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A Christmas miracle.

I'm Jason Horton. I'm Rebecca Lebe.

And this is Ghost Town. On Christmas Eve, 1914, in the dank, war-torn trenches on the Western Front,

a remarkable thing happened.

It was World War I, and the central and allied powers had been fighting bitterly.

At the light of dawn, the fighting stopped.

German soldiers emerged from their trenches, as did the Allied forces, calling out

Merry Christmas in their enemy's native tongues. At first, the Allied soldiers feared it was a trick,

but it was not. Replacing the bloodletting and death was singing,

partying, and even football. It was a day of peace, history would call the Great Christmas

truce. A little background to start. If you remember your high school history, World War I,

also known as the Great War, began in 1914 after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. The assassination

set off a rapidly escalating chain of events. Austria-Hungary blamed the Serbian government

for the attack and hoped to use the incident as justification to

stamp out Serbian nationalism once and for all. Other countries quickly picked sides, and during

the four-year war, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria, and the Ottoman Empire, known as the

...