Opinion | The Forgotten Story of Christmas 1918

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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