Although relief work conducted in Beirut and Lebanon during the famine of World War I has been well documented, most of the contemporary narrative literature dealing with the aid programs emphasized the humanitarian aspects of the operations and the wretchedness of those it supported, while taking the aid workers themselves for granted. From what little characterizations are provided, one would deduce that the aid work was the outward manifestation of the goodness of the hearts of these stalwart individuals or their sense of duty to their sworn professions as missionaries, doctors or community leaders. However, the more personal observations found in the diaries, memoirs and correspondence of the American and local Lebanese relief workers who served the populations during the famine tell a different story. From these sources, this paper argues that the widespread suffering and the often distasteful survival tactics that the relief workers encountered eventually altered the way that many of them viewed themselves, the famine and those struggling to survive within it. In order to shield themselves from the horrors of their work, many of these individuals developed hardened, detached or paternalistic attitudes towards the impoverished and starving recipients of their charity, whose very life and death at times turned on the decision of the relief workers. These coping strategies helped the relief workers to rationalize their roles and responsibilities during the crisis and to mitigate the depression and guilt that many of them suffered during the war. It is particularly instructive to examine the humanity of these humanitarians of the wartime period since their experiences provide rare and well documented personal evidence of the complexity of human reactions to the crisis and how these responses were psychologically and psychosocially manifested and represented. Such subjective interpretations of the famine period are among the most elusive and yet also among the most important elements of its lived experience, without which suffering in the famine is dehumanized, reduced to literary topos and sterile mathematics.