a short peace in a terrible war

… Alfred Anderson, the last surviving old soldier known to have participated in Christmas Truce of 1914, remembered, well beyond the century of two world wars and too many lesser conflicts, that ‘the young men of opposing armies often have more in common with one another than they do with the old men who send them into battle …’; in the same manner George McGovern, the decorated World War II veteran who would become one of America’s greatest champions of peace, ‘old men (are always) thinking up wars for young men to die in …’