Have just finished reading "Silent Night" by Stanley Weintraub (ISBN 0-684-86621-8). It is the story of the Christmas truce of 1914, in the trenches of WWI, covering amongst many other things the impromptu football matches in Nomansland. Not a bad book to read at this time of year.

The most interesting thing is actually the "What if..?" chapter, which considers the alternative history if the truce had held and WWI didn't progress any further than Christmas 1914...

Also very interesting to read of remarks by Sir H Kingsley Wood (a Cabinet Minister during WWII), who was a Major in the trenches in 1914 and who observed that if the soldiers had been left to themselves, there would never have been another shot fired. It was only the fact that the soldiers were being controlled by others that made it necessary for them to start shooting again.

Sir H Kingsley Wood unambiguously blamed the resumption of fighting on "the grip of a political SYSTEM which was bad" and discovered that even as a Cabinet Minister he was unable to change it.

Nothing much has changed over the last century...