D 638.B4 K29f 1918




01110580R
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                             Copyright by Underwood d Underwood

                   HERBERT HOOVER
   Chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium from the
beginning to the present.  Now also United States Food Admin-
istrator. 
FIGHTING STARVATION
       IN BELGIUM

             BY
       VERNON $ELLOGG
            OF THE
      COMMISSION FOR RELIEF IN BELGIUM
ILLUSTRATED
 GARDEN CITY     NEW YORK
DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY
        1918 
D


  1<|I8
   Copyright, 1917, 1918, by

DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY

  All rights reserved, including that of
  translation into foreign languages,
    including the Scandinavian 
PUBLISHERS'  NOTE
  Mr. Vernon Kellogg's connection with the Com-
mission dates from May, 1915.  He was Assistant
Diredor in charge of Northern France from June
to September, 1915, residing at the Great Head-
quarters (in Charleville) of the German Armies;
Diredor for Belgium and Northern France from
September to November, 1915, and from July to
October, 1916, residing at Brussels, and Diredor-
at-Large from November, 1916, to present, being
variously in America, London, Rotterdam, and
Brussels during this period. In connection with
the Commission's diplomatic negotiations with in-
terested Governments he visited Berlin, Paris, The
Hague,  and Le  Havre (the seat of the  Belgian
Government).  He also visited Warsaw to investi-
gate the possibilities of the  Commission's under-
taking relief work in Poland.  He is professor in
Stanford University, California.
<2><g2St>2- 
 
                 CONTENTS
CHAPTER                                  PAGE
   I.  Belgium Before and After Invasion....    3
   EL  The Origin and Organisation of the Com-
         mission  for Relief in Belgium  ("C.
         R. B.")...........................   19
  HI.  The Commission and the Governments.   36
  IV.  Negotiations in London and Berlin....   44
   V.  The German and Allied Guarantees....   68
  VI.  Do the Germans Get the Food?.......   83
 VII.  Where the Money Came From........   95
 VTTT.  How the Food Came Over Seas to Bel-
         gium .............................  Ill
  IX.  The Americans and the Belgians.......  125
   X.  Canal Boats and Troubles............  138
  XI.  What the Belgians Eat...............  154
 XH.  The Saving of the Children...........  169
XTTT.  Feeding Northern  France Under the
         Eyes of the German Army..........  180
 XIV.  The Great Headquarters and the North
         France Rations....................  197
 XV.  Belgian Relief To-day................  208
       List of Members of the Commission for
         Relief in Belgium..................  214
                      vii 
 
ILLUSTRATIONS
Herbert Hoover......................Frontispiece
                                   Facing Page
Belgian Refugees Driven from Their Homes...   4
Refugees Receiving Aid.....................   4
Brand Whitlock............................   5
Hugh Gibson..............................   6
Emile Francqui............................   7
Dannie N. Heineman.......................  10
Millard K. Shaler..........................  11
Walter Hines Page.........................  22
James Gerard..............................  23
Henry Van Dyke...........................  26
Marques de Villalobar......................  27
Edgar Rickard.............................  34
John F. Lucey.............................  35
John B. White.............................  35
Millard Hunsiker...........................  38
The Right Hon. David Lloyd-George.........  39
Viscount Grey, K.G. of Falloden.............  54
Sir William Goode, K.B.E...................  55
Group of Children of a Communal School Ready
  to Receive the Visit of a Commission Repre-
  sentative ................................ 102
Teacher and  Boy Pupils of a Communal School
  of Brussels............................... 102
                      ix 
x              ILLUSTRATIONS
Testimonials  of Gratitude  Made by Belgian
  School Children.......................... 103
One of the State Relief Ships................ 118
Flour in Sacks Specially Stamped to Show that
  it is "Relief Flour"....................... 118
Commission Tugs and Barges Moving Through
  Ice...................................... 119
Quick Unloading of Relief Cargo of Wheat..... 119
Albert N. Connett.......................... 150
Carl A. Young............................. 150
Oscar T. Crosby............................ 151
Lindon W. Bates........................... 151
William L. Honnold........................ 166
Vernon Kellogg............................. 167
Prentiss N. Gray........................... 170
William B. Poland.......................... 170
Warren Gregory............................ 171
Walter L. Brown............................ 171
Weak Children Being Fed in a Children's Can-
  tine in Brussels........................... 178
A Soup-line in Brussels...................... 178
Celebration in a Large Food-distributing Centre
  in St. Gilles.............................. 179
The  Great Central Clothing Supply Station in
  Brussels................................. 179
Paper Money Issued by Belgian and  French
  Communes.............................. 190
Group of  American  and German OflBcers at
  Great Headquarters................t..... 191
The  House at Great Headquarters  at Charle-
  ville.................................... 191 
FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 
 
FIGHTING  STARVATION
           IN  BELGIUM

              CHAPTER ONE

  BELGIUM BEFORE AND AFTER INVASION
      BELGIUM is the most densely populated and
       highly industrialised country in the world.
       In proportion to its size it has more miles of
railroad and carries a larger tonnage by rail and canal
than any other country.  Its population is 1% mil-
lions and its area but 11,400 square miles (less than
one-fourth that of the State of Pennsylvania).  It
has,  therefore, an average population of 664 per
square mile,  which is nearly twice that of Great
Britain,  more than  twice that  of  Germany, and
more than three times that of France. It gains its
living chiefly by the export and sale of manufactured
products, depending on importation for 50 per cent.
of its food supply (78 per cent, of its cereals).  It
                     3 
4  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
has twice the annual exports per capita  of  Great
Britain, three times those  of Germany or France,
and four times those of the United States.  Its im-
ports  per capita are twice  those of Great Britain,
three  times those of Germany or France, and seven
times  those of the United States.
  Belgium is a country and  a people tied in the clos-
est possible way to the  countries and peoples out-
side of it; tied, that is, by the necessity of this union
for the regular finding of its daily bread.   It must
have  its  wheat coming  constantly in to make the
bread—its money  and  manufactured goods  going
constantly out to  pay for  the wheat.   That there
may be money and manufactured goods to go out,
it is also necessary that much of the raw materials
for their manufacture come  steadily in, for only part
of  these necessary raw materials are native.
  About one-sixth of Belgium's  population  sup-
ports  itself by agriculture, producing enough wheat
to  make bread for itself, and, besides, for a small
percentage that works in factories which use native
raw materials, and for another small percentage to
act as shopkeeper  and middleman to the  two first
named.   The total grain production is  about one- 
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                    BRAND WHITLOCK
   United States Minister in  Brussels.  One of the  Commission's
"protecting Ministers," and actively  connected  with  the relief  of
Belgium from the beginning.   Honorary Chairman of the Commis-
sion from the beginning. 
   FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  5
fourth of that necessary for the consumption of the
whole population.  Only to that extent is Belgium
self-supporting.  Therefore, if anything unexpected
should at any time happen to shut Belgium off from
the rest of the world, even for  a short  time, she
would suffer, and, if for a long time, she would die—
or most of her would.
  Well,  the unexpected something, to do just this
shutting off, did happen in August, September, and
October, 1914, and  almost immediately  Belgium
began to suffer and  a little later  she would have
begun to die if something else unexpected also'had
not happened to ameliorate this suffering and prevent
this death.  The two  things that happened were
the invasion  of Belgium by the Germans and the
relief of Belgium by the Americans.
  The invasion of Belgium began on August 4, 1914.
In ten weeks all the country was in the hands of the
Germans,  except that  forever-famous little  north-
western corner that for two years and a half has been
all of the Kingdom of Belgium under royal rule, with
its village capital of La Panne sheltering, in a simple,
homely way, a royal family of imperishable memory.
  The invasion resulted in an  immediate  severance 
6  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
to a surprisingly complete degree of Belgium's com-
mercial relations with all the world outside—except
that part of it called Germany.  And this single ex-
ception to the complete isolation of Belgium  was
one of abnormal character and  no benefit to the
people.  For  although food might have come  into
Belgium through this break in the enclosing ring of
steel that shut Belgium away from the rest of the
world, it did not; for Germany realised at once that
she had none to spare.  Also, Belgian  money  and
manufactured goods might have gone out, and much
did, but only in  a way very shameful to  Germany
and of no benefit but only disadvantage to Belgium;
it is a way that would be called burglary if it could
not be called war.  And not only did food not come
in  from Germany but—shame added to  shame!—
much already in Belgium  actually went  out;  and
not only did the product of factories go out without
corresponding coming in of recompense in money or
kind, but a great part of the raw materials in hand
and for manufacture—and  even  machines for the
manufacturing—went out also.   So that Belgium's
great factories immediately became still, her myriad
tall stacks lost their usual adornment of smoke flags, 
•*•****«<*
                       HUGH GIBSON
   Formerly Secretary of the U. S. Legation at Brussels and an ac-
tive supporter and member of the Commission; is now in the Depart-
ment of State at Washington. 
                     EMILE  FRANCQU1
   Chairman  of  the  Executive Committee of the Belgian Comite
National d'Alimentation et de Secours.  The active and responsible
head of the great  Belgian relief  organization from the  beginning
to the  present. 
   FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  7
and her skilled workmen moved idly about, dazed
and hardly understanding, in the great silent sheds
of Liege and the Hainaut.  The  something that
spelled disaster in red capital letters had come to
Belgium and to the Belgians.
  The ring of steel about Belgium was  not all Ger-
man metal. The German encircling probably would
have been of itself sufficient to effect the commercial
isolation of the country.   But one must be fair.
The English  blockade of the Belgian coast, which
became by the invasion essentially German coast,
contributed English alloy to the metallic ring.  The
Belgians, perhaps, might have arranged to bring in
foreign  foodstuffs over their coastal  border, but
what the Allied Governments could not be sure of
was that this food would be eaten by the Belgians.
They had reasons to assume that it would not.  To
blockade Germany  meant of necessity,  then, to
blockade Belgium  also.
  But the how and  why of Belgium's  isolation in-
terested the Belgians much less than did the reality
and  the consequences of it.  The Belgians are in-
telligent and  quick-minded, and they saw at once
what the  unmitigated consequences meant.  They 
8  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
began, therefore, to move for mitigation.  But they
were rather helpless.  They were subjects of German
military rule.  It is a kind of rule that, to be fully
felt and understood, must be experienced.   Perhaps
it is not very different from any other kind of mili-
tary rule.  I do not know, as I have had no experi-
ence of  other  kinds.  But I do know now,  after
twenty months of personal contact with  it, what the
German kind is.   It is very effective, and its effects
are obvious.   They are most repellant  to the mind
of a free-born  American.   They reduce individuals
to numbered  units in  a controlled mass; a mass
that moves as harsh voices backed by  loaded guns
tell it to move.
  The Belgians had become such a mass,  and so their
attempts to move for mitigation were  pathetically
trivial.  That  is,  they were trivial in  comparison
with what the sequence of events revealed  to be
necessary.  As a matter of fact, the Belgians of city,
town, and village, over the whole land, rushed to meet
the needs of the situation in a most  beautiful and
most capable way.   I want later to try to do justice
to the remarkable genius of  the Belgians for local
organisation, and to the beautiful generosity shown 
   FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  9
by the more fortunate and capable to the unfortunate
and  weak, as revealed by the local relief work in-
stituted everywhere throughout the country.  Official
effort and private initiative combined to do wonders,
as far as  wonders are possible  to an imprisoned
people.  But the needs were too great; the resources
too small.   Other  help was necessary.
   Fortunately, the American influence toward ame-
lioration could begin  to be exercised at once, and it
was.

