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This chapter sets the scene for the Christmas truce by examining the letters British soldiers wrote home during the first winter of the war, which included forthright descriptions of the horrors of the trenches, the respect they had for the German soldiers, and occasional friendly relations with their enemies. Letters that were printed in the British newspapers containing this information conditioned the public to accept a reality about the front lines that deviated from the official reports. The frankness with which the British soldiers wrote home during this time anticipates how they would report the truce, and the way it would be received by the home front.

The subject of this chapter is the Oscar-winning film All Quiet on the Western Front. After discussion of why the Laemmle family’s Universal Studios wanted to make film of Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated novel, the chapter considers the screenplay adaptation, casting of Lew Ayres in leading role, the revolutionary sound design, influence of Sergei Eisenstein’s montage technique, reception and political reaction to the film in the United States, and changing attitudes towards World War I. The final section focuses on the hostile reception of the film in Germany, where it was used by the Nazi leaders, especially Joseph Goebbels, for propaganda purposes, and how the film’s global renown changed Milestone’s life.

Between the year 1941 and 1942, the Wehrmacht's combat units underwent a radical process of demodernization, just as the Third Reich's economy was being mobilized for a total industrial war. This chapter examines the contradiction between the Wehrmacht's image as the most modern army of its time, and the profound process of demodernization it underwent particularly on the Eastern Front. Through a detailed reconstruction of life at the front, the chapter demonstrates the effects of the immense material attrition on the troops' physical condition and state of mind. Strong emphasis is given on the winter of 1941–2, when the majority of Germany's soldiers were forced into trench warfare highly reminiscent of the Western Front of 1914–18, while facing, however, an increasingly modernized enemy. Several consequences of the demodernization of the front are also presented in this chapter.

This chapter discusses the conventional narrative of the Christmas truce and then introduces the popular narrative of the First World War, demonstrates how the standard view of the Christmas truce supports that narrative, and reviews recent historiography that challenges the conventional war narrative. The truce is then reexamined to illustrate how it can contribute to a more complete understanding of the First World War.

Works from the interwar and immediate post–World War II period, when everyone in Britain was supposed to be thoroughly disillusioned with the conflict, demonstrate that in fact the narrative of the war was still at this point hotly disputed, and remained so through the late 1950s. Memoirs, treatises, novels, general histories, and polemics all took different attitudes toward the war, and the truce was an important part of this contested narrative: some dismissed it as a mere curiosity, while others contended that the cease-fire signified an important moral about the conflict.

This chapter details the story of the IEFA (Indian Corps), which fought in France. We tackle the question whether the IEFA faced a breakdown of morale; if not, how was it able to cope with the challenges of mass industrial trench warfare in the cold damp region of north France and the Low Countries? How the sepoys and sowars were able to make a transition from waging small wars to conducting mass industrial warfare centring round mud-filled trenches and mass infantry attacks supported by voluminous heavy gunfire is an issue discussed here. The first section deals with tactics and techniques of warfare for which the sepoys and sowars were prepared before the onset of the Great War, and the second section discusses the adaptation and adoption on part of the Indian troops in face of combat along the Western Front. The third section relates the soldiers’ experiences with issues of morale and discipline.

In this chapter, the popular narrative of the truce is challenged by the letters and diaries of the soldiers involved. Although there were soldiers who joined in truces that mirror the conventional view of the cease-fire—including fraternization and even the occasional football match—an examination of the contemporary documents demonstrates that there were many types of truces. Some were held only to bury the dead, whereas others were cease-fires with no fraternization. There were soldiers who refused to participate out of mistrust of the Germans, and others who resented the enemy more after meeting with them. This chapter demonstrates that the truce was a much more nuanced and complex event than the current narrative allows.

The popular narrative of the truce further maintains that the event was “hushed up” by the military leadership and the government, and that the British public would have been horrified to learn that their soldiers had fraternized with the enemy. An examination of six nationally available newspapers from the end of 1914 through the beginning of 1915, however, shows that many letters from soldiers freely discussing the truce were published during that time. As a result, the British public was fully aware of the event; additionally, no letters or editorials critical of the soldiers who participated or of the truce itself appeared in those papers.

