Description
Behind the lines is a nonfiction book for general readers that brings the past to life by telling personal stories behind the facts in an as-it’s-happening style. Covering the first five months of the start of World War I, from August 1914 through December 1914, the book moves back and forth between England, Holland, and Belgium. Using lively personal details, the book follows a handful of young American “delegates” in the Commission for Relief in Belgium (CRB), a twenty-two-year-old Belgian woman, two US diplomats, and two Belgians—a priest, and a businessman—who team up to fight the German occupation.
As the war raged around it, the CRB initiated, organized, and supervised the largest food and relief drive the world had ever known. Working in concert with its counterpart in Belgium, the Comité National, the CRB fed and clothed for four years nearly 10 million Belgians and northern French trapped behind German lines.
Because the United States had declared its neutrality at the start of the war, young idealistic Americans who volunteered to be CRB delegates were allowed to go into German-occupied Belgium. Their job was to guarantee that the imported food was not taken by the Germans while maintaining their strict neutrality in the face of the brutal German occupation.
It is a story that few have heard, and is one of America’s finest hours in humanitarian relief.
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