Michael Ray's article for Britannica Online describes the event this way (Christmas Truce: World War I. 12/17/2022
By December 1914 the reality of trench warfare had settled in, and weeks of heavy rain had turned both the trenches and the No Man’s Land that separated them into a cold, muddy morass. For those on the Western Front, daily life was miserable, but it was a misery that was shared by enemies who were, in some places, separated by 50 yards (46 metres) or less. The Second Battle of Ypres and its clouds of asphyxiating gas were still months away, and the mindless slaughter of Passchendaele was years in the future. The men in the trenches had seen battle, but they were as yet untouched by the worst horrors that World War I would produce. ...None of them in the summer of 2014 expected the war to last for years and to become the bloodiest conflict in human history up until that time. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote about the First World War in 1977 (The Age of Uncertainty):
As December 25 approached, the constant soaking rain gave way to frost, and the battlefields of Flanders were blanketed with a light dusting of snow. German emperor William II contributed to the holiday atmosphere when he sent Tannenbäume (Christmas trees) to the front in an effort to bolster morale. On December 23 German soldiers began placing the trees outside their trenches. They sang hymns such as “Stille Nacht” (“Silent Night”), and voices from the Allied lines responded with Christmas carols of their own.
While there were relatively few British troops who spoke German, many Germans had worked in Britain before the war, and this experience facilitated communication between the two groups.
In the years before 1914, military technology had advanced greatly in the matter of small arms ordnance. This was a cheap and easy field for technical innovation; the product was one that the generals could, though with difficulty, understand. The most important result was the machine gun. ...The war brought down four major empires: the German, the Ottoman, the Russian, and the Austro-Hungarian. The peace treaties that followed - Versailles, Trianon, St. Germain, Neuilly, Sevres, and Lausanne - set the stage for the even greater slaughter that began in 1939. The soldiers in the Christmas Truce had far more sense than their leaders.
Supporting this unlimited capacity to kill was the limited capacity for thought. Adaptation of tactics was far beyond the capacity of the contemporary military mind. The hereditary generals and their staffs could think of nothing better than to send increasing numbers of men, erect, under heavy burden, at a slow pace, in broad daylight, against the machine guns after increasingly heavy artillery bombardment. This bombardment the machine guns, enough of them, invariably survived. It did, however, eliminate all element of surprise. So the men who were sent were mowed down, and the mowing, it must be stressed, is no figure of speech. The political leaders, for their part, could think of nothing better than to trust the generals. Thus the continuing, unimaginable slaughter. Those who went to fight in World War I could not expect to come back. If, as Churchill once said, they survived the first hurricane or the second, they would surely be swept away in the third or the fourth. [my emphasis]
Jacobin uncovered a "long-lost" contemporary short piece by American Socialist leader Eugene Debs on the incident (although they don't note other details about the source), in which he wrote, "The soldiers engaged in the European slaughter have become entirely too friendly with each other. They have in fact fraternized when they have had a chance instead of fratriciding."
And: "There is a world of meaning in this incident. The soldiers must not be allowed to even suspect that there is anything in common between them except a common hostility and a common duty to murder one another for the glory of their alleged Fatherland."
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