   Brussels has  always had  its  American  colony,
and at the time of the invasion the members of this
colony turned at once to the American Minister, Mr.
Brand Whitlock, for help in their efforts to get home.
When the  Belgian court left Brussels  for Antwerp,
and later for Le Havre, part of the diplomatic corps
followed it and part  stayed  in Brussels to  occupy
for the rest of the war a most peculiar position.   Mr.
Whitlock  elected  to  stay.  It  was  a fortunate
election  for  the Belgians.   Also  it  meant many
things, most of them interesting,  for the Minister.
  When  the American expatriates in  Belgium ap-
plied  to  Minister Whitlock for help to become re- 
10  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
patriates, he was able to refer them to three Ameri-
can engineers and business men resident in Brussels:
Messrs. D. Heineman, William Hulse, and Millard
Shaler,  who  arranged  their  financial  difficulties
despite  closed banks,  disappearing currency,  and
general  financial paralysis.   Started thus  in  relief
work by the necessity of relieving Americans, they
readily  turned to the work of relieving Belgians:
the more readily because they were the right sort of
Americans.
  In the very  first days of August, even before the
German  forces had entered Brussels, Burgomaster
Max of that city had decided to have the city ac-
quire stocks of foodstuffs,  to  be  held  in  reserve
against the coming need.  Indeed, King Albert and
his Government had issued from the Belgian Great
Headquarters,   on August  14th, a  decree  fixing
maximum prices at which various staple foodstuffs—
such as flour, bread, potatoes, salt, sugar, and rice—
could be sold, and giving the  governors  in  their
provinces and  burgomasters in  their communes the
right to requisition, for the public benefit, the wheat
and flour, and the  potatoes, salt, sugar, and rice,
respectively. 
                  DANNIE N.  HEINEMAN
   Connected with Belgian relief from the beginning, and with the
Commission at its founding.  First Director in Brussels, October to
December, 1914. 
                   MILLARD K. SHALER
   Connected with Belgian relief and  the Commission from the be-
ginning.  Honorary  Secretary of the Commission in  London from
the beginning to present. 
  FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  11
  As soon as the Germans had entered Brussels the
outlook became critical.  Communication with Lou-
vain—where  are  situated  the  greatest  mills  of
Belgium, the mills on which Brussels relies for much
of its flour—was interrupted, so that it was at once
impossible to continue  to  supply  the  capital with
flour.   Prompt action was imperative.
  Messrs. Heineman and his associates saw that some-
thing must be done at once.   They began to do it.
In  constant  consultation with  Minister  Whitlock
these  energetic Americans suggested to  Monsieur
Emile  Francqui—the most active director  in  the
greatest private bank of Belgium, and  a man of
unusual brain and vigour—that an organisation be
created having for its mission the aid  of  the poor
of  Brussels,  the  men  and women hitherto self-
sustaining but now out  of work  and out of income.
  Conferences   attended  by  Burgomaster  Max,
Messrs. Heineman and Hulse, Messieurs  Francqui
and Em. Janssen (a business associate and friend of
Francqui), and other personages of Brussels, were
held, resulting in the  organisation, at the beginning
of September, of a Central Committee of Assistance
and Provisioning  (ComitS  Central de Secours et 
12  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
d'Alimentation), which was soon  afterward  placed
under the patronage of the ministers of Spain and the
United  States  (the  Marques  de  Villalobar and
Brand Whitlock).  M. Ernest Solvay, the  richest
man in Belgium and founder of the Institute Solvay,
was made president of the organisation.   The first
regular meeting of the Comite was held on September
1,  1914.   America was  represented  by Mr.  Hugh
Gibson, First Secretary of the American Legation at
Brussels, and Messrs. Heineman and Hulse.
  An  executive committee  under  the presidency of
M.  Francqui was  formed,  and also a  special sub-
committee, under the presidency of Mr. Heineman,
of eight members, of  whom three were Americans,
namely Messrs.  Heineman, Hulse, and  Macloskie
(this last also an engineer associated with Mr. Heine-
man).  It was the particular  function of the sub-
committee to have direct charge of obtaining and
distributing  the food supplies.  The field  of opera-
tions of the  ComitS Central, its executive committee,
and sub-committee was so far limited to the city of
Brussels and the communes  immediately adjacent
to it (Agglomeration Bruxelloise).
  The sub-committee immediately  got busy,  very 
  FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM 13
busy.  There was plenty to do.  Brussels carries
normally no  considerable stocks  of food—that is,
food staples—nor  does  any city for  that matter.
Belgium has a marvellous transport system; canals,
railroads, and little narrow-gauge, light-rail, neigh-
bourhood lines (vicinaux) that run along the country
roads binding farms with villages and villages with
towns.  Anything  anywhere in  Belgium can be
moved to anywhere else in the country in a few hours.
One can go from Brussels, roughly in  the  centre of
Belgium, to the boundary of the country in any direc-
tion in three or four hours.  So Brussels and  the
other Belgian cities depend  in  normal times upon
the steady  movement of supplies, rather than upon
their aggregation in  any one place, for a constant
supply of foodstuffs.  Also in normal times there is
a constant inflow  of food from the outside world.
We  must  remember always  that Belgium depends
on imported wheat for three-fourths of its bread.
  But these  were  not normal times and the most
serious thing that  the sub-committee had to face—
next, of course, to the absence of stocks in Brussels—
was the interruption of communications, internal as
well as external.  There might be something of a 
14  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
supply of flour in the great mills at Louvain, only
half an hour away from Brussels by rail, but there
were no trains making this half-hour run.  Yet it
was the business of the sub-committee to get hold
of some of this flour and bring it to Brussels.  Heine-
man was more  than  an engineer  in the technical
sense of the word.   He was an engineering manager
and a  managing man of  affairs.  His  committee
therefore arranged to have the large motor trucks of
the Brussels fire department put at their disposal.
With these the flour was brought to Tervueren and
there transshipped to the Brussels-Tervueren tram
line which  was under  Mr. Heineman's  control.
He simply loaded flour instead  of passengers into
his little cars and thus staved off breadless days for
Brussels as long  as Louvain could let him have flour.
  But   the  Louvain stocks  were  soon exhausted.
Then the sub-committee ransacked all of the province
of Brabant (in which Brussels is the chief city) and
even other neighbouring  provinces  in its efforts to
collect   food  for the capital.  But what with  the
requisitions  of the German army and the demands
of the   inhabitants of these  provinces, there were
already but small food stocks left,  and the com- 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  15
mittee soon came to the limits of these.  The time
had come, indeed, when supplies from outside the
country must  in  some  way  soon be brought in
through the isolating ring of steel—or Belgium must
begin to starve.
  Steps were taken to this end, not only by those
primarily  interested in the provisioning of Brussels,
but by the authorities of other Belgian cities in which
the food problem was quite as grave as in the capi-
tal.  Burgomaster Max  wrote, on  September 7th,
to Major General Liittwitz, the German military
governor  of Brussels, requesting permission  to ar-
range for  the import of foodstuffs through the Hol-
land-Belgium  border,  and the  city authorities of
Charleroi  also began negotiations with the German
authorities in  their province (Hainaut) to the same
end.  The Americans of the provisioning sub-com-
mittee decided, as neutrals, to take up  personally
with the German military authorities  the matter of
arranging imports.   The neutral standing of these
Americans gave them a peculiarly favourable position
to carry on negotiations with the German authorities,
and in them,  together with Minister Brand Whit-
lock and his active First Secretary, Mr. Hugh Gib- 
16  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
son, and  the  Spanish Minister,  the Marques  de
Villalobar, may be recognised the germ of the later
great neutral  organisation  known now to all the
world as the Commission for Relief in Belgium.
  A general permission for the importation of food-
stuffs into Belgium by way of the Dutch frontier was
finally   obtained  from   the  German  authorities,
together with their guarantee that all such imported
food would be entirely free from requisition by the
German army.  This first guarantee from the Ger-
mans was originally made directly to Heineman and
Hulse,  but was confirmed  later to  the protecting
Ministers.  Also,  a special permission was accorded
Mr. Shaler to go to Holland and, if necessary, to
England to try to arrange for the purchase and
transportation to Belgium of certain kinds and quan-
tities of foodstuffs.
  Mr. Shaler's passports were obtained on September
19th, but owing  to delay  forced by the  German
authorities at Liege  (it  was practically imprison-
ment) and the general difficulties of  movement, he
did not reach Rotterdam (travelling by motor) until
September 25th.   He immediately  began  negotia-
tions through the American Minister at The Hague, 
   FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 17
Dr. Henry Van Dyke, for the purchase of food in
Holland, but  although  given  permission  to make
these purchases in Holland if necessary, the Dutch
Government urged that they be made in England,
as Holland had  need of all the food within her
country.  The Dutch Government offered to facili-
tate the transport through their country to Belgium
of any  foodstuffs bought in England.  Mr. Shaler
thereupon went on to London.
  There, on September 29th, in company with  Mr.
Gibson, the Secretary of the American Legation in
Brussels, who  followed Mr. Shaler to London, he
saw Count Lalaing, the Belgian Minister to England,
and explained  to  him the situation in Brussels  and
his own special mission.   Messrs. Shaler  and Gib-
son also handed  to  the  Minister a  memorandum
pointing out that there  was needed a permit from
the British Government allowing the immediate ex-
portation of about 2,500 tons of wheat, rice, beans,
and peas to Belgium.  Mr. Shaler had brought with
him from Brussels money provided by the Belgian
ComitS Central sufficient to purchase about half  this
amount of foodstuffs.
  The Belgian Minister transmitted the request for 
18  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
a permit to  the British Government on  October
1st.  On October 6th he received a reply which he,
in turn, transmitted to the American  Ambassador
in London, Mr. Page.   This reply from the British
Government gave  permission to export foodstuffs
from England through Holland into Belgium, under
the German guarantees that had previously been
obtained by  Mr. Heineman's committee,  on  the
condition that the American Ambassador in  London,
or Americans representing him, would ship the food-
stuffs from England,  consigned to the American
Minister in Brussels; that each sack of grain should
be plainly marked accordingly,  and that the food-
stuffs should  be distributed under American con-
trol  solely  to the Belgian civil population.  This
oflScial authorisation contained no mention of specific
quantities and was interpreted by Mr. Shaler to be a
permission without limit as to amount. 
CHAPTER TWO
THE ORIGIN AND ORGANISATION OF THE COM-
   MISSION FOR RELIEF IN BELGIUM (C.R.B.)
         MR. SHALER sought to interest the more
          influential Americans in London in the
          Belgian  work  and,  through Mr. Edgar
Rickard, an American engineer, he was introduced
to Mr. Herbert Hoover, then the leading American
engineer in London, who agreed at once to cooperate
in every way with the American authorities and the
British Government.  Mr. Hoover was already con-
spicuous in relief work, as he had been the organiser
and head of a special organisation called the Ameri-
can Relief Committee,  created in London for the
purpose of assisting and repatriating the 150,000
American  citizens who  found themselves  stranded
in Europe at the outbreak of  the war.  His sym-
pathetic and most  successful work in looking after
the needs of these stranded Americans  recommended
him  as the  logical head for the new and  greater
philanthropic undertaking.
                       19 
20 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  On October  7th, Mr. Hoover introduced  Mr.
Shaler to Ambassador Page, who, after a discussion,
decided  to  cable the Government at  Washington,
outlining the  British  Government's authorisation
and  suggesting that, if the American Government
was in accord with the whole matter as far as it had
gone, it  should secure the approval of the German
Government.   After a lapse  of four or five days,
Ambassador Page received a  reply from Washing-
ton  in  which  it was stated that the  American
Government had taken the matter up with Berlin on
October 8th.
  After  an  exchange of telegrams between Brussels,
London, Washington, and Berlin, Ambassador Page
was informed on October 18th by  Mr. Gerard, then
American Ambassador in Berlin,  that the German
Government agreed to  the arrangement, and the
following day  confirmation  of this  was received
from Washington.
  The first formal step in organisation was taken by
Mr.  Hoover   in enlisting  the existing  American
Relief Committee  (whose  mission was  then com-
plete) in the new undertaking of Belgian relief, and
in amalgamating its principal membership with the 
  FIGHTING  STARVATION IN  BELGIUM  21
Americans in Brussels, already active along this line.
This was on October 10th.
  On October 13th Mr. Hoover, in the name of the
American Relief Committee,  telegraphed an appeal
to the American public to consolidate all Belgian
relief funds and to place them  in the hands of the
American Relief Committee  for disposal, outlining
the situation which had arisen in Belgium.
  On October  15th  Minister Whitlock  cabled  an
appeal to President Wilson to assist in the relief of
Belgium.
  Between October 10th and October 16th it was
determined by  Ambassador Page and Mr. Hoover
that it was desirable to set up a wholly new neutral
organisation.  Mr. Hoover enlisted the support of
Messrs. John B. White, Colonel Millard Hunsiker,
Edgar Rickard, and Captain J.  F. Lucey, all Ameri-
can  engineers then in  London, and these men, to-
gether  with  Messrs.  Shaler,  Hugh  Gibson, and
Clarence Graff, thereupon organised, and on October
22d formally launched, "The American Commission
for Relief  in Belgium," with  Mr. Hoover as  its
active head,  with  the title of chairman; Mr. Heine-
man, as vice-chairman in Brussels; Colonel Hunsiker, 
22  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
as director in London;  Captain Lucey, director in
Rotterdam; Mr. Shaler, secretary  in London; Mr.
Hulse, secretary in Brussels; Mr.  Graff, treasurer;
Mr. White in charge of purchase and transportation;
and Mr. Rickard in charge of public appeals.   Am-
bassador Page in London and  Ministers Van Dyke
and Whitlock in The Hague and  Brussels, respec-
tively, were the organisation's  honorary chairmen.
  The American Commission for Relief in Belgium
became immediately and  vigorously active in  the
acquirement of food supplies and the solicitation of
public charity.  It entered also into organising rela-
tions  with  representatives  from  various Belgian
towns who arrived in London seeking food for differ-
ent parts  of Belgium.  Of these Belgian groups by
far  the most important was one  that arrived on
October 18th composed  of M.  Emile Francqui and
Baron  Lambert,  accompanied  by  Mr. Gibson.
These  gentlemen represented  the  Comite Central
of Brussels.  Their visit was  the  special outcome
of events  that  had been taking place  in Brussels.
Things had been moving there as well as in London.
  It had already become obvious that the situation
in Belgium was no longer one local to Brussels or to a 
	^^^	
Hi I		
*' ~ -1- -"dfsC	■ \^ R	
^9 MM		
	|L V fa-.	•' '**
	1^-dH	
                                        Copyright by Paul Thompson
                   WALTER HINES PAGE
   U. S. Ambassador in London, connected with  Belgian relief and
the Commission from the beginning.  Active in  all diplomatic ne-
gotiations  between  the  Commission  and  the British  Government.
Honorary  Chairman of  the Commission from the beginning. 
Copyright by Underwood (J Underwood
                    JAMES GERARD
   Formerly U. S. Ambassador in Berlin, and active in all diplo-
matic negotiations between America, the Commission and the
German Government.   Honorary Chairman of the Commission
from the beginning. 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  23
few of the large cities, but one that involved the entire
country and people.  All Belgium was crying for help,
and more was needed in the way of organisation than
a series of unconnected provincial, city, or village com-
mittees.  A national organisation was required, and
one that could have continuous powerful outside aid.
  On October 15th the Brussels Comite Central had
held a meeting to consider the establishment of  an
organisation of wider scope and  one which should
cooperate with the American organisation in Lon-
don.  At this meeting Messrs.  Francqui  and Lam-
bert were delegated to proceed to London to confer
with the Americans.
  The meeting  which  took  place in London  on
October 19th between Messrs. Hoover and Francqui
was certainly one of the most momentous in the whole
history  of  the Belgian relief work.   Both men  of
large business undertakings and world-wide  experi-
ence—they had, indeed, met  in China several years
before  under most interesting circumstances—they
were able quickly to formulate a basis of organisation
and even the details and methods of arranging the
large financial measures necessary to the operation
of the organisation. 
24  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  It was  determined that the Comite Central of
Brussels should reorganise  as  a  Belgian national
committee, with a sub-committee in  each  of  the
provinces, and that Americans should be despatched
at once to Belgium to act jointly with the National
Committee and the various provincial committees.
Soon after M. Francqui returned to Brussels, there-
fore, the Comite Central formally  made itself over
(October 29th), with some changes, into the  ComitS
National de Secours et a"Alimentation.
  At nearly the same time the American organisation
underwent a change of name.  It remained, indeed,
but four days under its original title.  At the urgent
suggestion of Minister Whitlock, Sefior Don  Merry
del Val (the Spanish Ambassador in  London),  and
Marques de  Villalobar (the Spanish  Minister  in
Brussels), both of whom had been consulted in  the
arrangements in Belgium  and  London, were added
to the list of honorary chairmen.  A little later, also,
there were added  the names  of  Mr.  Gerard,  the
American  Ambassador at Berlin;  Mr.  Sharp,  the
Ambassador at Paris; and Jongkeer de Weede,  the
Dutch Minister to the Belgian Government at Le
Havre; and the name of the Commission was modi- 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 25
fied on October 25th by dropping from it the word
"American."
  The new organisation thus became styled: "The
Commission  for  Relief  in  Belgium," which  has
been its official title ever since, although it has been
popularly known  under  various  names,  as  the
"Hispano-" or  "Spanish-American Commission";
the "Hoover Commission"; and, more commonly,
the "American  Commission"  or, as used  by the
Germans  in Belgium  and  North  France, "Das
Amerikanische Hilfs-ComitS."  The  Commission  is
usually called by its members, with characteristic
American brevity, the "C. R. B."; and this name,
pronounced "Tsay-er-bay," is perhaps the one most
widely used by Belgians, French, and Germans alike.
  The two organisations  thus formed  and named
began to exercise at once that close  cooperation
which has existed between them all through the work
of Belgian relief.   The details of their inter-relations,
a clear understanding of which is necessary to a com-
prehension of the whole relief work, will be  pointed
out subsequently; for the moment we return to the
efforts to get the first food supplies from  outside
into Belgium. 
 26  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  While in London, M. Francqui secured an appro-
 priation of  approximately $500,000 for immediate
 use from the already existing Belgian Relief Fund.
 Representations were also made to the Belgian and
 the British Governments of the necessity for Allied
 government assistance.  Through  the aid of the
 American press representatives in London the new
 American organisation was made widely known  to
 the American public, while through the British press
 it was given strong support throughout the British
 Empire, so that by October 22d money began to flow
 in from public charity.  In the meantime the British
 Government  decided to grant  it  an initial  sub-
 vention of $500,000.
  The American Commission had already begun  to
 arrange for  the purchase of 10,000 tons of cereals
 (wheat, rice, peas, and beans) and  by October 21st
 these  cereals, to the  value of $400,000, had been
 purchased, and four steamers, one English and three
 Dutch, had been chartered for the  transport of the
 foodstuffs to Rotterdam.  On the next day, October
 22d,  the British  Government  informed the Com-
mission that it would be permitted to buy grain only
 "in neutral ports  and export it in  neutral ships  to 
                           Copyright Harris & Ewing, Washington, D. C.

                    HENRY VAN DYKE
   Formerly U. S. Minister to Holland, active in diplomatic  nego-
tiations between the Commission and Holland.   Honorary Chairman
of the Commission from the beginning. 
                MARQUES DE VILLALOBAR
   Spanish Minister in Brussels.  One of the Commission's "protect-
ing Ministers" and continuously active in connection with the Com-
mission's relations to the German authorities.   Honorary Chairman
of the Commission from the beginning. 
  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM  27
neutral  ports."  No reference  was made  in  this
communication to  the permission already given to
export foodstuffs from  the United Kingdom.  The
position seemed a little serious, but, by pointing out
to the British Government the fact that the organisa-
tion had gone ahead in perfectly good faith on the
basis of the earlier permission to make purchases in
England, the American Ambassador succeeded in
getting permission to ship the 10,000 tons of cereals
already purchased.
  The first shipment of 2,500 tons left London on
October 30th.   On October 25th, Mr. Shaler  and
Captain Lucey had left London to open an office of
the Commission in Rotterdam.  They arranged for
the transport of the first shipment of cereals from
Rotterdam by canal via Antwerp to Brussels, and on
November 4th the first shipment of food from out-
side Belgium arrived in Brussels.   But it was  not
chiefly several hundred  tons of food that arrived in
Belgium in those sealed canal barges: it was Hope
and the promise of Belgium's safety from starvation
that came.
  This is a very sketchy account  of the beginnings
of the American  relief of  Belgium and the steps 
28  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
that led  up to the organisation of  the great Com-
mission.  It is altogether too sketchy to do justice
to the various persons who were associated with the
enterprise or to give proper relative weight  to the
various events connected  with the organisation of
the work, and it omits more incidents in connection
with this organising than it relates.  But it must
do for the  moment.  It is  the work itself that  we
want to get to.

  It has  not been simple, this  work;  nor easy.  It
has been much more complex,  and more difficult,
and  greater in extent than the  popular conception
of it imagines, and yet, paradoxically, it has been,
in a sense,  less, or at least less as regards one phase
of it, than generally supposed.  The Commission
has not, as  too widely believed in America, obtained
all of the $300,000,000 worth (amounting in quantity
to 3 million tons) of food and clothing it has sent
into Belgium and North France, by  charitable dona-
tion from  the United States,  nor  even  from the
United States plus the rest of the world.  Nor has
it delivered all this food directly to the 9}/£  million
unfortunate inhabitants of Belgium and North France 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 29
by the immediate hands of its American volunteer
members.   The total private charity of  the world
for  the relief of  Belgium and North France, put
into the hands of the Commission as money or direct
donations  of food and  clothing, has amounted to
but $30,000,000, of  which ten millions have  come
from the United States, and there  have never been
more than forty American  Commission workers at
one time in Belgium and Northern  France.
  But  it is also true that all of the many million
dollars' worth  of  money and donations in kind
have been obtained and devoted  to the relief of
Belgium and Northern France  at the instance and
through the efforts of the Commission; and that all
the supplies purchased with the money have been
bought by the Commission in the markets of the
world  in  competition with  the buyers  of all the
Allied  and neutral  Governments,  and transported
by the Commission in hundreds of ships chartered
by it across oceans  controlled by warships, through
the Channel strewn  with mines and infested  by
submarines, and finally distributed by canals and
railroads and vicinaux  and carts  all over 19,500
square miles of territory held in the  close grip of a 
30  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
hungry enemy  army.  And, lastly, it is true that
the final getting of this food into the actual mouths
of the 9% million imprisoned people of this territory,
by  all the  elaborate machinery devised to control
the adjustment to individual needs  and resources;
the avoidance  of  fraud; the minimisation  of  the
feeling of shame on the part of persons to whom
living on charity was never before,  or ever expected
to be, within their experience; the special care of the
children, the aged, and the ill—and all this with-
out the loss of  an appreciable fraction of the enor-
mous food supply handled, by shipwreck or capture
or seizure by the hungry  enemy  army, and  at  a
total outlay for overhead expenses of less than one
per cent,  of  the whole  moneys handled—all  this
has been partly the actual work, and partly work
done with the immediate collaboration and advice
or final control, of the Commission.
  There is, indeed, in the face of these  two sets of
statements of fact, a paradox that  needs explaining.
Fortunately,  it is an explanation neither difficult
to make nor hard to understand.

   As Belgium depends on  imports for half  her 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  31
food supply, including three-fourths  of  her  bread
grains, it is obvious that the "relief of Belgium"
meant much more than the relief of her poorest
inhabitants, the providing  by charity of food for
her indigent and  out-of-work  people.   It meant
as well the  making accessible of  a  sufficient food
supply,  especially  of breadstuff's, for  her  entire
population—rich and poor alike.   However  much
money Baron this or Banker that might have and
be willing to pay for  food, barons  and bankers and
everybody else would have to go hungry if there was
no food to buy.  Or, if there was some food but not
enough to go around, the barons and bankers would
get it and the rest of the people would starve.  There
was necessary, then, not only a benevolence (secours)
for the poor and workless, but a provisioning or
revictualling (ravitaillement) of the whole  country.
The relief of Belgium  would  have to  be, and  it
actually  has been  from the beginning, not  only the
collection and distribution of charity, but the obtain-
ing,  importing,  and  making  accessible  of such a
supply of  staple  foods,  above all breadstuffs,  as,
added to the limited native food  produced,  would
keep alive the whole population. 
32  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
  It is in this extraordinary necessity that lies the
explanation of the fact that although the Commis-
sion for  Relief in Belgium has sent into Belgium
and Northern France 300 million dollars' worth of
food and clothing, it has supplied only  30  million
dollars'  worth  from  money  or  material received
as donations  from the outside  world.  The  rest of
the great sum necessary for this complete ravitaille-
ment of the whole land has come from loans to the
Belgian  Government by England and France (since
June 1 of this year  by the  United States) and  by
the results of the business methods of the Commis-
sion in connection with exchange, etc.   Yet all of
the great sum has been arranged  for at the instiga-
tion and largely by the efforts of the Commission.
Thus is explained the first paradox.
  The  other  paradoxical statement—to  the effect
that there have never been more  than forty  Ameri-
can Commission  workers at  one time in Belgium
and Northern France, who obviously could not hand
out personally all the 3 million tons of food and cloth-
ing to the 93^ million individuals of the occupied
territories,  but that  nevertheless the  distribution
of the supplies has been a function of the Commis- 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 33
sion no less real than the obtaining of the supplies
to distribute—is also easily explained.
  The explanation lies in the nature of the organi-
sation for  the interior  distribution.  The basis of
this organisation is the existence in  each of the
nearly 3,000 communes of Belgium and  2,000 of
occupied France, of a  local committee headed by
the burgomaster or maire.  These committees con-
trol the communal warehouses and issue from them
the food on ration both  to those who can pay and to
those who have been given ration cards paid for
from  the benevolent fund.
   Over these communal committees  are imposed
regional committees—a region is a larger or smaller
group of  communes established for convenience—
who have charge of regional warehouses from which
the communal warehouses are supplied.  Over these
again are the provincial  and district committees,
one for each of the nine Belgian provinces—a special
one for Brussels and its immediate environs, Greater
Brussels—and  one  for  each of  the six districts
into  which the occupied French  territory is  arbi-
trarily  divided  for  ravitaillement  purposes.  These
committees have charge of the provincial and dis- 
 34 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 trict warehouses and mills which are the major cen-
 tres of distribution.  Finally, over these again are
 the Belgian National Committee  (Comite National
 Beige de Secours et a"Alimentation) and the chief
 French  Committee (ComitS a"Alimentation du Nord
 de la France).
  Associated with this series of communal, regional,
 provincial,  district,  and national  committees  are
 hundreds of special committees  supervising various
 special lines of benevolent  activity  and  more or
 less closely affiliated with the official series and con-
 trolled by it.
  The American  Commission is independent of all
these, but  has representatives on the national and
provincial  committees  and  many of  the special
committees, and hands  over to these under proper
control and continuous supervision the  foodstuffs
imported.  Thus  it is that the  forty thousand  Bel-
gians and  ten thousand French men and women
provide   that  host  of hands  necessary for  the
detailed distribution of  supplies.  Under other cir-
cumstances the foodstuffs and  clothing might  well
have been  simply turned  over  to  the Belgian and
 French relief organisation for it to do with them as 
                               Copyright Underwood y Underwood. N.Y.
                      EDGAR RICKARD
   Connected with the Commission from the beginning to the present.
Honorary Secretary  in  London, October, 1914, to October, 1916;
Assistant  Director in New York,  November, 1916,  to May, 1917;
Assistant Director in Washington,  May, 1917, to present.   Also now
on the staff of the U.  S. Food Administration. 
Copyright by Underwood y Underwood, N.Y.
              JOHN F.  LUCEY
  Connected with the Commission at the begin-
ning; Director in Rotterdam, October to Decem-
ber, 1914; Director in Brussels, December, 1914, to
February, 1015;  Director in New York, May to
•\u"usi  ic)i6.    Was  later connected with  the
l'n,ml Suto  l'o.xl  \Jiiniiisii.itic.ii.
Copyright by Underwood y Underwood, N. Y.
              JOHN  B.  WHITE
  Connected with the Commission  from the be-
ginning.   Director in London, October, 1914, to
September, 1915;  Director in New York, Decem-
ber,  1015,  to April,  1916.    Now  member  of
the War  I r:ule  Hoard as representative  of  the
U. S.  I-o-k! AJ.iiinisiration 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  35
it saw best.  But the circumstances were not other;
they were precisely such as rendered impossible this
easy escape by the American Commission from the
responsibility of seeing the food and clothing down
to the very mouths and backs of the people for whom
they were intended. 
CHAPTER THREE
 THE COMMISSION AND THE GOVERNMENTS
      THE  two chief guarantees  given  the Allied
        Governments by the Commission, by virtue
        of which the Commission had permission to
import the great quantities of supplies into the
occupied territories, were that none of the food and
clothing so imported should get to the Germans,
and that all of it  would be  equitably  distributed
to the people according to their  needs.  For the
maintenance of these two  conditions the Commis-
sion has always been held personally and immediately
responsible by the Allied Governments.  The Ameri-
cans in Belgium were neutral and  independent; the
Belgians were captives in German hands, unable to
give  such guarantees.
  The Commission had given the same guarantees
also, by implication, to all of the millions of individuals
in the United States, England, Canada, Australia,
New  Zealand, and elsewhere who were constantly
giving money and supplies for the relief  of Belgium.
                       36 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  37
  It was necessary,  therefore, that the Americans
in Belgium should have immediate oversight and all
the control necessary  of the detailed  distribution,
to be able to assure the Allied Governments and the
world at large of the  maintenance of the guarantees.
And through all  the two and a half years of the
activities of the  Americans in the occupied terri-
tories, this immediate oversight and control of, and
personal participation in, the work of final distribu-
tion has been maintained.  The hands of the forty
thousand  Belgian and ten thousand  French  com-
mittee men and women gave out the supplies under
the keen eyes of the  forty Americans.
  The detailed methods  of this distribution would
form a long story in themselves which must be post-
poned for the moment, in order that a clearer under-
standing may be gained now of the extraordinary
diplomatic conditions under which the Commission
has carried on its work.  The international relations
and diplomatic standing of the Commission  have
been sources of amazement, of irritation, of admira-
tion, of  congratulation, in a word, of constant atten-
tion, in the chancelleries  of Europe since the begin-
ning of the war.   That experienced diplomat, Baron 
38  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
von der Lancken—who, in his capacity as Chief of
the Political Department, acted as a sort of Secretary
for Foreign Affairs for the late Governor-General von
Bissing's German Government  of Belgium—said to
me once: "The Commission has accomplished a great
thing in actually feeding the Belgians, but  it has
accomplished a greater thing in achieving the  ex-
traordinary international position it enjoys."   That
was, of course, the point of view of the  diplomat.
The point of view of the Commission is that its inter-
national position is simply incidental, though neces-
sary, to its effectiveness in feeding the people.  It has
been an  international  bridge across which messen-
gers and messages  of mercy might pass between
camps that were otherwise wholly isolated by bit-
terness and distrust.
  What is  this international position?   How has it
come about?  Why is it necessary?
  It is, of  course, obvious that there  could  be no
relief of Belgium without an agreement between the
belligerent Powers; or, rather, an agreement between
each side and the relief organisation, or the neutral
mmisters acting as its protecting patrons, granting
certain privileges to the relief body.  As the Allied 
                   MILLARD  HUNSIKER
Connected with  the  Commission  at  the beginning; first Director in
            London, October, 1914, to March, 1915 
      THE RIGHT HON.  DAVID  LLOYD-GEORGE

