The 1914 Christmas Truce (Part 1)
Dan Snow's History Hit
00:00
The War Will Be Over by Christmas
No one was prepared for the huge scale of what would be needed when the lines actually froze and were fortified. The german army may have been slightly better prepared, but it was still overwhelmed. It had taken four years to defeat a bunch of dutch farmers on horseback in south africa 12 years earlier. If you showed anything above the line of the parapet, the top of the ditch, you were likely to get a bullet through it. So if you got hit, you were dead.
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