No doubt the saddest song of World War II is Kim Gannon, Walter Kent, and Buck Ram’s 1943 “I’ll Be Home for Christmas (If Only in My Dreams).” For years it was banned from Armed Forces Radio as defeatist.
A song I find even more moving, and certainly better, is Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane’s “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), the upbeat Vincente Minnelli movie about the life a comfortable St. Louis family, the Alonzo Smiths, in the year of the 1904 World's Fair. Meet Me in St. Louis offers itself as a pure piece of Americana, right down to the Currier and Ivesesque sampler pictures of the four seasons before each of the movie’s four segments. Nonetheless, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is, I suggest, a war song and told WWII audiences how to deal with the circumstances they faced.
Judy Garland sings the song to her sister, six-year-old Margaret O'Brien, who is hysterical because their father, Leon Ames, has told them that the Smith family is moving from St. Louis to New York City so he can get ahead in his company. Garland tries to comfort O’Brien, saying they will soon love New York and have just the sort of joyous Christmases they’ve had in St. Louis. For now, she sings, “Have yourself a merry little Christmas. . . . Some day all your problems will be far away.” Her closing verse:
One day soon we all may be together,
If the fates allow.
Until then we'll try to muddle through somehow.
So have yourself a merry little Christmas now.
Not too cheery that! We “may” be together, “if the fates allow.” Garland isn’t talking here of the Smith family’s changing cities, but of people being reunited, God willing, after a cataclysm like war. And how are the Smiths to get through the bad present time to the—God willing—better future? The expression Garland uses is a Britishism and an anachronistic, "muddle through," a phrase the English poet Louis MacNeice popularized in 1940 to describe the blundering, inexorable way the British were going to win the war.
"Muddle through," though not a phrase we Americans used much, was the way we thought of the British coping with war and the way we were encouraged to deal with the war ourselves: hanging on, hanging tough, pushing slowly ahead, having a merry little Christmas till it was over over there and Johnny came marching home again to sit with us under the apple tree.