The introduction explores reasons for the relative scholarly neglect of Lewis Milestone and his films: his diverse body of work, his troubles during the Blacklist period, the serious nature of most of his films, his difficulty getting along with studio bosses, his distaste for the “star system,” changing Hollywood tastes. It provides an overview of his career, from the silent to the sound era, and his huge early success with All Quiet on the Western Front, which came to haunt him in later years. Milestone was drawn repeatedly to the theme of war, especially its impact on ordinary soldiers. Also discussed is how Milestone’s life embodies the “rag-to-riches” American dream of millions of immigrants.

The Indian Army was not very successful in Gallipoli and Salonika. In the Gallipoli Campaign, the Ottoman infantry made the same mistake that the British and French infantry committed in the Western Front: launching mass infantry charges against entrenched enemy positions defended by barbed wire and machine guns. This probably saved the Allied bridgeheads. The Allied infantry assault at Gallipoli faced the same problem that the Allied infantry encountered in the Western Front till 1916: the inability of the artillery to support the advancing assaulting infantry as it neared the hostile defensive positions. The Gurkhas displayed their expertise in mountain warfare, but in general Indian infantry failed to develop flexible infantry–artillery coordination in a mobile battle. At Gallipoli, Indian artillery also learnt the techniques of indirect fire, counter battery bombardment, harassing fire, and so on.

This chapter focuses on Munzenberg's exploits in Stuttgart, where he found his friends Edwin Hornle and Max Barthel upon his arrival at the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof. Barthel, while retaining intermittent contact with his prewar co-conspirator in the publication of hack proletarian literature, had spent the war in Germany, and had even served a tour of duty on the Western Front. After finishing his service, he moved on to become a member of the editorial board of the Stuttgart Rote Fahne, the paper of the left-wing Spartacist viewpoint in the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), the faction of the prewar SPD that had broken off to oppose the war in 1917. Munzenberg, with the help of Barthel, promptly published a recruiting appeal to the “young workers of Wurttemberg” in Rote Fahne. Two days after his arrival in Stuttgart he was given an office in the state parliament house for his International Youth Secretariat.

This chapter focuses on the American Expeditionary Force's (AEF) experiences with poison gas on the Western Front and the logistical effort made by the United States to support chemical warfare during World War I. The nascent Chemical Warfare Service (CWS) had to support battlefield operations in 1918 as the AEF faced poison gas in Europe. On the whole, the CWS found itself seriously challenged by conditions on the Western Front and dependent on U.S. allies for information and equipment. This chapter examines the CWS's efforts to train the AEF, manufacture chemical weapons, and use poison gas on the battlefield throughout 1918. It discusses the comparatively heavy gas casualties suffered by the AEF in the fighting due to the inadequacy of the gas-mask training that its soldiers were given. It also considers the AEF's limited use of chemical weapons against the Germans and the U.S. Army's inability to organize for chemical warfare jeopardized the gas warfare program's status after World War I ended.

This chapter considers how nurses and doctors on the Western Front during the First World War negotiated and represented their experiences in terms of what they constantly define as ‘strain’. It discusses way these men and women articulate the psychological stresses of their situation with a range of responses, from the heightened language of sacrifice and duty and the desire to endure, to utter despair at the apparent futility of the war manifested in the thousands of dead and wounded that pass through their aid posts, casualty clearing stations, ambulances and hospitals. The discussion shows that the conditions themselves can have contradictory effects in that they may lead to breakdown on the one hand, but on the other can reinforce the need for endurance.

Although the myths about the truce insist that military leadership was horrified by it and punished the junior officers involved, the official war diaries kept by each regiment, brigade, and division instead demonstrate that the frontline officers involved in truces generally had no compunction about including them in their units’ official records. Two-thirds of the fifty-five regiments involved in the truce reported it in their war diaries in some form, from simple one-sentence summaries to multipage narratives, contradicting the conventional view that the truce was covered up by those in the lines for fear of retribution from military headquarters. Additionally, reports of the truce found their way into both regimental histories and the British official history of the war, demonstrating that no authority was particularly bothered by the event.