The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #133984   Message #3602237
Posted By: Jim Carroll
17-Feb-14 - 11:01 AM
Thread Name: BS: Christmas Truce (1914)
Subject: RE: BS: Christmas Truce (1914)
"Individual accounts are interesting, but have to be assessed in conjunction with the tens of thousands of accounts that are preserved."
None of which have been made fully public and there is no indications of what these diaries contain so there can be no possible conclusions like your %80 = men going willingly, knowing what they were fighting for and returning with the same convictions.
Writers like Sebastian Faulks not only researched the diaries for his highly regarded writings, but he interviewed many soldiers - he was considered authoritative enough to have been chosen to write the commentary for an official exhibition of war paintings.   
Historians like Liddell Hart were fighting in the field (he was an officer) and again, his writings on the war were fully accepted by fellow historians and by those who were there, or the families of the soldiers who fought, as fair and genuine.
What you have presented is a tiny handful of revisionist (in the correct historological sense) of historians who have questioned certain small details of the war (not one of them has ever challenged the overall analysis of that war - or if they have, you have yet to find it i your desperate scrambling around the net for "evidence"- no more that a half dozen from a pool of several hundred now involved in war research.
You have failed to come up with one historian who challenges the overal analysis of the war, you can only lie about the programmes that have sunk your arguments deeper than the Titanic (you have yet to mount one serious challenge to one point I raised, in fact I am convinced that you never even bothered to watch them, just like you have never read a book.
You can not raise on objection to Faulkes' remarkable, compassionate article other than to say that men like Harry Patch didn't know what they were talking about, just like you accused Tommy Kenny and other veterans of being "liars".   
If you have any evidence whatever of what is contained in those soldiers' diaries , please indicate where it has been made public - other than a single quote from your tabloid journalist.
Jim Carroll