English · Drill 46
English practice 46
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When it started1, tanks and poison gas made their first appearances2. World War I was the deadliest conflict3 the Western World had ever seen.
In the trenches near Ypres, Belgium, German4 soldiers dug tunnels beneath enemy line5. Underground6, in the darkness and cold, every soldier must have thought7 that he was about to die. In the middle, where they exchanged8 fire, both sides were furious9. The bombardments continued again10 as the generals11 ordered more attacks.
For example12, the devastation ended up13 leading directly to the existence of both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. These consequences are difficult to understand or comprehend14.
with the assassination of an Austrian nobleman in the summer of 1914, and by the end of that year all Europe was scarred by trenches full of soldiers and pits full of poison gas.
Old-fashioned commanders accustomed to valiant charges on horseback sent countless waves of young men to instant death in the face of another new invention, the machine gun. The Great War, or World War I as it would come to be called, 
But out of its horror came one of the most reassuring accounts of the essential goodness of the human spirit.
and English forces had fought to a standstill from their opposed trenches. Both sides had sent miners to dig tunnels toward the enemy 
each unit could hear the sounds of the 
digging getting closer, and knew that the tunnels would soon meet and a firefight would erupt in the darkness at point-blank range.
. Recognizing the melodies, the men in the other tunnel responded, singing along in their own language. The singing picked up above ground, where the armies lit candles visible to the enemy at the edges of their trenches. The fighting ceased, and slowly, some individuals even dared to cross No Man’s Land and meet enemy soldiers in the 
food and drink from their respective homelands.
and ordered the fighting to resume. When Christmas 1915 approached 
, they took steps to ensure that such things would not happen, ordering artillery bombardments on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day to make No Man’s Land uncrossable. The commanders in the trenches had to follow orders, on pain of court martial.
had never specified coordinates for the mandatory bombardments, entrenched officers in several locations came up with the idea of ordering wildly inaccurate shelling, allowing gift-giving between enemy combatants once again. 
in one location English and German soldiers even organized a soccer game in the middle of the battlefield.
Just about the only good thing that came out of it was the story of a few young men who couldn’t 
each other’s languages but still decided that they would rather play soccer than fight.