that i think it's i'm i don't know i'm just so glad that he's talking about this because it is so true that like the dehumanization is just continuing like honestly like six steps further all at once with this ai development and that opportunity yeah We don't have to get into all the different things, but I do have to talk about my favorite paragraph.

Go for it.

Okay.

Because we haven't looked, we've referenced it, but there's that Franco-German film about The

Christmas Truce, whose name I'm completely...

Oh, is it Penuel?

Yes.