First as Chancellor of the Exchequer and later as Prime Minister,
  an active and powerful  British supporter of the Commission 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 39
Governments controlled the oceans and maintained
a blockage of the Belgian (now essentially German)
coast, it was necessary to have laissez-passers for the
relief ships and cargoes on the water and permission
for the ships to land their cargoes in some port from
which they could readily be transported into Belgium
and  Northern  France.   As the Germans  also by
means of their submarines and occasional short-lived
raiders kept alive a certain danger to ocean traffic, a
similar guarantee of lack of molestation of the relief
ships was necessary from them.
  On the other hand,  no such privilege could be
granted by the Allied Governments if  it were not
made certain that the foodstuffs thus imported from
overseas and from  England and France themselves
would be rigorously restricted to the use of the civil
population in the  occupied territories.   The guar-
antee  of  non-requisition  of the imported supplies
had to be obtained from the German Government
and military  authorities.  More  than  that, as  it
would have been absurd for the Allied Governments
to allow foods regularly to be sent  into Belgium and
Northern France merely to replace similar native
foods as regularly taken out by the Germans, it was 
40  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
necessary to obtain guarantees that the drain on the
native resources of  the occupied territories  would
not proceed further, at least, than that permitted
support of the occupying army, regularly recognised
by international rules of  war.   It will be seen later
that the Relief Commission  was  able  to obtain
guarantees  much better than this.
  As  the  whole of the  Commission's imports for
Belgium and Northern France are landed at Rotter-
dam and taken in through Holland, it was necessary
to  get Dutch  governmental recognition  of the
work.  Much more was got.   Holland gave valuable
privileges  in various  ways,  and  has  consistently
rendered oflScial support  to the relief work from its
beginning.   It has  permitted its Minister to Bel-
gium  (at Le Havre), Jongkeer de Weede, to act as
one of the  Commission's honorary chairmen,  while
its  Charge  d'Affaires  (now  Minister  Resident) in
Brussels, Mynheer Vollenhoven, has  been of con-
stant  practical assistance.
  Spain, also, has given its official recognition to the
Commission by permitting its Ambassador in Lon-
don, Senor  Don Merry del Val y Zulueta, and its
Minister in  Brussels, the Marques de Villalobar, to 
  FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  41
act as honorary chairmen, and both of these gentle-
men have also  been concerned from the beginning
in the  Commission's diplomatic  negotiations.  The
Marques de  Villalobar has indeed played  a con-
tinuously active and important part in Commission
affairs.
  From the Belgian Government, too, in its pathetic
isolation on French  soil and in  the tiny corner of
Belgium left to it, had to be obtained official recogni-
tion, financial aid,  and the granting  of what  can
only be called a monopoly of relief work in its occu-
pied territory, in  order that the Commission might
have every advantage in the collection of relief funds
and might exercise that rigorous  control over native
foods necessary to the maintenance of its guarantees
to the Allied Governments.
  Finally, as the American ambassadors to Lon-
don, Berlin, and Paris, and the American ministers
in Brussels and The Hague were  honorary chair-
men of the Commission; as the members of its Ameri-
can  advisory  committee  [Messrs.  Hemphill (also
treasurer of the Commission), Bertron, Coffin, Cut-
ting, Gary, Honnold, Lucey, Stimson, Straus, Trum-
bull, Vanderlip  and White] were personally  invited 
42  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
by  President Wilson, at Mr.  Hoover's request, to
serve on this Committee; as Ambassadors Page and
Gerard and Mmisters Whitlock and Van Dyke have
busied themselves  continuously   with diplomatic
negotiations on account of the Commission; and as
President Wilson has taken a hand personally and
most effectively in several critical periods in  its
history, the American Government has been closely
associated officially with the Commission's activities.
  The Commission,  therefore, has had an official
recognition, since its inception, from all the Govern-
ments, both belligerent and neutral, interested in its
work.  This recognition has been much more than
merely formal  and  passive.  In  addition  to the
numerous and various guarantees given it by the
belligerent Governments, there has been an active
assistance rendered it financially in the way of large
subventions by Belgium, England, and France; free
use of harbours,  canals, railroads,  telegraphs,  and
telephones by Holland; and reduced freight rates and
remitted  canal tolls and customs duties in  the occu-
pied territories by Germany.  Extraordinary con-
cessions and aid in connection with the movement
of the Commission members and the carriage  and 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  43
reduced censorship  of the Commission's mails have
been made by the belligerents.  Its members have
crossed the channel in  convoyed English despatch
boats, passed through closed frontiers, scurried about
in swift motors over all the occupied territory in
which few other cars than German military ones ever
moved, visited villages at the front under shell fire,
lived  at  the very  Great  Headquarters  of all the
German armies of the West, been trusted on their
honour to do a thousand and one things and be in a
thousand  and  one  places  prohibited to  all  other
civilians, and have lived up to the trust.  They have
suffered from the mistakes  of uninformed or stupid
soldiers, and spent  nights in jail;  they have  taken
chances under bombing airmen,  and  been falsely
but  dangerously accused  as  spies;  but despite
obstacles and delays and danger they have carried
the little  triangular red-lettered  white  C.  R.  B.
flag to every town and hamlet in the imprisoned
land, and have gulped and passed on wet-eyed as
the people by the roads uncovered to the little flag,
with all  its  significance of material and spiritual
encouragement.  Under this flag  they have  been
protector and protected at once. 
CHAPTER FOUR
  NEGOTIATIONS IN LONDON AND^BERLIN
      THE outcome of the many and various negoti-
       ations of the Commission with the various
       Governments  has been determined by two
chief  considerations:  humanitarianism and inter-
national politics.  The Commission has had really
but one consideration to guide it, the needs of the
people of  Belgium  and Northern France, but the
Governments have had always to keep in mind the
relation which  the Commission's  activities might
have  to the international situation.   And it must
be confessed at once that these activities, whether
the Commission wished it  or not, and  however
technically correct its attitude of impartial neutrality
may have been, have exercised a real and ponderable
influence, not only on international politics, but even
directly on the actual military situation.
  The possible  differing points of  view and hence
governmental attitudes  which  can be assumed re-
garding the Commission's work came out clearly
                       44 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  45
in the early history of the Commission in a series
of interviews and exchanges  of  correspondence
between representatives of the British Government
and Mr. Hoover.
  On January 21, 1915, Mr. Hoover had a meeting
with  Mr. Lloyd  George, then  Chancellor  of the
Exchequer; Lord  Emmott, representing the Com-
mittee on Trading with the Enemy; Lord Eustace
Percy, representing the  Foreign OflBce; and the
Attorney General, Sir  John Simon.  The work of
the Commission had already, for two months and a
half,  been going  forward  actively under  certain
agreements provisionally made with the British Gov-
ernment  and  certain  specific  guarantees  officially
given by the Germans.  It had  been, however, all
this time an open question with the British Govern-
ment whether the relief work was not a real military
disadvantage for the Allies, and much pressure was
being brought on the responsible government heads
by the military  authorities to cut off, or at least
modify and curtail, the work of the Commission.
   The primary occasion of the meeting  was the
discussion of the financial arrangements of the Com-
mission, but the talk soon touched the fundamental 
46  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
matter of the continuance of relief work at all.  I
quote directly from Mr. Hoover's memorandum of
the discussion, made immediately after the meeting:
  "Mr. Lloyd George stated that he felt that, in-
direct as the matter was, it was certainly assisting
the enemy and that this assistance would take place
in several ways.   In the first instance, we were giv-
ing the Belgians more food resources with which to
stand requisitions in food by the Germans; we were
giving them more resources generally with which to
stand monetary levies and that, beyond all this, in
relieving  the Germans from the necessity of feeding
the civil population, we were directly prolonging the
war, which was bound to be largely one of economic
character, and that economic pressure was the prin-
cipal method by which  the Allies would ultimately
win.  He expressed the belief  that the  Germans
would, in the last resort,  provision the people of
Belgium, and that our action was akin to provision-
ing the civil population of a besieged city, and thus
prolonging the resistance of the  garrison.  He was,
for  these reasons, wholly opposed to our operations,
benevolent and humane as they were, and therefore
he could not see his way to grant our request. 
  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM  47
  "I pointed out, first, that as to the requisitioning
of food, the Germans had given an undertaking that
after the first of January no such requisitions would
be made, and I read out to him  the undertaking
which had been given to the American Minister in
Berlin, and  informed him  that we were  satisfied,
from the many agents  which we had in  Belgium,
that the Germans were carrying this out  with  the
utmost scrupulousness.  I furthermore informed him
that the Germans had impressed none of our actual
food.  Also  I stated that I did  not believe that the
feeding of the civil population increased the re-
sources which they had available for money levies.
We were introducing no new money into  Belgium,
but  were simply  giving circulation to that already
existing, and that there was no danger of the Ger-
mans taking the money which we collected for food-
stuffs, because that was, in effect,  in the possession
of the American Minister.
   "On the second point, as to whether the Germans
would ultimately  provision the civil population, I
told him that I  was satisfied that they would not
do so; that when we undertook this labour  we under-
took it  with the utmost reluctance, and our  first 
48  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
move was to satisfy ourselves that this population
would  starve unless America intervened  and con-
verted the hitherto-negative quality of neutrality
into one of positive neutrality; that, as proof that the
Germans would not provision the civil population,
I thought it was desirable that he  should understand
the German views on this question, and I recited to
him the confirmation by the German military of the
current statement made in Germany that there was
no  clause in the  Hague  Convention  obliging the
Germans to provision  the civil population  of Bel-
gium, but that, on the contrary, it incidentally pro-
vided that the civil population should support the
military.
  "I told him further, that the Germans contended
that the Belgains were a people of great resources;
that these resources would become valuable  at once
on a partial recovery of industry; that this recovery
of industry could take place the instant that they
were given a port through which they could trade
with the neutral world; that in taking the  port of
Antwerp and opening it to  neutral ships they had
given the Belgian civil population a means of pro-
visioning themselves, but  that this  outlet had been 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 49
blocked by the British Navy, and the British must
therefore bear the responsibility.  Further, that the
Belgian population, by continuing its  hostility and
its  passive resistance, was  assisting  the  Allies by
compelling the Germans to operate the public ser-
vices, rendering trade useless to them, and requiring
from them a considerable army of occupation, and
that, as the Allies do all this, they must take the
responsibility  of  these people starving.  Further-
more, the Germans contend that, while they have
ample food supplies to carry their own people through
the struggle, they have not sufficient to carry on their
backs the 10,000,000 people in Belgium and France
inside their lines,  and that, as they are struggling for
national existence, they must feed their own people
and attend to their military exigencies first.
  "I pointed out  that I did not offer these arguments
as my own, but  to illustrate the fixity of mind by
which  the German people justified their action  in
refusing to feed the Belgians, and asked  him if he
could conceive for one moment that, with this mental
attitude of conviction on their part  that they are
right and the Allies wrong, they  would be likely to
feed the Belgians. I pointed out that starvation 
 50 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 had actually  occurred in Belgium before we  had
 begun work; that some, although perhaps little, riot
 had occurred,  but sufficient to indicate the fixity of
 the Germans in their intentions.  I further pointed
 out the position of the French people in the Meuse
 Valley, who had not had our assistance, and were
 already dying  of starvation although under German
 occupation, and I expressed the conviction that the
 Germans would never feed the civil population.
   "Mr. Lloyd George denounced the whole of this as
 a  monstrous attitude, to which I replied that, be
 that as it might, one matter stood out in my mind,
 and  that  was  that  the English  people had under-
 taken this war for the avowed purpose of protecting
 the existence  of small nations,  of vindicating  the
 principle of  guaranteed  neutrality by which small
 nations might exist, for the avowed purpose of guar-
 anteeing to the world the continuance of democracy
 as against autocracy in  government, and that it
 would be an empty victory if one of the most demo-
cratic of the world's races should be extinguished in
the process, and ultimate victory should be marked
by an empty husk.   I said that the English people
were great enough to disregard the doubtful value 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 51
of military advantages in favour of assurances that
these people should survive, and I felt the obliga-
tion went even further than mere acquiescence in
our work, and extended to an opportunity to the
English to  add to their laurels by showing magna-
nimity toward these  people, a magnanimity which
would outlast all the bitterness of this war.
  "Mr. Lloyd George then stated to his  colleagues
abruptly:  'I am convinced.  You have my permis-
sion.  I would be obliged if you gentlemen would
settle the details of the machinery necessary to carry
it out.'  Then, turning to me,  he said that I would
forgive him for running away, but that he felt the
world would yet be indebted to the American people
for  the most magnanimous action which  neutrality
had yet given rise to."
  Ever  since that momentous interview, with its
dramatic and gratifying finish, the British Govern-
ment—and with  it the  French Government—has
stood steadfastly  by the Commission and its work.
This interest ultimately led to the granting of a sub-
vention of $5,000,000 a month from the British and
French  Governments,  passed  to the Commission
through the Belgian Government. 
52  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  Also, on the whole, the people of England and the
whole British  Empire, the people,  that is,  as dis-
tinguished from the official Government, have sup-
ported the Commission.   For this  British support
Mr. Lloyd George and Sir Edward (now Lord) Grey,
Sir  Robert Cecil, and Lord Eustace Percy, of the
Foreign OflBce, are largely responsible, together with
a great benevolent organisation called the "National
Committee for Relief in Belgium," organised in April,
1915, with the Lord Mayor of London as  its chair-
man, and two active managers in the persons of Mr.
A.  Shirley Benn, M.P., as treasurer, and Mr. W.
A.  M. Goode,  as secretary.  This  committee has
conducted an  impressive campaign of propaganda
and solicitation of funds, collecting $12,500,000 with
which to purchase  foodstuffs and clothing for the
Belgian destitute.
  But there has always been, and there exists to-day
in England, a certain body of antagonists to the relief
work.  They represent the extreme militaristic view.
The reason for the antagonism comes entirely from
a convinced  belief on the part of those holding this
attitude that the relief works to the  military advan-
tage of the Germans by relieving them of the neces- 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 53
sity  of feeding the  imprisoned people,  and enables
them, by hook or crook, to get some of the imported
food, and to take openly a considerable part of the
native Belgian crops.  And this despite the fact that
the Commission has asserted and proved over and
over again that the Germans get but an almost in-
appreciable fraction of the imported food, and this
not  through  seizure but mostly  through  Belgian
fraudeurs,  and have given guarantees—not wholly
Hved up to, but maintained in such measure as can
be  accepted   as  tolerable—to  refrain  from  the
removal from  Belgium, or the wholesale use by the
army, of all native food products.
  But if there is a party in England that has opposed
the relief  work, so  also is there one in  Germany.
And it has been, as in England, the Foreign OflBce,
together with the authorities of the German General
Government in Belgium, that has saved the  work
from extinction. Also, as in England, the arguments
of this party—similarly, the extreme militaristic one
—opposed  to the relief have been that it worked a
military disadvantage to Germany.  Their demand
has been that rather than let a single German  man,
woman, or  child be hungry, absolutely all the native 
 54  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 foodstuffs of the occupied territories should be seized
 for German  consumption, and  the Belgians and
 French allowed to starve—if the Allied Governments
 would not break their blockade.  Germany was to
 advantage both by the use of the Belgian food and
 by  using  the imprisoned  people as hostages to  be
 starved to force the opening of the Allied blockade
 of Germany.  Reventlow and his  jingo supporters
 have  constantly cried out: "Abolish Belgian relief,
 and kick the Americans out."
  The Commission  has  had  to fight constantly
 against being kicked out.  One of the incidents of
 this struggle  for existence may be related by way
 of illustration.  In the summer of 1916 the Commis-
 sion began a hard fight for two imperatively needed
 concessions from  the German authorities.  In the
 first place, the  ever-increasing difficulties of getting
 ships for the growing needs, in food quantities, of the
 people imprisoned in a  land becoming more and
more  exhausted of native foods, made it necessary
for  the Commission to effect an arrangement  with
the German  military command  whereby a larger
proportion of  the 1916  native crop  of Northern
France would be turned over to the civil population 
                                          Photo by Paul Thompson
          VISCOUNT GREY,  K. G. OF FALLODEN
Formerly British Secretary of State  for Foreign Affairs.  An active
                 supporter of the Commission 
               SIR WILLIAM  GOODE,  K.  B. E.
   Organizer and Managing Secretary of the British National Com-
mittee for Belgian Relief,  which collected  more than twelve million
dollars for the benevolent funds of the Commission; now connected
with the English Ministry of Food. 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  55
than had been the case with the 1915 crop.  In the
second place, the dearth of protein- and fat-contain-
ing food was beginning to affect seriously the vitality
of the population of Northern France, the 600,000
children of the region especially showing the effects
of this lack of meat, milk, and eggs, the native sup-
plies of these foods being mostly seized by the Ger-
man army, or already exhausted.
  Through the  English Government,  we had dis-
covered that Holland would let us purchase consider-
able quantities  of  fresh  meat,  eggs,  butter, and
cheese, if  we could arrange to get permission from
the Germans for their importation by us from Holland
through Belgium into France.  Germany—which has
always looked on Holland as  a storehouse of food
which by  some  turn of the screw could  be forced,
despite England's preventive measures, into her own
larders—could prevent this export by the simple
expedient  of  closing the  Dutch-Belgian frontier  to
these foods.  As a  matter of  fact the Commission
has always had  to have the agreement of the Ger-
mans for  the import  across this  frontier of  every
ounce of food or other supplies taken into the occu-
pied territories. 
56 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  The  negotiations  for these two concessions  had
already been pursuing a slow and most unsatisfac-
tory  course, the Berlin Government and General
Staff blocking us  at every step, undoubtedly because
of the  pressure from  the  extreme militaristic  and
anti-relief party.  This party was making strong use
of the  discomfort  of  the  German people brought
about by their food shortage, and was encouraging
the people to demand that no food, that  might by
any  circumstance be  possibly  available  to  them,
should  be allowed to go to the people of Belgium
and Northern France.  However, the Commission's
demands for the  two concessions had some measure
of support from certain officers of the Great Head-
quarters at Charleville and from General  von Biss-
ing's Government  at  Brussels.   It  was  arranged,
therefore, that Mr. Hoover (who had been negotiat-
ing in  London  with  the  Allied  Governments in
connection  with  their demand  that the  Germans
should  give up the whole of the native crop of North-
ern France to the civil population) and I  (who  had
been negotiating with the General Staff at the Great
Headquarters and Governor von Bissing's Govern-
ment at Brussels) should go to  Berlin and take up 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  57
the matters directly with the German Government
and highest military command.
  We first, however, met at The Hague to discuss
matters with the Dutch Government and with the
British Minister to Holland, Sir Alan Johnstone.
Here we became acquainted with the details of the
agreement  between England and Holland affecting
Dutch food exports, and with the condition of the
corresponding agreement  between  Germany and
Holland.   The important thing in these agreements
affecting our attempt to get Dutch foods into France
was a clause (introduced as a result of Mr. Hoover's
negotiations in London) recognising the principle
that, if the Commission could arrange to get permis-
sion from the Germans for these imports, the quanti-
ties so imported should be in diminution of England's
share of the exports.  It was a generous concession,
and gave us a strong position.  Information of the
existence of this clause had already  been given the
Germans at Great Headquarters and Brussels, but
they had demanded ocular proof of  the agreement.
Sir  Alan  therefore gave us a certified copy  of the
clause to use in  our further negotiations with the
Germans.   The Dutch  Minister  of Foreign  Affairs, 
 58 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 Mynheer Loudon,  a man of  great ability, broad-
 mindedness, and  generous sympathies,  who  has
 always given a cordial support to the Commission's
 work, informed us that he was  himself making repre-
 sentations  to  Berlin  in favour  of  meeting  our
 requests.
   On August 3rd  Mr. Hoover and  I started for
 Berlin.  On the  same train we found Baron  von
 der Lancken, chief  of the  political  department of
 General von Bissing's Government, and Dr. Rieth,
 of his staff, both of whom had shown themselves
 friendly to the Dutch imports matter.  From them
 we learned  that there was to be a great conference
 in Berlin, and that three important Great Head-
 quarters* officers, two  of whom  we  knew to  be
 friendly to our requests in the matter of the French
 native crop, were also on their way to Berlin.  We
 felt, therefore, less alone in our struggle to  help save
 the lives of 600,000 children  of Northern France.
 These men would aid us!
   Making the  trip to the German capital without
 uncomfortable incident, thanks to our special mili-
ftary  passes, we  arrived  at nine o'clock  the  next
 morning, and, by chance, met  at once, in the lobby 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  59
of the Hotel Esplanade, one of the Great Head-
quarters' officers, Hauptmann Graf W----, through
whom all Commission affairs were always first taken
up  when we had dealings with the General Staff.
He greeted us with some haste and said that he had
to rush off at once to  an important conference  on
our affairs.  He was wholly uncommunicative about
the scope and character of the meeting, but informed
us that General X----, Acting Quartermaster Gen-
eral of the German army, wished us to take tea with
him at the hotel at four o'clock.  We understood
that this was to be an important tea-drinking!
  In our need for support we went to see Ambassa-
dor Gerard.  He had never failed in his energetic
support whenever the  Commission needed help at
the Berlin Court.  He  gave us advice which, at the
moment, was disheartening, but turned out to be
wise counsel.  It was that we should steer clear of
invoking  oflScial  governmental assistance  in this
affair, but should make the fight simply on the basis
of  the  Commission's standing  and influence, and
keep international politics out of it as far as possible.
The Germans knew that all we were struggling  for
was the good of the imprisoned people of Belgium 
60  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
and France, and that  we were  playing the game
honestly.  He  believed that  the  Commission could
fight this fight best alone.  His words were at least
an encouraging assurance to us of the Commission's
extraordinary international position.
  Promptly at four we found the three officers from
the Great Headquarters, the third being Major von
K----, a man of great capacity, under whose im-
mediate supervision rested all affairs connected with
the feeding of  the civil population in the occupied
territory.  He   had   always  handled  Commission
matters with intelligence and prompt decision, and
usually with sympathetic understanding.  We had
known Count  W---- and Major von K---- ever
since the beginning of the work, but it was our first
meeting with General X----, whose office was one
of high importance,  only second  in importance,  in-
deed,  in the German army, to the Chief of Staff of
the Field Armies, a position at  that time filled by
General von  Falkenhayn.   General X----  is  an
enormous, burly man and makes an impression of
brutal strength.  He drank whiskey instead of tea.
  As we sat down, Major von K----,  with charac-
teristic promptness  and in a few  words, gave us 
  FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  61
news of the great conference.  It was startling news
and most of it bad.  The conference was one of im-
portant representatives of  the General Staff, the
General Government of Belgium, the Foreign OflBce,
the Department  of the Interior,  and of all  other
departments immediately interested in the handling
of the civil populations in all occupied territories.  It
had apparently already definitely decided  that  we
could import no Dutch foodstuffs, and that no further
allocation of the French native crop could be made to
the civil population.   But these were only incidents
in a larger question taken up by it, which was that
of the Commission's  being  allowed to continue  its
work at all!  Just as  the famous  meeting with Mr.
Lloyd  George on January 21, 1915—arranged pri-
marily for a discussion of certain phases of the Com-
mission's activities—revealed  the strength of the
feeling in England against the relief work as a whole,
so this Berlin visit of ours, to take up simply two
special points in our work, revealed itself as coinci-
dent with a crisis in  the Commission's history, de-
termined  by  the crystallisation  of  the  German
opposition to the work.
  Major von K----said that things looked very bad 
 62 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 for us.  Extremely violent speeches had been made
 against the work, and only two or  three men had
 ventured to speak in favour of it.  These were, how-
 ever, men  of  influence, and  represented important
 parts of the Government, notably the Foreign OflBce
 and Interior.  But the Reventlow jingoes were in the
 saddle.  A special cause of bitterness was a public
 despatch from the British Foreign Minister which had
 just been published in all the German papers, demand-
 ing that the German authorities turn over to the civil
 populations in the French, Polish, and Serbian occu-
 pied territories (as had already been done in Belgium)
 the entirety of the native products of these territories.
 The bellicose speakers in the conference demanded
 that the German  Government answer this despatch
 at once with a curt refusal  and a statement that, as
 the British  blockade  was responsible for the food
 deprivations of the Belgians  and French, the ravi-
 iaillement should be abolished, the people allowed to
 starve, and the Allied governments be held respon-
 sible for their starvation.  These men declared that
 Germany could not for one moment accept the posi-
tion that England should dictate its attitude and
action toward  the occupied territories, and that the 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 63
only position Germany could take henceforth was to
throw the population on the shoulders of England,
which could open its blockade or let the Belgians
and French starve, just as it was trying to  let the
Germans starve.
  The feeling all over Germany was high, and the
conference seemed likely  to end  the  Commission's
work then and there. Just one ray of light came to
us in this dark hour.  During our  depressing conver-
sation with the Headquarters officers,  a remark was
made by one of them to the effect that if the request
for a larger allocation of the native products to the
civil population had come simply  from the Commis-
sion, something might have been done, but  with
England demanding it—"No, a thousand times No."
  This was our cue.  We repudiated England! What
England demanded was its affair.   Let the Germans
fight it  out with England.  What the Commission
pleaded for was its own affair—the affair of saving
the fives of human beings; of keeping body and soul
together for ten million people, known to the world
as Belgians and French, but known to the Commis-
sion as  human beings,  men, women,  and children,
especially children, crying for food! 
 64 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
   As we were not allowed to attend the conference
 we had to work outside.  We argued with the Great
 Headquarters men. We urged on the representatives
 of  General von Bissing's Belgian Government the
 consequence  to the population  for whose lives this
 Government  was responsible, and on the represen-
 tatives of the Foreign OflBce and Department of the
 Interior the consequences of the position of Germany
 before the world if German action should cause the ter-
 rible tragedy  which the abolishment of the ravitaille'
 ment would certainly entail.  We argued here and
 pleaded there.  And it all had to be done before that
 fateful conference of the day's length should dissolve.
  The long story must be cut short. We succeeded!
 The Commission was  allowed to continue its work.
 And even more.  Just three  weeks later we signed
 an agreement with the General  Staff by which twice
 the proportion of the coming crops of Northern
 France was reserved for the people as had been re-
 served of the previous crop.   And still later—unfor-
tunately much later, but still better than not at all
—a little fresh meat  and butter and  cheese from
Holland began to be eaten by the protein- and fat-
hungry people of Northern France. 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM _65
  The conference broke up with the Reventlow gang
sullen and angry, but accepting, as all Germans do
accept, the will of the higher command. Mr. Hoover
returned to England to continue negotiations with
London. I went back to Brussels and  the  Great
Headquarters to hasten the formulation  and  signa-
ture of the agreements.  The crisis was past.

