There were in fact many such unofficial truces between the trenches. Not quite to the degree of the British / German christmas truce depicted here, but plenty of them just the same.
And in each case, it was the drive of officers and governments to keep the war going that ended them, rather than the desires of the men doing the fighting.
Maybe that's one of the reasons World War One has sort of faded away from the collective memory - it was a "bad war" by any rubric, fought mostly over ego and the right to oppress third party colonies, fought in hellish conditions by men who were almost universally conscripts charging forward at threat of execution if they didn't.
It wasn't just the scale of the war that led people to believe it had 'ended wars' - it was that World War One managed to lay bare and obvious every single flaw, lie, and wrong of war, for the entire world to see, telegraphed globally even to those who were not fighting. even at the end, there was nothing but loss, and a treaty that would doom the world to an even greater outbreak of slaughter and violence; not just World War Two, but nearly every conflict between 1917 and today can be traced straight back to the outcomes of World War one.
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