By Will Hall, Baptist Message executive editor ALEXANDRIA, La. (LBM) – World War I was a gruesome conflict, introducing horrific combat weapons that had not been imagined before: flamethrowers which burned men alive where they stood; machine guns that fired 500 rounds per minute at a distance of 2,000 yards (indiscriminately cutting down infantrymen as they charged enemy positions); and mustard gas (as well as chlorine, bromine and phosgene variants) that killed and permanently disabled troops with such lethality that chemical weapons were subsequently banned by international treaty. Six months into the grueling battle along the Western Front (the nearly 440 miles of dueling trench lines that stretched from the border of Switzerland through Belgium to the North Sea) Christmas came (after an estimated one million deaths in that brief time of war), and with it a miracle of sorts. On the eve of Christmas, in the mud and muck amid the misery of war, soldiers on both sides of “no man’s land” (the territory between the opposing armies, marked by barbed wires and pocked with craters from exploded artillery shells) began to blend their voices to the tune of the carols that in times past they would have been singing with family in … [Read more...]