  The  story of one  of  the numerous Commission
crises has been sketched.  But one incident of that
Berlin visit—wholly irrelevant to the matter  of our
errand—may yet be told.
  As we sat, after long and strenuous debating, tired
and silent for a moment, over our tea and saccharine
—the burly General over his nth whiskey and seltzer—
the hush was broken by a hoarse whispering between
the General and Count W----.  The Count seemed
to  remonstrate, the  General to  insist, and then
W----, addressing us, said that the General wished
to tell us the story of Nurse Cavell!
  We were startled and uneasy.  That was the kind
of thing Commission men and Germans did not talk
about.  If we were to carry on effectively  and neu-
trally we tried to  forget—for the  moment—the 
66  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
Nurse Cavell and the many other less-notorious but
hardly-less-sickening similar incidents of the  Ger-
man pacification of Belgium.
  But General X----insisted.   We knew his  rela-
tions to the murder of Miss Cavell.  He was the man
directly  responsible for it.   He was Military Gov-
ernor of Brussels at the time.  He, not von Bissing,
must bear forever the chief  burden of that horror—
and stupidity.  And it was this burden that made
him want to tell the story.   Also, he had just  seen
at a Berlin hospital his only son struggling for life,
which, if he won, was to be the life of a man  with
both eyes shot out, and a face  hardly recognisable.
And the  sight of his son—and the memory of  Miss
Cavell—had made him remark that this was a hor-
rible war!
  And  so he  wanted  to tell  the  story of "The
Cavell"  (it was always  Die Cavell in his mouth).
He said the Belgians called him a murderer, another
Duke of Alva, but he wasn't. He was just a soldier
doing his duty.  Die Cavell was a  thing that inter-
fered with the German control of Belgium.   It had
to be got rid of.  "So I had  her shot. Yes, I did it."
Did we think the world called him a murderer, too? 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 67
His son had no eyes.  It was hard.  It was a horri-
ble war.   "Die Cavell,  die Cavell, ah, die Cavell!"
.  . . It was not a pretty story.  But it is a story
that he will tell often before he dies.  That is part
of his punishment. 
CHAPTER  FIVE
  THE GERMAN AND ALLIED GUARANTEES
      THE actual official agreements and guarantees
      which made possible the work of the Commis-
      sion in Belgium and Northern France are many
and various.  They make hundreds of pages in the
dossiers of the Commission, and cover subjects all
the way from an agreement by the Germans to our
control of the whole native crops of bread-grains in
Belgium  to  a permission by the  British  for the
importation  of  a few cakes of  soap for our own
men.  Soap  is  a more significant article  in  war
time  in  a  blockaded  country   than  one  may
realise at first. The word "glycerine" gives the clue
to this significance.
  It is, of course, quite impossible to refer  here to
all or even to many of these guarantees and agree-
ments.  But a few are  of such outstanding impor-
tance for any clear conception of  the work of the
Commission  that they must be told of with exact-
ness and in some  little detail.   For example, the
                       63 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  69
various agreements concerning the control of native
food crops (as well as of the imported supplies) en-
tered into  by the  German General Government;
General von Bissing's half civil, half military, gov-
ernment of most of Belgium;  and the German Gen-
eral  Staff,  which governs directly all  of occupied
France and part of Belgium, gave the  Commission
an unusual responsibility, and forced it to undertake,
with much Belgian help, a very difficult  and arduous
kind of labour commonly  referred  to by  us  as
"inspection and control."   This  work  led  us into
more difficulties  with the  German authorities, and
even with  certain groups of Belgians,  than all our
other work together.
  The first agreement given by the  German authori-
ties in immediate control of Belgium granted per-
mission for the import of food by way of the Dutch
frontier and guaranteed that all such imported food-
stuffs would be entirely free from requisition by the
German army.  This guarantee was given early in
September, 1914, by Baron von  der  Goltz, then
Governor-General of Belgium, to Messrs. Heineman
and Hulse, neutral members of the original Brussels
Comite Central.  The guarantee  was  repeated in 
70  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
more formal manner on September  17th by von der
Goltz to Minister Whitlock.   In this form it pro-
vided: (1) that the German Government of Belgium
agreed not to requisition  any shipments  of wheat
and flour destined for the feeding of the Belgian
civil population;  but (2) that if contraband of war
should be found  in any such shipment, the entire
shipment would be confiscated by  the German au-
thorities;  and (3), that the civil administration of
the German Government in Belgium reserved to it-
self alone the right of decision as to the distribution
of the wheat and flour in the different portions of
the occupied territory, according to local needs, and
to supervise the distribution.
  This was, of course, before the  formation of the
American Commission.  It is obvious that the last
clause in the guarantee could not be accepted by any
organisation working  under the permission of the
British Government, and it was necessary, therefore,
for the American  Commission to obtain a new and
different guarantee from the Germans.  In fact, the
British Government insisted that a guarantee must
be obtained which would not  only  place all control,
including the details of distribution of the  imported 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  71
foodstuffs,  in  the  Commission's hands, and  would
provide for the maintenance in Belgium of an Amer-
ican staff sufficiently large and with sufficient privi-
leges of movement and control to be able to assure
the Allied  Governments of  the proper distribution
of the  food and its exclusive use by the civil popu-
lation,  but  would also bind the Germans to make no
further requisition  of native foodstuffs, live-stock, or
fodder, and would also contain a clause binding the
Germans to a  non-interference with the ships carry-
ing the Commission's foodstuffs, whether these ships
(carrying exclusively  Commission  supplies)  were
neutral or not in ownership.
  On the other hand, the Germans, before making
any further guarantees, demanded that the British
Government should formally bind itself to a similar
non-violation of the Commission's food ships on the
water,  and to a permission  for the Commission to
purchase foodstuffs in England or other countries for
the exclusive use of the Belgian civil population.
  As each Government wished the other to give its
assurances as a prerequisite to giving its own, some
maneuvering  was necessary to effect a  practical
simultaneousness of agreement.  This was effected, 
 72 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 however, before the end of November.  On Novem-
 ber 21st the authorities of the German Government
 of Belgium notified Ministers Whitlock and Villalo-
 bar—these two gentlemen thus formally  assuming
 their position as protecting ministers of the Ameri-
 can  Commission and Belgian  Comite National—of
 their agreement to the stipulation asked for, and
 two  days later  the German Foreign OflBce in Berlin
 confirmed these guarantees to Ambassador Gerard—
 "until further  notice and with reservation of any
 recall which may become necessary at any time."
   In  the  meantime the formal agreement of the
 British Admiralty  to the free  passage of the  Com-
 mission's ships  had been obtained, and it only re-
 mained  to settle details with both Governments  as
 to special papers  and passes to be carried by the
 captains, indicating  that  the  cargoes  were exclu-
 sively the Commission's supplies,  and were to be
 allowed  the "freedom of the seas."  Arrangements
 also  were made for special distinctive markings  to
 be displayed on the ships, and against any possible
misuse of these  safeguarding markings.
  All this took time, but the purchase and importa-
tion went ahead anyway.  It had to go ahead if the 
   FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 73
Belgians were not to starve, and by some means or
other the Commission has always managed to do
what had to be done.  We became so accustomed to
trouble and delay, to accident or wilful interference,
and to meeting the situation quickly by expedient
or by the "big stick," that unless we had a major
crisis once a month and a minor crisis once a week,
we became nervous  through inactivity and  soft
peace!  As a matter of fact, we have suffered little
from this cause during the course of our work;  the
crises always  came on to save us.
  The British insistence that we could not continue
to take food into Belgium unless the Germans agreed
not  alone to refrain from requisition of such im-
ported foodstuffs, but to refrain from taking for their
army any of the native foodstuffs, made it necessary
for us to use all effort to get such a guarantee and to
get it  quickly.  Ambassador Gerard  took up  this
matter energetically at Berlin, and by the end of
December he  was able to report to Washington and
to the Commission that he had  been assured by
Under Secretary of State Zimmerman (later head of
the Foreign OflBce and now replaced by von Kuehl-
man) that the commanding general in Belgium would 
74  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
give assurance to the protecting ministers of the
Commission in Brussels that the German military
authorities would make no further requisition of any
food supplies in Belgium as long as the Commission
continued to send in food.  Secretary Zimmerman's
formal letter to Mr. Gerard added to this assurance
the statement that the Governor  General  of Bel-
gium would  authorise the American and Spanish
ministers at Brussels to convince  themselves in any
way which should appear to them advisable that the
prohibition was  observed most scrupulously.  Un-
fortunately, the assurance in Secretary Zimmerman's
formal note of the non-requisition of native foods
and forage differed a little in wording, but impor-
tantly in effect, from that  conveyed by him verbally
to Mr. Gerard in that it was limited to those com-
modities which,  if  taken,  "would require  to  be
replaced by  importation  by the American Com-
mittee  for Belgian  Relief."  And  Governor von
Bissing, in his decree of a  short time  later pro-
mulgating the order of  non-requisition, specifically
noted as alone being covered by  the decree: wheat,
flour, rice,  dried peas  and  beans, corn,  sugar,
oil  cakes, and other prepared   forage  for cattle. 
  FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM 75
These  were the  only  foodstuffs  then  being taken
into Belgium by us.
  Although  this  was a large  concession from  the
point of view of the German Government (which has
steadfastly maintained the position that it had full
right, under international practice in time of  war,
to maintain  its  army of occupation on the products
of the occupied territory), it  was unfortunately a
concession less sweeping than that insisted on by the
British Government, and in addition the guarantee
itself was for some time not very strictly lived up to
by the German military authorities in Belgium. This
involved the Commission in a long struggle with both
the German and  the British Governments to effect
such compromise  arrangements as would not put it
out of business.
  Two incidents illustrate the difficulties the Com-
mission has always had in making the purely philan-
thropic character of its undertaking realised.  Mr.
Hoover had come to Brussels, in February, 1915, to
lend his personal  endeavours on the ground to the
struggle to get from the German authorities there
the more sweeping guarantees needed, and to "plane
out"  some other lesser difficulties in our relations 
76  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
with our German friends, such matters as that of a
freer circulation in the country by  our representa-
tives, etc.  Our young men were too often arrested
and  delayed—indeed, often temporarily jailed—by
stupid or uninformed guards for the most successful
prosecution of their work.  Another of these  lesser
difficulties came from the interesting objection made
by  the Governor-General to the fact that we were
giving the Belgians a better bread,  and at a  lower
cost to those  who could pay, than the civil popula-
tion in Germany was getting!

