Tag archives: war

What is peace? Two millennia ago, the Roman historian Tacitus quoted an enemy leader as saying of the Romans, “They make a desert and call it peace.” But total destruction is not the preferred method of peacemaking, and various alternatives continue to be tried – one of which is mediation, whose success depends in part […]

At Christmas 1914, when World War I had already been raging for several months, an odd phenomenon occurred along the Western Front. Men from both sides briefly stopped fighting and fraternized. This “Christmas truce” is remembered as a freak occurrence. Some were punished for having engaged in it. Fighting resumed, and the war went on […]