The Forgotten Story of Christmas 1918

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/25/opinion/christmas-world-war-i-1918.html

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It’s a famous tale, and largely a true one: On Christmas 1914, five months into the First World War, groups of German and British troops along the Belgian and French border put down their weapons of war and held unofficial cease-fires. Men sang Christmas carols across the trenches on Christmas Eve, and on Christmas Day, some were brave enough to rise out of their trenches and walk into no man’s land to meet their enemies in person.

Photographs recall that day, as do concerned letters from higher-ups, instructing their men not to meet with the enemy. But the soldiers disobeyed orders; they shook hands, and shared cigarettes and other treats. (They may have even played soccer, though the evidence for such pop-up pitches is scant.) They also buried their dead together, taking care of the corpses trapped between the two lines that had been too dangerous to move during the fighting. The respite from bloodshed these soldiers chose was fleeting, and within days they had returned to their respective trenches and borders, and to fighting.

We recall that day in books, documentaries and films because, a century later, it still offers hope that even in our darkest hours, our common humanity overcomes our best efforts to destroy it. Hope prevails, goodness triumphs — even if just for a moment.

But there is another, less uplifting Christmas story from the Great War, one that undermines the sort of hopes that the 1914 tale elicits. This one took place four years later, just weeks after the Germans surrendered. By that point some 20 million soldiers and civilians on all sides had died from the fighting and its side effects, including rampant starvation in Germany brought on by the Allied blockade. The cruel but effective logic held that depriving civilians of food would make public support for the war collapse.

When the German delegates signed the Armistice papers on Nov. 11, 1918, they asked the Allies to lift the blockade, which was maintained primarily by Britain and overseen by a multilateral group called the Inter-Allied Blockade Council. Civilians in Germany were hungry, and the flu had killed many. The Allies agreed to “contemplate the provisioning of Germany,” but would not agree to lift the blockade at that time.

By late December, winter had settled in, Christmas was approaching — and still no foreign food had been allowed into Germany. The final peace had not yet been signed, and some Allied leaders feared that the Germans could start fighting again. And there were plenty of hungry people outside of Germany: Why should enemies be fed before allies and neutrals were taken care of? Especially when so much of their own suffering and hunger was a direct result of German aggression?

While animus was understandably strong against Germany, there were still those who wanted to help them. President Woodrow Wilson sent a letter to the other top Allied leaders on Dec. 15, asking them to relax the blockade, and to allow neutral countries to trade food to enemies.

At the same time, the future president Herbert Hoover, then in charge of American food aid to Europe, devised a scheme to export pork to Scandinavia. As there would be no legal restrictions on re-exporting, it could then be shipped to Germany.

On Christmas Eve, the Allied governments approved Wilson’s request through the blockade council, and on Christmas Day Hoover wrote to Ira Morris, the American ambassador to Sweden, with the news: “It is our first movement towards feeding Germany.”

It seemed, for a moment, that the spirit of 1914 had returned — two sides, still technically at war, overcome by their common humanity.

But in fact, the opposite happened. Within days, the European allies soured on the idea, and canceled the agreement before a single pound of pork could get through. The exact reasons are unknown, but they are not hard to imagine: The allies, especially France and Britain, were simply too embittered by the war to see Germans, even children and other civilians, as anything except the enemy. The same desire to punish Germany infused the Treaty of Versailles, several months later.

In the meantime, untold thousands of Germans died that winter, people who might have been saved had Wilson and Hoover prevailed. The blockade on foodstuffs was not lifted until July 12, 1919, after Germany had signed the Versailles treaty.

The lesson is a simple one. There are no better angels standing by to overcome us, at Christmas or any other time. We choose. There was nothing predetermined about the Christmas 1914 truce — or, for that matter, the 1918 blockade extension.

If the Christmas 1914 story reminds us about the importance of choosing to see past our momentary hatreds, the Christmas 1918 story reminds us how hard that can be, especially when it requires forgiveness — of all the virtues, one of the most beautiful to receive and the most difficult to offer, but perhaps the most important in this world of ours.

Mary Elisabeth Cox is a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, a junior research fellow at Oxford, a postdoctoral fellow at the British Academy and the author of “Hunger in War and Peace: Women and Children in Germany, 1914-1924.”

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