[ WP ] War . War never changes . Well , except that one time ...

We didn ’ t want to be on patrol on Christmas Eve, crawling through no-man ’ s land in the dead of night looking for Krauts sneaking through the mud when people the world over were dancing around trees and drinking spirits full of holiday spices. 
 
 Yet there we were. And there they were when we slid down the inside of a particularly large shell crater to find three Germans huddled around a bottle of liquor in the moonlight. 
 
 For a long minute, the three of them stared at us, and the three of us stared at them. My Browning Auto-5 was at my side, sort of held under the weight of my leg. Their weapons, Gewehr 98s, sat leaned against the dirt behind them. 
 
 Finally, one of the Germans moved – he held out a bottle of liquor in offer. I stayed motionless, my eyes flicking between the German about 15 feet away, and Sergeant Baynard to my right. After another long pause, Sarge shifted himself off the wall of the crater, sauntered over, grabbed the bottle and lifted it in salute before taking a long swig. 
 
 The Germans, just as silent and motionless as myself and Hotchkins, laughed heartily. More bottles were produced, and Baynard even managed to reciprocate with a flask of Tennessee whiskey, which the Krauts enjoyed. 
 
 We spent the rest of our patrol in that crater, throwing back swigs of harsh drink, laughing and communicating through a lot of makeshift sign language. Pictures of love interests were displayed in the light of the three-quarter moon, backs were slapped and the weapons stayed leaning on the side of the crater. 
 
 For a few hours, we all forgot that we were there to kill each other. 
 
 In the wee hours just before dawn, with the bottles long empty and hugs all around, we crawled back to the west and they crawled east. We made a lot more noise than when we left our lines, falling over barbed wire in our drunken state as we attempted to rejoin our platoon. 
 
 That afternoon, we went over the wall, an entire battalion forcing our way across that same no-man ’ s land to pound a breach in the German trenches. Baynard fell to a sniper halfway between the lines, and Hotchkins hit a landmine as we neared the Kraut trenches. I made it through, but as I clamored through trenches full of bodies and blood, I kept expecting to see the faces of my German drinking buddies. 
 
 I never did. I don ’ t know what became of them. Who knows, we could have been face to face and not recognized each other after only seeing each other in the dark of night a few hours before. 
 
 I'd had 19 Christmas Eves before that one, and I've been lucky to have many since, but I ’ ve never had a Christmas Eve that taught me as much about the brotherhood of man as the Christmas Eve of 1917.
