Yes, this. "The enemy" was just the men previously living normal lives and working normal jobs the previous year, just like you were, before they were bundled

Yes, this. "The enemy" was just the men previously living normal lives and working normal jobs the previous year, just like you were, before they were bundled off to fight for their country. War is incredibly destructive to the frontline soldiers in so many ways even beyond killing them -- psychological ruin, destruction of land, homes, livelihoods, infrastructure.... It's something that soldiers can be very gung-ho about -- in the abstract. In non-desperate times, normal adults do not resolve conflicts by fighting to the death; when people do kill in anger, it's usually a matter of rash action, deeply regretted afterward. Imagine a regular working class man in Germany, told "there's a family that lives a few hundred kilometers that way -- shall we go kill them, and take over their house & land?" What do you think he'd say? But at a macro scale, it's somehow legitimized. And the soldiers are told whatever they need to be told to transform them from humans to game pieces -- we're under attack, or threatened, or disrespected, or we need to revenge some past wrong... Keep it abstract - here's your gun! On the other side, micro-scale again, imagine hearing that a man and a few friends have the idea that you've harmed them somehow, and are coming to aggressively confront you. Should you... hide in the woods with a gun and shoot them on sight? Or assume it's a misunderstanding, and try to find a way to communicate and resolve it peacefully? At human scale, it's obvious; violent death is awful, and completely final. We take it seriously. The Christmas Truce is about some of the poor "regular folk" removing their blinders for a few days, and the tragedy of it is that the juggernaut didn't even really stumble; the soldiers that we're "weakened" by fraternization with the enemy -- e.g., doing what humans naturally do to resolve conflict -- were quickly shuffled out of the way (or in later cases, court-martialed), and the war went on. And there is no Christmas Truce story in WWII.