  In an interview Mr. Hoover had with one of the
most important officers  of von Bissing's  staff, this
official Jbroke  off  the  general  discussion  to say
abruptly:
  "Now, we are all just human here, and I want to
ask you, as man to man, one question: What do you
Americans get out of this business?  Why are you
doing it?"
  "I tried to explain first with evenness  of temper
and then more emphatically," writes Mr. Hoover in
his  memorandum  of the  conversation, "that the
whole thing was simply a humane effort; and that 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  77
not only did none of us get anything out of it, but
that most of us lost something by it.  But I found
it too difficult to be emphatic enough about this to
make any real impression on him."
  A few months later I had a similar experience at
the Great Headquarters of the German Armies in
occupied France.  At a dinner-conference with cer-
tain officials  of the  General Staff,  who concerned
themselves especially with our work, the first remark
made to me by the most important  officer, General
von S., who came in late and sat at the head of the
table, was: "Well, how is business?"  I could only
reply that it was  going on about as well  as  any
business could that  made  no  profits  for anybody
concerned with its management.
  But it should  be added that this earlier  almost-
universal belief among the Germans—and many Bel-
gians!—that there must be "something in it for the
Americans," gradually came to be dispelled. At least
the more intelligent  and broader-minded men at
Berlin, and also in General von Bissing's Govern-
ment, and at the Great Headquarters, came to recog-
nise that the Americans of the Commission had to
be admitted to be curious exceptions to the conven- 
78  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
tional German conception of American nature;  our
interest in dollars was not self-interest.  Part of the
new conviction was due to personal acquaintance-
ship with our men and methods, and part to  the
very careful and  detailed examination which was
constantly made by them of all our statistical tables.
They discovered, among other things, in this close
watch of  the  work, that despite the swiftly rising
prices paid elsewhere in the  world for foodstuffs,  the
prices required by the Commission of those Belgians
who could pay for their food did not keep pace with
this rise, but, thanks to the ever-perfecting business
organisation of the work, and the world-wide volun-
tary assistance of buyers and transportation agents,
remained nearly stationary.  And they learned, too,
that what "profits" were realised by requiring  the
paying Belgians to pay a little more than cost were
immediately turned over to the benevolent or purely
charitable side of the  work: that,  in  other words,
what profits  were made all went to the destitute
Belgians and not to the Commission.
  But back to the guarantees.   Despite all the pres-
sure Ambassador Gerard and Minister Whitlock and
the Commission could bring to bear on the German 
  FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  79
authorities at Berlin and Brussels through the spring
of 1915,  these authorities held strictly to the  form
of the oflficial note of Secretary Zimmerman and the
decrees of Governor-General von Bissing  regarding
the kind of native food products they would not
requisition, and only by the tolerance of the British
Foreign OflBce  was the Commission's work allowed
to go on.  But the Foreign Office never  really  re-
ceded from its position; in fact, it was deciding that
the Commission would have to obtain an even more
sweeping concession from the Germans.

   In April  the Commission was  formally notified
that the British Government would put up no longer
with any compromise  on the native foods question,
but that the Commission must immediately obtain
from the Germans not only an agreement to renounce
any further requisitioning of the native foodstuffs in
stock, but also a guarantee that  the whole of  the
forthcoming Belgian harvest of the year would be
reserved exclusively for the use of the civil popula-
tion, and this under such conditions as would enable
 the Commission to assure the British Government
 of the strict carrying out of the guarantee.  In  the 
80 FIGHTING STARVATION IN  BELGIUM
light of the crying needs of the people and the limited
amounts of food that could be imported by the Com-
mission because of the difficulty of chartering enough
ships, and in the light of  the facts that the Allied
Governments were paying for a large  part  of  the
foodstuffs imported, and  the  Germans were con-
tributing almost nothing as yet, in money or foods,
for the support of the people under their control,
this requirement of the Allied Governments was  not
an unreasonable one.  And the Commission, accept-
ing it as such, put its whole  energy into the task of
trying to get from the German authorities an accept-
ance of the position.
  Mr. Hoover set the machinery in motion to bring
about the needed arrangement by a long letter to
Ambassador Gerard, who began negotiations in Ber-
lin with characteristic promptness and vigour.  The
matter was  also taken up actively with Governor-
General von Bissing's  Government in  Brussels, by
Minister Whitlock, with  the  collaboration  of  the
Spanish Minister, Marques  de Villalobar, and  the
Dutch  Charge  d'Affaires, Vollenhoven.  Through
May and June the discussion and diplomatic struggle
went on. 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  81
  By this time Germany was feeling the effects of
the Allied blockade in the real food shortage caused
by it, and was probably in no position to feed ten
million people in addition to her own, even if she had
been willing to.   Also, the shooting down of starv-
ing mobc in  city streets  by machine  guns is  no
indication of a successful civil administration of a
land, and Governor-General von Bissing's  Govern-
ment of Belgium was organised  in the form of a
quasi-civil administration—with, to be sure, a strong
military odour.  Peace and quiet are indications of
successful civil administration, but people  do not
starve peacefully and quietly, and a starving popu-
lation of seven and a half millions would, even with-
out guns or bombs, be a  serious  group to handle.
Therefore, if for  no other reason  than  that  of ex-
pediency—and it will be only fair to presuppose more
humane reasons  also—the German Government of
Belgium has shown itself consistently favourable in
principle, even if often very troublesome in specific
matters, to the Commission's work.
  By June,  therefore, a favourable outcome of the
negotiations was assured, and on June 25th Minister
Whitlock was able to send to Mr. Hoover a mem- 
82  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
orandum from Governor-General von Bissing, recit-
ing his willingness to hold at the disposal of the Bel-
gian civil population of the territory placed under
his orders (most of Belgian East and West Flanders
has  always been under the immediate  control of
the General Staff)  the product  of the grain harvest
of 1915 used for the making of bread (wheat and
rye).  But this concession was to be contingent upon
a formal agreement by the Commission to continue
to import into Belgium until harvest time of 1916
the remaining necessary commodities for the feeding
of the people in the occupied territory.
  To this the Allied Governments agreed, and  on
July 4th Governor von Bissing confirmed his earlier
memorandum by a formal guarantee given to  the
protecting ministers, and the issuance of a decree,
followed a little later by a supplementary one, de-
claring  that  "all cereals  used  for the making of
bread, and other agricultural products mentioned in
Article  I  arising from  this  year's  harvest, will  be
exclusively reserved for the provisioning of the popu-
lation."  Article I enumerated  wheat, barley, and
oats used for bread-making—and  also barley and
straw intended for the consumption of cattle. 
CHAPTER SIX
      DO THE GERMANS GET THE FOOD?
       THE essential result of the Governor-General's
        guarantee, and of all the multifarious details
        passed on by the Crop Commission, and cor-
respondingly many and multifarious regulations an-
nounced by it, was to place month by month in the
hands of the Commission and the Comite National
the whole of the grain crop as far as it could be got
from  the farmers.   Each farmer was allowed to re-
tain what part of his product  was necessary for the
bread of his family through the year—he was, cor-
respondingly, not allowed to get bread on the regular
ration cards—and for  seed for the next planting.
The rest he was obliged to sell to the relief organisa-
tion—but at a fixed good price.  This good  price
insured getting most of the grain out, and stimulated
production for the following year.  As a matter of
fact, the farmers of Belgium have, next to the very
rich, suffered less than any other class of the people.
                       83 
84  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
Unfortunately they and their families compose hardly
more than a sixth of the total population.
  For the crop of 1916, the guarantee and general
arrangements  of  1915  were  renewed,  with some
modifications even more  favourable  to the  civil
population.  The new, or  renewed, agreements for
the crop of 1917 have been looked  after by  the
Dutch and  Spanish neutrals who have taken  our
places inside Belgium.
  So much, then, for the Belgium native crop guaran-
tees. The arrangements, very different in nature, as to
the crops in Northern  France, may be left to a later
article describing the special conditions of our work
in that region.  A fleeting reference to these arrange-
ments was made in the last article in connection
with the recounting of  an incident illustrating the in-
ternational relations of the Commission.
  Of the many, many other formal agreements be-
tween the Commission,  or its protecting ministers,
and the German authorities, space can be given here
for reference to but one  set intimately connected
with the crop guarantees; indeed, including them.
They are those later ones, more  detailed and specific
in statement and rather  wider in scope than the 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 85
earlier ones,  which recapitulate the whole  of the
basic German guarantees, on the existence of which
and on the assurance by the Commission and its
protecting ministers of the strict living up to which
by the  Germans, the Commission was allowed by
the Allied Governments to continue its work.  The
first of these was given in July, 1915, the second in
February, 1916, and a third in April, 1916.
  The essential points in these German guarantees
respecting  the  food of  Belgium under which the
Commission has carried on  its work, and only by
virtue of which the Allied  Governments have per-
mitted its continuance, are:
  1. An agreement to take none of the  imported
food,  and to permit all the measures deemed neces-
sary by the Commission for the complete  control
and equitable distribution of this food;
  2. An agreement to export to Germany none of
the  Belgium native food,  except  certain  excess
quantities of a few kinds of watery vegetables and
fruits, not  including such staples as potatoes, etc.,
and not to seize or purchase any of this native food
for the maintenance of the occupying German army,
except  occasional  small personal  purchases  by 
86  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
individual  soldiers not  representing  the  army's
commissary department;
  3. To reserve,  under combined  German,  Bel-
gian,  and Commission control, the  entire ; native
grain crops, fodder and live-stock  (except horses),
exclusively for the use of  the  civil  population;
and
  4. To permit the Commission and its protecting
ministers to assure themselves by suitable measures
that these guarantees were lived up to.

  The universal query is, Do the Germans get any
of the Commission's food?   The proper query, how-
ever,  is a  much  more comprehensive  one.  It is:
Do the Germans live  up to all the food guarantees
they have given?  Do they not merely abstain from
taking by force, or getting by devious means, any
of the food imported by the Commission, but do they
also really leave in the hands of the Belgians all their
native crops and live-stock, and refrain both from ex-
porting any of this food to Germany, and from feed-
ing their army of occupation on it?   And, finally, do
they allow the Commission and its protecting min-
isters such freedom of movement and observation 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 87
in the country, and such control checks on the food,
both  imported  and  native, that  they can  know
whether these guarantees are respected?
  These  are  queries that the Commission has had
to  answer,  from  the  beginning,  constantly  and
honestly  to  itself  and  to  the ever-watchful  and
inquiring British Foreign OflBce.  There seems to
have existed, ever since the fateful autumn days of
1914, a general suspicion of all German scraps of
paper on which guarantees have been written.   The
Commission has always had to reckon with the pos-
sibility of "military  exigency" overriding at  any
moment the guarantees under which its labours were
permitted.   And because of  this it has had to estab-
lish within itself, or, better put, perhaps,  to make of
all that part of itself  within Belgium an elaborate
department  of "inspection  and control," with the
effective  help of all the great Belgian internal  relief
organisation with its forty thousand oflficial members,
and the  eagerly proffered services of nearly all the
seven and a half million other unofficial B elgians.  I say
"nearly all," because no population of seven millions
but has its hundreds or thousands of bad little people
ready to turn an honest penny by dishonest means. 
88  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  For  example, bakers.   I am sure that  not all
bakers are dishonest, not even  all Belgian  bakers.
But we certainly did have trouble with the  bakers.
Finally we set up bakers' courts: the American  pro-
vincial representative and a member of  the Belgian
provincial committee for  judges, and a lawyer as-
signed for the suspected baker; the judges were the
prosecutors!  Of course, we had no legal  standing,
no authority, indeed, except the trivial one of hold-
ing all the flour in our hands, and if we did not  give
the baker flour to bake, that ended  Monsieur le
Boulanger.  So  we  either warned him, if he  was
trivially guilty  and it  was  a  first  offence;  or  sus-
pended him from baking for a week or two if he was
more seriously guilty or a second-time offender; or
put him entirely out of business  if he was dishonest
on  a large scale, or a proved incorrigible.   Their
pleas of extenuating circumstances were varied and
ingenious.  For example, how could a man of heart
resist  the pitiful appeals  of  a  haggard,  hungry
woman  for an extra kilo  of bread for her children
above the  permitted allowance; or a  woman less
haggard, who would give the baker a warm  kiss for
an extra cold loaf? 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  89
  Then there were the  sellers of rice.  We taught
the Belgians the use of rice as a piSce de resistance in
a war-time meal.  They had known it before as a
dessert.  But not all of them liked  rice,  and by
hoarding up their daily allowance for a week or two,
they could—if they were dishonest—sell a kilo or so
of rice at a fancy price to a German soldier.  With
this money they could buy a potato or two.  Why
not?  We were cruel to  report them  to a Belgium
civil court which could try them and punish them
for infraction of the new law against  the re-sale of
the Commission's food.   But remember the German
soldier; many  soldiers  make an  army.  And re-
member the British Foreign OflBce.
   But these were our little troubles.  There were
greater ones out near the Belgian-German  frontier,
along the fringes of Limburg, Liege, and Luxemburg
provinces, where  one only had to hand things over
or through the electrified wire fence, or drive a pig
through an opening in it guarded by a German sentry
suffering  from  intermittent  blindness.  We had
heard  interesting reports  of  the doings  at  Wel-
kenraedt, a  Belgian frontier village, separated from
an adjoining German town by a common road down 
90 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
the middle of  which ran the famous wire fence.
One of our inspectors went to Welkenraedt.   It was
quiet and sleepy by day.  But it was so wide-awake
during the night.  From eleven  p.m. to three a.m.
it was like a country fair, many Belgians coming to
the wire with little bundles or a pig on a string; and
on the other  side many Germans,  without bundles
or pigs, but with the money to  exchange for them.
We got it stopped; but other villages took it up.
It was  a continuous struggle,   and a continuous
worry, despite the fact that all the  exchanges for as
long as they could run were trivial in total.
  But the Belgian fraudeurs were not many, and they
were dangerous only when they attempted things on
the grand scale, not with German soldiers, but with
German  cattle-  and  pig- and  sheep-buyers from
Aix-la-Chapelle or Cologne.   And  here our appeal
was direct to the German Governor-General; the mar}.
who had given the guarantees against export.  '*ind
our appeals and  demands were not in vain.   IJe
always tried,  and mostly succeeded, to check any-
thing like wholesale infractions.   But it necessitated
struggling.    Ministers  Whitlock  and Villalobar,
Charge Vollenhoven, the Commission's director and 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN  BELGIUM  91
assistant-director  in Brussels, and  all its  men in
the provinces, had to keep everlastingly at it.  And
so did the Governor-General  and his  staff in the
Civil-Verwaltung and  the Politische Abteilung, be-
cause the cry for food was strong from inside Ger-
many, and the threat of "military exigency" always
imminent from the German army heads.
  One of the means adopted by General von Bissing's
Government  to protect the foodstuffs was the issu-
ance of placards to be exposed on warehouses, rail-
road  wagons, carts, etc., safeguarding  the  supplies
in storage or in course of transportation.   On the
following page is a copy (translated) of the  placard
used on our warehouses.

  But if we can  truthfully  say  that  the  German
Government  of  Belgium could resist this  pressure
on  the  border with sufficient strength to limit the
food leakage to such a minimum that the Commis-
sion and the Allied Governments, who were told of
it all, could  accept it as tolerable, it goes without
saying that the guarantees preventing the internal
seizure  were  maintained with even better strictness.
And this is true.   The German Government in Bel- 
92 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
COMITE NATIONAL  DE SECOURS  ET d'aLIMEN-
                   TATION
     COMMISSION FOR  RELIEF IN BELGIUM

Service of storage of foodstuffs, provisions, and
             divers merchandise

  By order of  His Excellency,  the  Governor
General in Belgium, all  stocks stored in this
warehouse, belonging  to  the  Comite National
de Secours et d'Alimentation, or to the Com-
mission for Relief in Belgium, and intended for
the civil population of  Belgium shall be neither
seized nor requisitioned by German military or
civil  authorities.
                  Brussels.................
gium lived up to its guarantees respecting the Com-
mission's imported  food  in  such measure that we
may honestly say that the Germans got practically
none of this food.  And it has lived up to its guar-
antees  respecting the  native food stocks and crops
in such measure that we may say the Germans have 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 93
got of this food only a very small fraction.  It is a
fraction that was increasing toward the end of our
stay in  Belgium.  What it  is now, our successors,
the Dutch and Spanish neutrals who have taken our
places in Belgium, must tell.
  We can say this by virtue of the real knowledge
we have had through our department of inspection
and control; and by virtue of the strenuous and con-
tinuous efforts  this department has made to help
make the statements  possible.  It is too  bad that
space prevents even the barest account of the organi-
sation  and  work  of  the department.   It has en-
grossed the time and  energy of some of our keenest
eyes, best brains, and hardest fighters.  Men like
Joseph Coy Green, of Princeton, have given it almost
their whole stock of strength and health.
   The  exceptions to the  general  decree  of non-
purchase  by  the Germans provided  for by the
phrases, "excess fresh vegetables" and "individual
purchases by soldiers," have been sources of some
leakage;  these phrases  have been hidden  behind
too often when  we have run down serious infrac-
tions of the general guarantees. But on the whole,
and to  that large degree which has been necessary 
94  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
to allow us to continue the work of relief of Belgium
with clear consciences,  and to allow the Allied Gov-
ernments  to  permit and  actually  to support  the
work, the  answer to the query: "But don't the Ger-
mans get  the food?" is a categorical and positive
"No."
  If this answer and the consequent continued im-
portation  of food into  Belgium  can be accepted, as
it has been, by both the British and French Govern-
ments, testing it always by their own. very efficient
secret intelligence service—certainly as keenly alive
as any American dry-goods box strategists to every
phase of  possible  military disadvantage  that  the
relief of Belgium might entail  for them—it is  my
opinion that the American public can overlook with
equanimity  the monotonous mutterings  of these
home-grown strategists of Podunk when Belgian
relief is mentioned: "You can't tell me that the Ger-
mans ain't getting that food." 
CHAPTER  SEVEN
      WHERE THE MONEY CAME FROM

      BEFORE the food could be imported into Bel-
       gium and protected and distributed, it had to
       be found, bought, and transported from points
all over the world; and before it could be bought and
transported, money had to be found with which to
buy  and ship it.   I shall  attempt here  to give a
glimpse—it  can hardly be  more than that—of  the
extent of this task and how the Commission accom-
plished it; a task  which has so far involved the pur-
chase of more  than three hundred million dollars'
worth of food, and the transportation and handling
of the more than three million tons of foodstuffs that
were bought with this great sum.
  The public appeals made in October, 1914, by Mr.
Hoover, on behalf of the newly-organised  American
Commission for Relief in Belgium,  and by Minister
Whitlock through the President, resulted in the swift
organisation of relief committees all over America.
                       95 
96  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
But food had to be bought immediately, and so at
the same time Mr. Hoover begged the British Gov-
ernment  for a  subvention  that  would enable the
Commission to begin work at once on a sound finan-
cial basis.  The sum of £100,000 [approximately
$500,000] was granted, and, with this actual money
in hand and  excellent prospects  for a large  inflow
from the charity of the world, the Commission was
able to begin making purchases and contracts on the
large scale necessary to meet the  Belgian cry.
  Thus, from the very beginning, the Commission
has relied on Government subventions as well as world
charity for  the funds necessary to carry on its two-
phased work,  viz., work of general provisioning (ra-
vitaillement), and work of pure benevolence (secours).
  Up to June 1, 1917, when the Government subsi-
dies were provided for by  loans from the United
States Government, the  Commission had had from
the British Government, in round  numbers, $89,500,-
000, and from the French Government $66,000,000,
both these  sums being in the form of loans to the
Belgian Government, for relief work in Belgium.  In
addition, the Commission had had,  from France,
$108,000,000 for relief expenditure in German-occu- 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 97
pied Northern France.   As charity from  private
sources, the Commission had had, up to the same
date, when the Commission's world-wide propaganda
for  charity to aid in maintaining the general ravi-
taillement and secours was interrupted, cash, food, and
clothing to the amount of $28,500,000, of which $17,-
000,000 came  from committees and persons  in the
British Empire, and $11,500,000  from the United
States. In addition the Commission had to its credit,
on June 1, 1917, an additional $5,000,000, temporar-
ily accumulated in the course of its commercial opera-
tions, which may be referred to as "profit." All this
so-called  "profit" accumulation,  however, is from
time to time transferred to the Commission's strictly
benevolent account.  Altogether, therefore, the Com-
mission had had available for its work, up to June
1st  of this year, $297,000,000 in cash and goods.
  This takes into no account the large sums given
within Belgium by  cities, communes, and strictly
Belgian organisations, sums whose total is not known
to us but cannot fall short, up to date, of 500,000,000
francs [approximately $100,000,000].  Nor does this
latter figure include still another and quite unguess-
able amount, given directly  as private charity from 
98  FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM
Belgian to Belgian. Many small and several fairly large
internal charities have had no subventions either from
the Commission and Comite National or thecommunes.
  It is, however, the money, food, and clothing re-
ceived  from American  private  charity,  and the
methods by  which they have been acquired, that
claim here  our special interest.  The great sum re-
ceived by private gifts from British sources has been
chiefly raised by the admirably organised and ener-
getically directed campaign  of the British National
Committee for Belgian Relief, an organisation al-
ready referred to in an earlier chapter.  This Com-
mittee has  always worked in close cooperation with
the Commission, but has managed its own affairs as
to methods and details, turning over to the Commis-
sion,  in  London,  the money, food, and clothing
collected by it.
  The "record" of all giving to Belgian relief is held
by New Zealand, which from its population of 1,159,-
720 has sent to the National Committee $2,655,758,
or a per-capita average of $2.29. Australia has given
$1.34 per capita, Canada 22 cents, the United King-
dom 9 cents, while the contribution of the United
States averages slightly more than 10 cents. 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  99
  In America the Commission has directly managed
the campaign for charity, with its New York oflfice
as organising and receiving headquarters.  The work
has been carried on partly by definitely organised
committees in thirty-seven states, and by scattering
local committees in other states.   Many of these
state committees have organised local committees in
almost every county and large city in the states rep-
resented by them.  Ohio, for example, has had some
form of local organisation in eighty out of the eighty-
eight counties in the state, and California has had
nearly ninety local county and city committees re-
porting to the state committee.
   As examples of the results of the work of the state
committees, the following may be cited:
   The New England Belgian Relief Fund was organ-
ised on October 19,  1914—that is,  immediately on
the publication of Mr. Hoover's first appeal.  It soon
became largely restricted to work  in Massachusetts,
and may be held  to be  fairly synonymous with  a
Massachusetts  State organisation.  From  it  the
 Commission, up to May 1, 1917, had received food
 valued at  $214,142; clothing valued at $270,754;
 and $120,767 in cash;  total  $605,663.  Two "Mas- 
100  FIGHTING STARVATION IN  BELGIUM
sachusetts Relief Ships," i.e., ships loaded with sup-
plies from Massachusetts, or purchased  with Mas-
sachusetts money, were despatched in  January and
March, 1915.   They were the Harpalyce (sunk by
torpedo or mine on a later relief voyage) and the
Lynorta.
  Illinois has also had a state organisation continu-
ously active since October, 1914.  Its contributions
to May 1st were:  food, value $128,556; clothing,
value $38,314;  cash $25,230; total $192,100.
  Connecticut organised on November 1,  1914, and
continued active to May 1, 1917, during which time
it contributed food, clothing,  and cash to a value of
$79,292.  On January 1, 1916, the S.S. Pontoporus,
under the official designation of "Connecticut Food
Ship," sailed for Rotterdam with a cargo of food and
clothing, mostly from the Nutmeg State.
  The Kansas Belgian Relief Fund was organised as
a state committee on November 14, 1914.  It also
arranged for the sending of a Kansas State ship (the
Hannah),  which sailed in December, 1914, with a
cargo made up of  flour contributed by the Kansas
millers.  There were  176 cars  of this Kansas  gift
flour.  Altogether the Kansas organisation has con- 
 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  101
tributed food worth $246,085; clothing worth $8,469;
and cash $3,428;  total $257,983.
  Maryland's  State organisation has provided food-
stuffs of the value of $69,701; clothing, value $11,798;
and cash $80,240; total $161,739.
  Ohio's State organisation,  established January 4,
1915, included local committees in almost  every
county  in the state.   Its  total  contribution  to
May  1, 1917, has  been:  food,  value  $78,993;
clothing, value $17,242;  and cash $51,967; total
$148,202.
  Oregon's State committee was organised in No-
vember, 1914.  It helped make up the  cargo of the
relief ship  Cranley, which sailed from the west coast
in January, 1915, carrying, also, food and clothing
from California.  Oregon's committee has  contribu-
ted food worth  $50,857;  clothing  worth $10,759;
besides  $8,059 in cash;  total $69,675.
  Michigan established a  State committee in Feb-
ruary, 1915.  It furnished most of the cargo of a
relief ship  that sailed  in  July.  Its total  contribu-
tion of foodstuffs has been  of a value  of $36,047;
clothing, value  $52,244;  and  cash  $8,450;  total
$96,741. 
102  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  Pennsylvania began  early and has carried on  a
most energetic campaign.  It contributed, up to May
1, 1917, food of the value of $146,800; clothing to
the value of $38,690;  and cash  $193,878;  total
$379,368.
  Finally, to cite but one more example, California,
the State of Mr. Hoover's adoption, and from which
has come an unusual number of  active Commission
workers in Belgium, effected a  State organisation in
December, 1914.  This organisation has contributed
foodstuffs valued at $269,317;  and clothing valued
at $19,441.   In addition it has sent in $154,553 in
cash; making a total  contribution,  up to May 1,
1917, of the value of $443,311.  It loaded and sent
the relief ship Camino  in December,  1916, and fur-
nished most of the cargo of another  relief ship, the
Cranley.  Much of the success of California's work
is due to the constant stimulus received  from the
activities of the little town of Palo Alto, the "college
town"  of  Stanford  University,  from which Mr.
Hoover graduated in 1895.  This village of 5,000 in-
habitants and  university  of 2,000 students (many
included in  the village population) has contributed
a total of nearly $15,000 to the relief of Belgium.  It 
■*!j> ''"• . -  A.
^ '5L JLS'*** V
V M
D'U
iJL
Group of children of a communal school ready to receive the visit of
                 a Commission representative
■/'-.'-•MOLMKK-S'JEAS ■

leacher and boy pupils of a communal school of Brussels assembled
             to greet a Commission representative 
Testimonials of gratitude made by Belgian school children and presented
                         to the Commission 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  103
was in Palo Alto that the first picturesque outdoor
"Belgian Market" was held,  the success of which
led to a second one there and also one in San Fran-
cisco, and several elsewhere in the country.
  The examples of State work cited are but samples.
Other State committees did as nobly, and splendid
contributions and loaded relief ships came from still
other states in which no attempt was made to effect
organised State committees.  In fact, State organi-
sation was  only one  of  many means adopted for
carrying on the nation-wide propaganda for Belgian
relief.  Numerous special funds were raised by vari-
ous  organisations  and privately  instituted  move-
ments.  An early example of these was the "Millers'
Belgian Relief" movement, organised and directed
by the editor of the Northwestern Miller, Mr. William
C. Edgar,  which resulted in the contribution of a
shipload of flour, valued at  $466,301, which  was
carried from Philadelphia to Rotterdam in February,
1915, by the S.S. South  Point.   The  organiser of
this  splendid contribution  accompanied  his flour
cargo all the way to its  destination in Belgium.
There he actually saw its final distribution to the
Commission's provincial  storehouses.  The  good 
104  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
Samaritan ship was sunk by a German submarine
on her return trip.
  The Rockefeller Foundation contributed a million
dollars, which was sufficient to load, wholly or partly,
five relief ships, part of the cargoes coming from con-
tributions from the Belgian Relief Fund, which also
contributed  supplies for  another relief ship, to the
value of half a million dollars. (The Belgian Relief
Fund is composed of money given  directly to repre-
sentatives of the expatriated  Belgian  Government
at Le Havre, and is chiefly used for relief work in
free  Belgium.   A considerable part of it  is being
retained for  restoration work after  the war ceases).
  The American Society of the Daughters of the
American Revolution made a wide appeal, culmi-
nating in a Belgian Flag Day  on April 8, 1916, the
forty-first anniversary of King  Albert's birthday.
This appeal provided more than $150,000 and was
personally acknowledged by Queen  Elizabeth in a
cable of thanks to the Society.
  In June, 1916, a great Allied Bazaar  was held in
New York under the auspices  of three relief organi-
sations, of which the Commission was one.  The
Commission's share of the net receipts was $115,000. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 105
A  bazaar was held at Boston in December,  1916,
from  which $20,000 came to the Commission, and
one in  Chicago which yielded $11,675 for Belgian
relief.
  In December, 1916, the mining engineers of the
country, as a  special testimonial  to  the mining
engineer at the head of the  Commission, organised
the "Belgian Kiddies, Ltd.," a corporation for the
raising of money to feed 10,000 Belgian children for
one year.  Up  to May 1, 1917,  they had collected
$85,000 for this beautiful special charity.  The Rocky
Mountain Club, another  great body of engineers,
in a similar campaign at the beginning of the year,
raised $245,986.  A large part of this money had
been  assembled by the club to  build itself a new
club  house  in  New York.  The members decided
that feeding Belgian children would make them hap-
pier than housing themselves in luxury while Belgian
children were starving.
   The New York Chamber of Commerce also enlisted
itself in  the Commission's 1917 campaign on behalf
of the children of  Belgium, and collected $69,625
for this purpose up  to May 1st.  The Cardinal Gib-
bons  Fund for the  same purpose had collected, up 
106  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
to May  1, $77,000 from the Catholic  children of
America  and their parents.  This Fund was estab-
lished  as the direct answer to a  personal public
appeal from  the Pope, headed by  a personal con-
tribution from His Holiness.  The Dollar Christmas
Fund, organised by Mr. Henry Clews, has collected
during the month of December of  each year, par-
ticularly   at   Christmastide,  money  which  now
amounts  to $95,300.
  Finally, special  mention  must be made of  the
brilliant success of the Literary Digest Fund for the
children of Belgium, which,  under the active direc-
tion  of Mr. R. J. Cuddihy, has collected from all
over the  country, in sums  from pennies  to thou-
sands of dollars,  more than half a million dollars,
now  being expended  for the maintenance of  the
weak and destitute children of the "little land of
sorrows."
  Besides all these and other organised collections
of funds, the Commission has received many single
private gifts of large size, notably one of $210,000,
another of $200,000, several  of $100,000, and many
of more than $10,000.   But the great  majority of
the  gifts made to the Commission through  State 
 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  107
committees  or through special fund  organisations,
or directly to the New York oflfice,  have been in
small sums coming from millions of individuals. And
it is a beautiful thing that it has been so.  It would
be interesting  indeed to know just how many of the
105,000,000  inhabitants of the United States have
contributed  personally to  Belgian relief.   We can
never know this with any approach to  accuracy,
but we do know enough to say that the givers num-
ber several millions.
  Thousands of incidents, pathetic, inspiriting, noble,
connected with the giving, clamour for the telling.
  A number of little girls in a charity home in Coop-
erstown, N. Y., sent $1 each month.  These little
girls are rewarded by a few pennies for any particular
excellence in their tasks, making beds, sweeping, etc.,
and for months they gave enough pennies earned in
this way to send this dollar for the children of Belgium.
  A little country school  near Montara lighthouse,
on the Pacific Coast, gave its playtime to knitting
wool caps and mittens and mufflers, and then the
school children brought  pennies from their little
metal banks, and jars of preserved fruit, and home-
made jam, and the girl school teacher put them all, 
108  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
pennies, jam, and mittens, into her one-horse buggy
and  drove  forty miles through a storm to convey
these more-than-royal gifts to the  California  Com-
mittee's oflfice in San Francisco.
  A  druggist in a small town in Indiana  sent one
dollar a week for more than two years; a country
grocer sent, each week, a fixed percentage of  his
profits;  a man without money, but with a gold
watch left as a family heirloom, sent it in to be sold
for the feeding of a Belgium family.
  Over in Rotterdam  and in Belgium, too, we had
our glimpses of the incidents of giving.  There are
three fascinating  old-fashioned wedding  dresses
draped on forms that stand just inside the  entrance
of the  great  Antwerp  clothing  ouvrior.  These
dresses were rescued by Mme. Osterrieth from the
cases of used clothing that came from America.  She
has not let  them go to the benches  to be torn  apart
and made over, but has kept them intact  to speak
their message  of sympathy to every one who sees
them, and  especially  to the eight hundred saved
women and girls who find employment in the ouvrior
in working over the masses of gift clothing,  new and
old, that go to the share of Antwerp. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  109
  In the pockets of many of the garments sent over
have been found messages of sympathy and cheer.
Other messages admonish the finders to see in these
gifts the hand of God, and to "get right with Him."
In the pocket of a fancy waistcoat was a quarter,
wrapped in  a bit of paper,  on which was written:
"Have  a drink with me.   Good luck!"  In many
of the parcels are English Bibles, the good souls who
sent them not realising that few Belgians can read
English. In fact, the enclosing  of messages  and
books  caused us much trouble, for the Germans
allow no scrap of paper, printed or written, to enter
Belgium uncensored.  We now have to unpack all
the clothing in  Rotterdam and go through it care-
fully to remove all notes and books.
  But I must not run on.   Volumes would not con-
tain all the incidents,  but a page of the incidents
speaks volumes.  Tears and smiles and heart thrills
and thanksgiving for the revelation of the human love
of humanity in these terrible days of a  depressing
pessimism.  The  giving has been  so worth while;
worth while to Belgium, saved from starvation  of
the body; worth while  to America, saved from star-
vation of the soul. 
110  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  If I could only make real to the hosts of volunteer
Belgian relief workers in America, the organisers and
managers of  the State committees, the local com-
mittees, the special committees and groups, and to
the donors of the money, whether in pennies or dol-
lars, or checks for thousands,  and the senders of
food, whether glasses  of  jam or shiploads of  flour,
and  the  givers of  clothing and makers of mittens
and  mufflers; if I  could  only make real and  vivid
to all these unnamed American men and women and
children of overflowing heart and quick sympathy who
have given their work and devotion and self-sacrifice
for unfortunate Belgium, the words and the gestures
of gratitude of the Belgian men and  women and
children,  I should  be  ineffably glad.   Because this
deep and undying gratitude ought  to be known
to the  millions  over here who  have deserved it.  I
have been caused more gulps and tears in Belgium
from the gratitude of  the Belgians than from their
suffering.  And this gratitude  is meant as  much
for those millions over here who worked and helped
as for the few score who  had the privilege to  work
and help  over there. 
CHAPTER EIGHT
HOW THE FOOD CAME OVER SEAS TO BELGIUM
           WE MUST leave the half-told story of the
            collecting of the money for a glimpse of
            the great commercial activities involved
in the  buying and sending of the food.  Although
much of it, especially in the beginning months of the
work, was bought directly by the givers in their vari-
ous States and regions, some of  it in large quantities
by committees, as in the  case  of the special relief
ships, and some of it in small quantities by the indi-
vidual givers, the greater part  of the food sent to
Belgium has been bought by the New York and
London offices of the Commission, which have an
elaborate  purchasing and shipping machinery.
   As a matter of fact, the purchase and sending to
us of food in small quantities gave us much trouble,
and was  necessarily a very uneconomical way of
handling the matter.  Much of the food  privately
bought was of the nature of luxuries.  The givers
assumed that the Commission would look out for the
                       m 
112  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
staples, and they wished to add special comforts and
delicacies for the weak and  ill.  These small pack-
ages of special kinds of food, not on our regular
programme  of importation,  came by tens  of thou-
sands,  many of them in  special "green label" or
"blue label," or "red stripe"  parcels  arranged by
communities or groups to  be sold at fixed prices by
certain  grocers, and containing a fixed and varied
special ration for a week  or fortnight.   It was dif-
ficult to arrange for an equitable distribution of this
food.  Many as were the packages, they were not
enough  to  go round among  the whole population.
We gave some,  containing delicacies, to hospitals;
some to schools.   Some we distributed among the
Belgian provincial committees in proportion to the
population  of their  provinces, with permission to
sell the luxuries  in  special little "American food
shops " to people able to pay well for them, the money
thus obtained to be used in buying the  staple neces-
sities for the destitute of the province.   One of our
American delegates used to load his motor  car with
packages of jam and fancy crackers and whatnot,
and  rush around his province on Belgian festival
days, making presents to children's canteens, hospi- 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 113
tals, convents, and schools.  He came to be looked
on as a continuously appearing Santa Claus!
  Rice from Rangoon, corn from Argentina, beans
from  Manchuria, wheat and  meat and  fats from
America; and all, with the other things of the regular
programme, such as sugar,  condensed milk, coffee
and cocoa, salt, salad oil, yeast, dried fish, etc.,  in
great quantities, to be brought across wide oceans,
through the  dangerous mine-strewn Channel, and
landed safely and regularly in Rotterdam, to be there
speedily transferred  from ocean vessels into  canal
boats and urged on into  Belgium  and Northern
France, and from these taken again by railroad cars
and horse-drawn carts to the communal warehouses
and soup  kitchens; and always and ever,  through
all the months, to get there in time—these were the
buying and transporting problems of the Commis-
sion.  One hundred thousand tons a month of food-
stuffs from the  world over, in great  shiploads  to
Rotterdam; one hundred thousand  tons  a month
thence in ever more and more divided quantities
to  the  province  and  district  storehouses, to the
regional  storehouses and mills, to the  communal
centres, and finally  to the  mouths  of the people. 
114  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
And all  to be  done economically, speedily, and
regularly; to be done, that is,  with "engineering
efficiency."
  Well, it has been done;  that is the story in a sen-
tence.  By virtue of a devoted volunteer direction;
by  constant resort  to sympathetic Governments,
commercial  firms,  banks,  and transportation com-
panies for advice and concessions;  by shrewd pur-
chasing on a great scale in primary markets; by the
chartering and control of shipping solely for the Com-
mission's service  and under the protection of  the
Commission's flag, recognised, like  the emblem of
the Red  Cross, by belligerent  and neutral  Govern-
ments alike, the great  undertaking has gone  on,
efficiently and economically,  for three years.   A
measure of the efficiency and economy with  which it
has gone on is found in the fact that the overhead
expense of the work has been less than three  quarters
of one per cent, of the values involved. But a truer
measure to the imprisoned Belgians and the French
of the efficiency  and economy  of this volunteer un-
dertaking is  found in the continuous presence of food
in the steel-encircled  countries, and the low prices at
which this food has been delivered to those who could 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  115
pay.  The price of bread in Brussels has never been
more, and has usually been less, than that in London
and Paris.
  The Commission's ships cross the ocean  under
their own special flag and markings. In these three
years of sea  raiders, submarines,  and  mines, the
oceans have  been no safe place for ordinary ships.
But  the  Commission had sent, up to July 1, 1917,
484 shiploads of food and clothing across the seas
with a loss of but eighteen ships, and four damaged.
Each ship carried a pair of great cloth banners, 9 by
100 feet, stretching  along the hull on each side; also
two  50-foot pennants flying from the mast head; a
house flag 12 by 15  feet;  a pair of deck cloths, 12 by
50 feet, to be stretched across the deck face up, one
forward and one aft; and two huge red-  and  white-
striped signal balls, eight feet in diameter, attached
at the tops of two  masts.  The balls and flat deck
cloths are for the benefit of airplane pilots; the side
cloths, pennants, and house  flag are for  sea raiders
and submarines.  All the flags and cloths are white,
with the Commission's name  or initials (C. R. B.) in
great red letters on them.  The masters of the ships
have special  passes from the German  diplomatic 
 116  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 authorities in the country from which they start.  In
 these days of barred zones the ships must follow cer-
 tain determined courses, approaching Rotterdam, not
 through the English  Channel,  but going up around
 the north of Ireland and Scotland, then across to and
 down by  the Norwegian coast, and  then  nearly
 straight south through a  narrow free zone lying be-
 tween the English mine field off Heligoland and the
 danger zone along the English  coast where the Ger-
 mans torpedo any ship without  warning.  Some  of
 our losses have been due to the carelessness of ships'
 captains, too impatient of such restricted safe waters,
 but a few have been due to an  equal carelessness—if
 we  shall use  no harsher  term—on the part  of the
submarine commanders.
  For example, when the Germans had declared their
submarine  blockade  of  the   British Islands and
France, and on February 1st of this year published
the outlines of the so-called barred or danger zone,
a serious interruption in the Commission's shipping
service to Rotterdam occurred at once.  The Channel
route was wholly "closed" to all  ships, and the out-
lined  free or "safe" north-about route  through the
North Sea was dangerous because  of  mine fields. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 117
Under strong  pressure from the Commission and
from  Holland  (whose people are as dependent, in
some  ways, as the Belgians on the continuous im-
portation of food,  especially  feed  for their  dairy
stock), the German Government finally modified the
outlines of its danger zone in the North Sea. Holland
and the Commission were notified that after March
15th  their ships  could come  and  go with certain
safety through a narrow free zone  extending from
the Dutch coast north and northwest to  the Faroe
Islands.  The Commission thereupon instructed five
of its ships, which it had been  holding  empty in
Rotterdam  harbour  for  some time, to  start  for
America to reload.  As an  extra  precaution  we
held these ships for  an extra day, despite the fact
that every day's delay, at that  time, meant addi-
tional privations in Belgium.  On the night of March
16th,  therefore, they started out.  On the afternoon
of the next day two of these boats were deliberately
shelled in the "safe" zone by a German submarine,
and six  sailors on one of them, the Haelen, were
killed.
   We hurried  to the German Legation at The
Hague.  They took the matter coolly. In answer to 
118  FIGHTING STARVATION IN  BELGIUM
our protests and our pointing out of the terrible result
that such a thing would have on the whole course of
our work—for if we could not guarantee safety to our
ships none would continue in our service, and the
whole feeding of the imprisoned Belgians and French
would break  down—the Legation's First Secretary
simply said,  with a  shrug:  "There  has been a
stupidity."
  "Where?  What?" we  demanded.  "Haven't all
the  submarine  commanders received  their proper
orders?"
  We had  waited more than  a month, an anxious
month for us  and Belgians and Hollanders alike, for
the lapsing of the time demanded by the Germans as
necessary for the proper instruction of  their sub-
marines as they came home singly and in groups to
their bases from their trips outside.  And now it
seemed that we must wait still longer.
  "Oh yes," was the reply, "all of them, absolutely
all,  have been instructed  not to molest your ships
and Holland's ships in the free zone."
  "Then what is the matter?"
  Again the speaking shrug of the shoulders, and the
curt reply:  "Some submarine commander has been 
					
ft'* rt „_.	•**j ■ ^	■	ilfr-4. { n	wJ ^	
^^^^^m					
					
	,,«"-' -f	§*•			
	~ is*-.-	..Ji :	R	£\ -	-
					
   One of the State relief ships, showing the conspicuous side cloths,
long pennants, etc., used on all ships carrying cargoes for the Com-
mission to make them easily recognizable even at long distances.
   Flour in sacks specially stamped to show that it is "relief flour"
and whence it came.   Thousands of these sacks, when empty, have
been decorated by Belgian women and  children and given back to
the Commission, as evidence of gratitude. 
\	/			
T *i> m		■4?	A' •** ■"'	
>** ' ■"				
fc^rS		5 - -*to«i ^p"™***-^"	***■ -JE*,. ■	
[p*r				
Commission tugs and barges moving through ice in
               Rotterdam harbor
Quick unloading of a  relief cargo of wheat in Rotterdam harbor by
               the Commission's floating elevators 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  119
a stupid pig. We shall find out later—and reprimand
him."
  They may have found out.  We didn't.  It didn't
matter to us what particular young commander had
done it.  It simply mattered that we might lose our
whole shipping service if this kind of thing went on.

  Once in  Rotterdam, the great ships become the
centres of  extraordinary  activity.  Giant floating
elevators come up to them, sometimes one or two on
each side, and a group of empty canal boats cluster
around.  The hungry pipes of the elevators are thrust
down into the mass of wheat in the hold,  and other
pipes are let down into the lighters;  then the  pre-
cious wheat streams run up and out of the ship and
down and into the canal boats.
  Or it may be that the ship's  cargo is of boxes of
bacon, barrels of lard, cases of  clothing and shoes,
and whatnot.  If so, a mob of stevedores takes the
place of the elevators. In either case it is speed that
is demanded,  and  that is  obtained;  always the
essence of the contract  of feeding  Belgium  and
Northern France has been time.
  As soon as one canal boat is filled, another takes 
120  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
its place.  Nor do they make delay in starting away
with their life-saving cargoes.  Along the tortuous
waterways of Holland and on to the sentry-guarded
Belgian frontier, with its fatal electrified wire, the
canal boats  move, not  dragged  slowly, as in old
times,  by plodding horses  or  men, but pulled as
swiftly as may  safely be, in long  strings by strong
tugs, or driven by their own gasolene engines.
  The  Commission has made records in Rotterdam
harbour.  No such speed of trans-shipment had been
known there in good old Dutch days; for three years
now there have  been American days  along  the
Boompjes and in the harbour basins.  Up to July 1,
1917, 484 overseas cargoes and 1,008 cross-channel
cargoes had been  unloaded in Rotterdam by the
Commission, and 7,084 canal-boat loads despatched
into Belgium and Northern France. In addition,
when Holland's weather  was so  unkind  to  us  last
winter—however much the  skating Dutchmen  and
their Queen  enjoyed  it—and froze and kept frozen
for  six  weeks all the canals, some thousands of rail-
road cars were  used  by arrangement with Holland
and the German Government of Belgium.
  Sometimes the  ships came fairly  crowding each 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 121
other into Rotterdam.  On June 1, 1916, 31,342 tons
of Commission foodstuffs arrived. Then there were
strenuous hours to earn despatch money. And some-
times they came with long intervals between, with a
consequent shortening  of the food stocks inside of
Belgium—for the eating went on steadily, however
irregular the arrival of the wherewithal to eat.  Then
there were  strenuous  hours  again, for there were
needed  swift loading and hard driving of the canal
boats out of the harbour basins  into and along the
canals.   On  a single day in October,  1916, 19,557
tons of  foodstuffs were started off for Belgium in the
canal boats.  As these boats carry on the average
about 350 tons each, this meant  the getting away of
a fleet of nearly sixty boats.
   The shortest distance for any of these canal boats
to travel is that to Antwerp, 140 kilometres (about
88 miles); the longest that to La Louviere, 376 kilo-
metres  (235 miles).
   If the Germans have often given us some trouble
about our overseas shipping, so have they also in
connection  with our fleet of canal boats.  Not, we
may assume,  from a dangerous viciousness, but
 mostly, perhaps, from  a no less dangerous stupidity. 
122 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  Never did our Brussels oflfice have a more nerve-
racking time than during a certain period in the
summer of 1916 when, without  a whisper of warn-
ing, Governor General von Bissing's  Government
suddenly tied up our  whole canal-boat fleet by an
order  permitting  no  canal  boat to pass out  from
Belgium into Holland without  depositing  the full
value  of the boat before crossing the frontier.  The
Governor  General had reason to fear, he said, that
some of the boats that went out didn't come back,
some of them, it was  whispered, even going across
the Channel to England.  As these boats are worth,
roughly, about $5,000 each, and we were using about
500 boats, it would have tied up two and a half mil-
lion dollars of our money to meet this demand, and
tied it up in German hands!  We simply couldn't do
it.  So we began negotiations.
  Oh,  the  innumerable beginnings of  negotiations,
and, oh, the interminable enduring of  negotiations,
the struggling against form and "system,"  against
obstinate and cruel delay—for delay in food matters
in Belgium was always cruel—and sometimes against
sheer brutality!  How often have we longed to say:
Here,  take these ten million people and feed  them 
 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN  BELGIUM  123
or starve them as you will!  We quit.  We can't go
on fighting your floating mines  and stupid subma-
rines; your brutal soldiers and more brutal bureau-
crats.  Live up to your agreements to help  us, or
at least do not obstruct us;  or, if you won't, then
formally and oflficially and publicly before the world
kick us out as your arch-jingo, Reventlow, demands.
   But we couldn't say it; we couldn't risk it;  it was
too certain to have been starving rather than feeding.
   We arranged  the  matter of  the  canal boats, of
course.   But it took time, and  brought us terribly
close to empty  warehouses—and  empty  stomachs.
In the course of the negotiations, when we saw the
food situation getting more and more  desperate, as
each fruitless day of talking  went by, we lost  our
self-control, and let two "undiplomatic" letters run
off from our nervous finger tips to two high officials
in General von Bissing's Government.  One of these
letters  was written by Mr.  Poland,  the assistant
 director (now director of the London oflfice),  and in
 it he suggested  that the whole negotiation could be
 settled in two hours if common sense were given some
 place in the matter; and the other was one from me
 suggesting that it was diflficult to understand why it 
124  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
should take a letter from America as long to reach
our office after it had arrived in Brussels as it took
it to arrive in Brussels from New York.  I implied,
I presume, a certain unnecessary leisureliness in the
work of the oflficial censor.
  We were immediately told—no delay in this case
—that such  letters could not be received  by  His
Excellency's Government, and it was suggested that
the Commission  not only withdraw  the letters, but
also  the letter-writers!  More  negotiations  were
necessary!
  Mr. Hoover happened to arrive from London just
as things were warmest—it was a habit he had.  And
he took a hand in the new negotiations.  He explained
that it should be remembered that the culprits were
both crude Americans who were unaccustomed to the
niceties of diplomatic form, and that  our letters were
couched in the regular approved manner of American
business men. He was sorry, and  we were sorry,
that they seemed impertinent; they were not intend-
ed to be. ... So the director and assistant-director
stayed on to fight another day. 
               CHAPTER  NINE
     THE AMERICANS AND THE BELGIANS
            W1EN the New York and London offices of
            the Commission had purchased the sup-
            plies  and seen to their transportation
overseas, and the Rotterdam oflfice had received and
trans-shipped them into canal boats or railway cars,
and started them on their way to Belgium and France,
they were thereafter in  charge  of that part of the
Commission organisation which  was within the Ger-
man-occupied territory.  Everything that was later
done by the Commission with the food and clothing
was done by that part of it working in Belgium, and
it was done under formal and informal agreements
and arrangements with  the  German  authorities in
control of Belgium.  The more formal of these agree-
ments have already been explained.
  But also all that was done inside of Belgium was
done in agreement and  close cooperation with the
extensive  and highly  developed volunteer Belgian
relief organisation, composed at bottom of the (ap-
                       125 
126  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
proximately) three thousand communal committees;
then, above them,  the regional committees repre-
senting groups of communes; then, still over these,
the provincial committees, one for each province in
the country; and finally, at top, the Belgian national
committee.
  To define, as well as might be defined in words,
the special functions and position of each of the two
parts of the combined relief  organisation, and the
general relations to be maintained between them,
various formulations of agreement have been drafted
from  time to time.  The  first  written-out  general
scheme of organisation bears date of December, 1914.
Before that, of  course, had come the all-important
meeting in London, in October, 1914, between  Mr.
Hoover and M.  Francqui, the organising and direct-
ing heads  of the two groups, at which  a  general
agreement as to fundamentals was reached.
  The last general  agreement was written out  in
December, 1916, and was drawn up in the light of all
the experience of two years  of  work.  It was in-
tended to  do away with any possible  future  mis-
understandings  concerning  any  phase  of the  re-
lations of  the two  groups,  and was  drafted  and 
 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  127
signed as a formal agreement between the directing
heads.
  In any complete history of the Commission's work
these agreements with our Belgian co-workers must
be fully given.  No space for that is possible here.
But  certain essential  points  of  the arrangements
must be given in order that the important and deli-
cate position of the Americans working in Belgium
can be in some measure understood.
  I quote from the "general scheme" of December,
1914, which was drafted chiefly to point out the posi-
tion of the Commission's provincial representatives:

  "As the ComitS National  will control its work
through ten sub-committees, or ComitSs Provinciaux,
each covering a province of Belgium [one province,
Brabant, is subdivided for purposes of food adminis-
tration into two, one being Greater Brussels, and the
other  all of Brabant province outside  of Brussels]
and  each having its own president and working or-
ganisation, the Commission  for  Relief in Belgium
proposes to station an authorised delegate (with one
or more assistants) in each province,  at the point
where the principal oflfice of the Comite Provincial, 
128  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
with its president, is located.  The ComitS National
will also station a delegate or two delegates, as the
case may require, at the same office, who will repre-
sent the central organisation at Brussels.
  "The head delegate of the C. R. B.,  the delegate
of the C. N., and the president of the C. P. will form
the three principals for the affairs of the relief work
in the province.
  "But as it  has  been clearly stipulated that  the
grain or other merchandise introduced into Belgium
by the C. R. B. is under the  responsibility of their
Excellencies the  Mmisters of the United States and
of Spain, who  are the protectors of the Commission,
it is essential that the merchandise remain the prop-
erty of the C.  R. B. until the  same is distributed to
the communes. . . . Therefore, in spite of the fact
that the merchandise may be entrusted  for handling
to the Provincial  Committee .  . . the delegate of
the C. R. B. is  still responsible for its safety until
it is delivered to the communes."

  The  various provincial delegates of the Commis-
sion were responsible for the protection of the sup-
plies from possible German seizure, and for seeing 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 129
that all plans proposed by the Provincial Committee
in no way contravened the  general principles and
plans of the Commission regarding fair distribution;
they vised all directions of the Provincial Commit-
tee as to milling, storage, distribution, etc.; they
checked up all shipments coming into their provinces
to see that they corresponded as to  weight, quan-
tity, and character with  the advices from  Rotter-
dam; kept the Brussels oflfice  informed constantly
and in utmost detail of all receipts, movements and
distribution of supplies in each province; they took
regular monthly  inventories  of all  stocks on  hand,
made representation of all general and special needs
of each region and people, saw to an efficient inspec-
tion and control of the use and  abuse of the food,
even to the degree, if necessary, of using their power
of  absolute prohibition of movement of the food
stocks under their control to  correct abuses.
  As a matter  of fact, the  Commission province
delegate  acted as no tyrant; he cooperated, rather,
in all  ways with the  well-organised, devoted, and
hard-working provincial,  regional, and communal
Belgian committees; struggled for them and for the
people generally  with  the German authorities, and 
130  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
came to be the loyal and energetic protector and
helper of all in his province.
  These are the bald and meagre statements of the
responsibility, duties, and activities of the American
dSlSguSs in Belgium.   But no statement could ever
be drafted that would set out in full what really were
their  responsibilities and  duties, what  their work
and behaviour were to be, what delicacies of situa-
tion were to be met, what discretion was to be exer-
cised, what kind of extraordinary experience  alto-
gether they were to meet and meet acceptably for
the sake of maintenance of the lives of Belgian men,
women, and children, and the honour of American
humanitarian achievement.
  Let us turn our attention to some details of the
work, to some of its difficulties, and some of its suc-
cesses and satisfactions.  But, first, just a few things
concerning the personnel of the Commission.
  Who  were these young—and  few older—Ameri-
cans?  How were they selected?  What  did  their
personality  mean to  the  Belgians,  and what did
Belgium mean to them?  The answers to these ques-
tions  should some day be told by  a man  of vision,
dramatic instinct, sense of humour and well-trained 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  131
hand—another Richard Harding Davis. They could
be so answered by this man as to make a story to be
read with satisfaction.  But here there can be no
question of a story.   We must be matter-of-fact and
concise.
  The total  roll  of these men, successive resident
directors,  assistant directors, head delegates, assis-
tants and all, makes a list of hardly one hundred and
fifty.   Other men of the Commission were as busy;
did as faithful and as important work in the Rotter-
dam, London, and New York offices; but it was the
men privileged to work inside of Belgium and France
who had the personal experiences they can  tell to
their wondering children in future years; who lived
something that already seems almost unreal,  almost
impossible.
  The  few  older men of the  Commission—from
among whom most of the directors and executive
officers of the  New York,  London, Brussels,  and
Rotterdam officers were drawn, although some took
their places among the younger  men as  province
delegates—were successful engineers  [Mr. Hoover
drew his volunteers  first  of  all  from his  engineer
friends], half  a dozen college professors, a lawyer of 
132  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
large practice, two clergymen of practical turn of
mind,  a  well-known explorer and  sportsman,  a
dietetic expert, an architect of high repute, a maga-
zine editor, a famous forester,  a stock broker,  a
consul,  an expert  in children's diseases; altogether
a wholesome variety!
•  But the majority of the men, especially those who
worked in Belgium and  the occupied portion of
France, were  young men,  representatives  of an
American  type.  They came from forty-five differ-
ent American  colleges and universities; more from
Harvard than any  other one.   Twenty of them
had  been selected by their colleges and their States
to be Rhodes Scholars in Oxford University.  These
twenty had been thus already selected on a basis of
youthful scholarship, energy, general capacity,  and
good-fellowship.   They  had  not, however, been
selected on a  basis of experience in business  or—
least of all—relief work.   And the rest of the  one
hundred and fifty were selected by us on about the
same general grounds, adding the more special one
of a usable, or buddingly usable, knowledge of the
French  language.  Several could read  German,  a
few speak it.   That was also useful.  But the Com- 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 133
mission asked primarily for intelligence, character,
youthful vigour, and enthusiasm, rather than specific
attainments or experience.
  Two things most of these  men had that I have
not  mentioned.   But  they  were two  important
things, namely, idealism and a sense of humour; a
supporting idealism, and a saving sense of humour.
Curtis, the  first of our Brussels-Holland  couriers,
had  to have these qualities to stand his seventeen
arrests by  German sentries, and Warren his  three
days in a military  prison at Antwerp, and  yet keep
unconcernedly on  with their  work.  Curtis's  sense
of humour was fortunately well matched by a Ger-
man's—a single German's—when the young Ameri-
can,  a little annoyed by an unusual number of stop-
pings on the road  one  day, handed his pass to the
tenth man who demanded  it, with a swift, highly
uncomplimentary personal allusion to his tormentor,
in pure Americanese.   The sentry handed it back
with a dry, "Much obliged, the same to you."  He
was  probably  a  formerly-of-Chicago reservist who
knew the argot.
  Later, to  save much fumbling in pockets, many
of our men carried their passes spread out in leather 
134 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM
frames with transparent celluloid covers, suspended
by a strap  around the neck.  For this they earned
the name of "Les Aveugles" among the Belgians.
  In the early days of the work, when matters went
with some irregularity and the German petty rigidi-
ties made more irritation than they did when we had
become more  hardened  to them, the American dele-
gate  at Liege  is said to  have written his confrere at
Namur as follows:


Dear  Delegate:
  I started three canal  boats  last week for Namur.
I thought it  safer to send three in order that one
should finally reach you.  The "Attends Je Viens"
has already been stopped—the towing horse had no
passport.  I hear  that the "Marchons Toujours" is
also not likely to  get through, as the skipper's wife
has given birth to a baby en voyage whose photo is,
naturally, not on the passport.  Betting is strong,
however, on the "Laisse-moi Tranquille."  Be sure
to take up  the bottom planks when she arrives, as I
understand Rotterdam  thinks she may be carrying
contraband. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  135
  But not all the humour came from the Americans
—though perhaps all the conscious jesting did.  How
is  this contribution from  the  German side?  The
military commander of the village of  Marchiennes
sent this telegram to a superior:

                  (Translation)
                              August 28, 1915.
  Flora Roch, age 20, of Boevry, hair fair, eyes blue,
nose and  mouth ordinary, has  till now supplied
Marchiennes  district with yeast,  indispensable  for
baking but not obtainable in district; the Etappen-
Kommandatur requests permission for Flora Roch
to continue supplying  this Etappen  district  with
yeast from Tournai in Belgium.
                (s)  Et.  Dktr. Marchiennes.

  On the back of the telegram was this endorsement
by the superior officer:

                  (Translation)
  According to determined rules  of June 9, 1915,
between A  O K  6 and the Gen. Government—Sec- 
136  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
tion  lb 4317—the request of the Etappen-Inspection
Marchiennes seems legitimate.

  But mostly the humour was only the flash of bright
moments in days  that had much darkness in them.
The  stern necessities of the work and the distressing
scenes of the soup-lines and  canteens filled most of
the hours, and gave most of the colour to the days
and  weeks  and months that seemed always to be
leading, but never quite coming up to, the peace and
end of it all that  we persisted in seeing just ahead.
If it had not been for this  confidence in the near
coming of peace, shared by Americans and Belgians
alike, a confidence curiously persistent despite the
constant passing of the  successive dates set by us for
the  peace-coming, I  doubt that  we  could  have
carried on.  The difficulties of a permanent mainte-
nance of the relief seemed every now and then quite
too serious to  be overcome—but we could always
make shift  to go  along for a few weeks or months
longer, that is, until peace came.
  The spirits of the American group could always
rebound  from  the effect of each  disappointment.
One  thing that helped  was the activity  and  move- 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  137
ment demanded of the delegates by the nature of
their work.  Only the few of us who were kept close
to the central oflfice in Brussels felt the depression
of physical inaction.  Our relief came from the con-
stant coming in from the provinces of the busy  and
excited delegates with reports of new troubles or new
successes.
  Sometimes one or more of the men would not be
allowed by the German military authorities to come
in to Brussels for some time; the delegate stationed
at St. Quentin was once held for seven weeks, dur-
ing a time of active military operations along the
front of his district.  The men, especially those from
Northern France, often had exciting tales to  tell of
their proximity to  shell fire or bursting bombs from
raiding  French and English fliers which, instead of
discouraging  other  young men  from any desire to
work there—as they might have discouraged older
ones—only increased the list of candidates for the
district. 
CHAPTER  TEN
        CANAL BOATS AND TROUBLES
   A  S for details of the work itself, they crowd for-
  / %  ward for  recognition.  How begin?  How
^  -^choose among the many phases of the work
the few that may be touched on?  For choose one
must.  Perhaps the matter of internal transport and
distribution comes  properly first in order.  For the
food had certainly  first to be carried to all parts of
the country before it  could be given  out to the
people.
  We already know—I have already said it several
times—that when  the supplies  reached Rotterdam
in the overseas  ships, they  were trans-shipped into
canal boats and  railroad  cars and sent  on through
Holland into Belgium and Northern France.  Noth-
ing  easier to say, but perhaps nothing harder to do
in all the Commission's undertaking.  Seven thou-
sand  canal-boat  and several thousand  railroad-car
loads  of food and clothing—altogether nearly three
million  tons; an average of almost one  hundred
                      138 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  139
thousand tons a month for two and a half years—
to be moved distances varying  from eighty-five to
two hundred and twenty-five miles, through a coun-
try disorganised and impotent as regards the desire
of its own people to help, and very much over-
organised and brutally potent as regards the atti-
tude  and control of the  invaders, who seemed
stupidly antagonistic, even  when they pretended to
be willing to help.   And all these boats and cars
with their life-saving loads to be moved on time.
Tons of wheat and beans and bacon are perfectly
useless to people just dead of starvation.
  The Ten Commandments for the American Com-
mission  and the Belgian National Committee were
all concentrated in one: Feed the People Regularly,
no matter  the cost  in energy, in compromise, in
money;  no matter the difficulty or the sore discour-
agement; keep the food coming in; keep it going to
the mouths of all.  That the Commission managed
to obey its  Ten Commandments in one, the fact
that no commune of all the  5,000 in the Belgian and
French  occupied territory missed for a  single  day
its ration of bread,  from the  time the  Americans
came in until they went out, is the sufficient evidence. 
140  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  But I want to point out a few details of the diffi-
culties under which the Commission laboured, and the
methods used by it, in  solving a single one of its
problems,  namely, that  of internal  transportation,
which was the basic problem in all  the  work after
the supplies had once reached Rotterdam.
  In doing this I avail  myself of certain notes re-
cently  prepared  by  Mr.  Prentiss Gray, for nine
months assistant director  of  the Commission in
Brussels, and director for that last strenuous month
of April of this year after America had declared war,
and all but a small group, left to  close up accounts
and  turn  over  affairs to  the  Spanish and Dutch
neutrals who succeeded us in Belgium, had gone out.
Mr. Gray  had a large share in the successful main-
tenance of the transport system during the whole
time of his service.
  First is  to be remembered the complete paralysis
of all means of transport  in Belgium immediately
following the occupation by the German arms.  A
large number of Belgian  canal boats had been requi-
sitioned by the Germans.   Another large number had
been taken from the country before the advancing
armies  had overrun the  whole of  it,  and all these, 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 141
until some agreement of subsequent non-requisition
had  been reached, steadfastly—and  wisely—were
kept away for fear of seizure.  The canals in many
places had been broken, locks blown up, and many
barges had  been sunk  in  the narrow waterways.
Most of the rolling-stock of the Belgian railroads had
been run off into France in front of the advancing
German armies, and many railroad bridges destroyed.
All lines of communication not rendered inoperative
were taken over by the army and restricted to military
transport. All freedom of movement of the people was
withdrawn; the use of  telephones interdicted and
most fines cut; the telegraph was limited to army use.
  For months after the incoming of the invaders it
was impossible  to learn the actual conditions of the
canals, or to keep in constant touch with the canal
boats in their progress along the few waterways that
were usable  and were used by the Commission  in
its first movement of supplies.  It was not until the
end of December, 1914,  two months after the work
began, that the  Commission had been able to collect
the necessary accurate data concerning the condi-
tions of all the canals, and the width, depth, and
length of all the locks.  Nor was it possible for some 
142  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
time to get a definite understanding of the conditions
of movement that the German authorities intended
to impose on the canal boats and boatmen engaged
by the Commission.
   Finally, matters were arranged with some approach
to definiteness, and an organisation of the canal-boat
service of a workable kind was effected.
   The boats used were Dutch as well as Belgian and
were first chartered either for single trips or for vari-
ous  time periods in which  several  trips would  be
made.  Finally,  because of  constant  difficulties in
the matter of chartering, due principally to constant
interference by the German authorities, the Commis-
sion arranged for the organisation of a "ship owning
department," which, although essentially a Belgian
organisation in connection with the Provincial Com-
mittee of Antwerp, acted as the agent of  the Com-
mission in purchasing, time-chartering, and manag-
ing canal boats  and tugs.  This  arrangement, put
through only after overcoming much opposition from
the German authorities and  suffering heart-breaking
delays  and  interference on  their part, resulted  in
giving us a fleet of 500 canal  boats and 35 tugs under
our  own control. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  143
  The work of internal transport followed—when it
went according to programme—the following general
course.
  On the receipt of advices from the Commission's
New York or London oflfice that a ship  had sailed
with a given cargo, the Rotterdam oflfice immediately
made out a division list of the cargo in accordance
with the  needs of the various Belgian  provinces.
These needs, constantly compiled in Brussels, were
as constantly made known in Rotterdam, and served
as basis for the assignments of each cargo.
  The canal-boat department of the  Rotterdam
oflfice would arrange to have suflficient boats ready
for the trans-shipment of the overseas cargo immedi-
ately on its arrival.  The boat inspectors examined
them to see that they complied with  all of the regu-
lations of the Dutch Customs, and to see that there
was no means of entering the hold of the  canal boat
when once it had been sealed after loading. The boat
was preparing for a long trip through  a country filled
with hungry Belgians—and hardly less hungry Ger-
mans—and the one insurance that the cargo  would
arrive intact in the hands of the American delegate
at the point of destination was the absolute sealing 
144  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
of the boat.  Our men were not allowed to accom-
pany a canal boat, but they could inspect it at almost
every  point on  its journey.   In Brussels  a large
chart indicated the position every day of every mov-
ing canal boat.
  On arrival, then, of the overseas  ship in Rotter-
dam, the allotted canal boats were immediately put
alongside and the rapid and often  record-breaking
trans-shipment of  cargo  occurred.  It  was done
under the eyes of Dutch Customs officials and Com-
mission inspectors, who watched every phase of the
work and verified the weighing of the cargo with great
exactitude.
  Simultaneously with the loading, the pass formali-
ties  were complied  with.  A photographer  made
photographs of all members of the crew for the pass-
ports.  These passes were of different kinds, accord-
ing to whether the canal boats were Dutch, and hence
not subject to seizure in Belgium by the Germans,
or Belgian (except those that had escaped from Bel-
gium before a certain date, and  had been excepted
from seizure if they returned, and were hence known
as "free boats") which were subject to  seizure  and
for return of which to Belgium  after going at  any 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  145
time to Holland for a cargo, the Commission  was
responsible to the German authorities.  In the event
of the refusal of any such boat to go back into Bel-
gium, the Commission was  to pay its  full value to
the Germans.  To insure this payment  the Germans
compelled us to keep a sum of 100,000  francs ($20,-
000) in their hands.
  Each canal boat flew a large flag marked "Com-
mission for Relief in Belgium," and a larger canvas
banner bearing the serial number of the shipment.
  Thus equipped and ready for  their  journey,  the
boats were  arranged  in strings  for towing. This
towage was done chiefly by tugs under charter to the
Commifsion. On certain canals, however, only horse
or man towage was allowed, and as the Germans were
constantly sweeping the country of horses, the pull-
ing of the boats on these canals was done chiefly by
men.  From Rotterdam, then, the strings of boats
wouM start over their first or main routes;  via the
Ghent Canal for Ghent, Bruges,  Courtrai, Western
Hainault, Lille, and  Valenciennes; via  the Antwerp
Canal for Antwerp,  Brussels, Louvain,  or for trans-
shipment at  these points to  rail for Luxemburg and
Northern France (except Lille and Valenciennes); or 
146  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
via the Liege Canal for Hasselt, Liege, Namur, and
Eastern Hainault.  After the boats passed the  Bel-
gian border they came under the immediate control
of the Brussels oflfice, which could change their course
and  destinations  if the exigencies of the situation
inside the country demanded.

  During the early days of  the work, gifts  of food
of extremely various kinds poured into Rotterdam
for the Commission from America and Great Britain.
This variety of food came to be a source of much
trouble.  It made it difficult to load the canal boats
to best effect,  and it was almost impossible to dis-
tribute it fairly.  A single canal boat departed from
Rotterdam one day with forty-eight different kinds
of food.  It was this difficulty of economical trans-
port and fair distribution that led the Commission
to adopt the policy, sometimes criticised by unthink-
ing persons, of selling many of the  gifts of food mis-
cellany and luxuries to those in Belgium who could
afford to buy  them, and  using the  money  for the
purchase of the much more  necessary staples to be
given to the destitute.
  The distribution of the canal-boat cargoes in Bel- 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 147
gium  and Northern France was determined by the
Brussels  oflfice on the basis of inventories taken in
the first part of each month, showing the stocks on
hand  and the rate  of consumption in each region.
The ration was not made uniform over the whole
country,  but varied according to the special needs of
different  regions.  It was felt that the agricultural
communities, where green vegetables and potatoes
were grown and could be had, should not receive so
large a quantity of imported foods as the large cities
and industrial regions.  The fairness of the distribu-
tion came, indeed,  to be  a burning question  in all
the relief work.
  Often,  when the stocks in the provinces approached
low ebb,  all the earlier plans of distribution had to
be cast aside and the canal boats shunted about the
waterways to relieve those sections most in need of
immediate help. Hardly a day passed, as a matter
of fact, that  some readjustment did not have  to be
made in the distributing situation. In various crises
the possibility of issuing a bread supply in certain
regions for the following week depended entirely on
these  swift readjustments.
  In order to keep in closest possible touch with the 
148  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
situation in every part of the country, a daily sheet
was kept at Brussels, showing in detail for each prov-
ince  the stocks on hand, rate of consumption, the
date to which the province had suflficient food to
last, and the last date when additional supplies should
leave Rotterdam in order to arrive on time to make
no break in the feeding.  This statement for all the
principal commodities was sent to Rotterdam weekly
for their guidance in making shipments, and was fol-
lowed by them as closely as possible.
  The  system was further complicated by a special
importing programme of foodstuffs destined exclu-
sively  for  the  popular soup  kitchens.   As these
"soupes" furnished  the backbone for the system of
feeding the destitute, it was imperative that they
should   be  supplied first.   A  careful census of all
people  utilizing this form of public feeding was tab-
ulated  from month to month, and the available sup-
plies divided  from Rotterdam according to a per-
centage table based on these records.  These cargoes
were specially labelled and billed and had precedence
over all other shipments.
  The  varying conditions in the provinces and the
consequent many rearrangements necessary  in our 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  149
"soupes" programme are best indicated by the fact
that,  while  in  January,  1917,  15 per cent, of the
396,023 people in the City of Antwerp were depend-
ent on the public soupes, by April 15th the number
had increased to  54 per cent,  of  the population,
which required that three and one-half times as much
food must be shipped to Antwerp for this special
branch of the work in April as in January.
  Just as Belgium's  magnificent  network of canals
was of inestimable value to the  Commission in its
distribution  of  food  supplies by canal boat, so the
fact that Belgium has more miles of railroad in pro-
portion to its  area  than any other country  was
equally helpful.
  The Belgian railroads are of  two  types.  The
standard-gauge main trunk lines are owned and oper-
ated by the Government, and consequently passed
over into the hands  of the occupying authorities.
Connecting practically every small village with the
large centres are narrow-gauge steam roads- that wan-
der over the face of the level country as if they were
following cattle trails.  These roads are partly gov-
ernmentally, partly municipally, and partly privately
owned, and  their management was but little inter- 
150  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
fered with by the Germans' until the spring of 1917,
when they began to dismantle some of these roads,
carrying the tracks and ties off to the front to build
up the transport service behind the lines.
  These narrow-gauge roads did much of the hauling
for the  Commission of supplies from the provincial
or regional warehouses to the points of distribution,
and as the main roads became more and more con-
gested  by movement  of troops and army  supplies,
the importance  of  these  smaller roads increased.
The  Dutch Government generously  gave the Com-
mission free railroad transport on all the Dutch rail-
roads, and an agreement was reached with the  Ger-
man Government whereby only one-half the regular
tariff should be paid by us for freight inside of the
occupied territory.
  Each winter we had feared that the canals and
rivers of Belgium might freeze and thus shut off all
traffic by waterways.   Such a serious freezing had
not occurred for fifteen years, but, to be safe, a care-
ful plan was worked out in advance and negotiations
carried on with the Dutch and German authorities
for the supply of the necessary railroad cars should
this event ever come to pass. 
       ALBERT N. CONNETT
Director in Brussels in February-April, 1915
         CARL A. YOUNG
Director in Rotterdam from January, 1915,
            to June, 1916 
        Copyright by Harris y Ewing, Washington, D. C.
            OSCAR T. CROSBY
  Director in Brussels, May to September, 191 5.
Later Assistant Secretary of the Treasury  and
now member of the Inter-Allied Conference.
           LIN DON W.  BATES
First Director in New  York,  November,  1914,
            to November, 1915 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 151
  In February, 1917, our fears were realised.  Every
river and canal was blocked with ice, which gradually
attained a metre in thickness, and defied all efforts of
our ice breakers.
  Our plan called for the despatch  to  Rotterdam
from Belgium empty, and the return  loaded, of two
hundred  German  cars per day, beginning four days
after the freeze-up, and the gradual increase of this
number up to three hundred cars per day. This pro-
gramme was never fully lived up  to  because of the
movement at this time by the Germans of large sup-
plies for their armies, in anticipation  of the summer
offensive, but our shipments from Rotterdam reached
as high as 3,000 tons per day, and by them we were
able to carry on the supplying of the country without
serious interruption during all the forty days that
navigation was closed.
  The difficulties  that had to be overcome were tre-
mendous; breaking barges out of the ice in Rotter-
dam harbour so that they might come alongside the
loading wharfs or elevators; keeping canals open in
Belgium  up to the  last minute so that barges  en
route might get to  the  nearest unloading  ports;
checking, unloading and  diverting railroad cars  as 
152  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
the needs required.  All called for the hardest work
imaginable,  and a  complete transformation over-
night of the existing system based on shipments by
water. All custom of the port of Rotterdam in the
manner of loading cars was upset.  The Dutch had
never heard of loading  wheat in bulk in cars, but
sacking it was a slow process, and could not be tol-
erated.  Therefore the cars were first made tight,
which was a serious job, because the rolling-stock was
in a badly run-down condition.  It kept men work-
ing day and night.  Some of the gear of the elevators
had  to be re-arranged so that the grain would run
down the spouts into the cars at low tide.   Basket
cranes had to be rigged, and thirteen loading stations
in the port of Rotterdam created.
  To meet the changed conditions and permit the
discharge of cars, the unloading gear of all the mills
in Belgium had to be changed, and where this could
not be done the wheat was ground in a central mill
and the flour sent on to destination.  Our transport
and  handling organisation, which had taken more
than two years to build up, was disrupted and disor-
ganised in a day. But only for a day, for out of  a
maritime organisation appeared in twenty-four hours 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 153
a railroad organisation, which daily increased its
handling capacity up to 3,000 tons per day.
  But no sooner was it created that we began to plan
to turn it back again into the handling of canal boats
and tugs, and when finally the thaw set in after six
weeks of ice, and water transport was resumed again,
we were prepared to pick up the  canal boats where
they had been frozen in, and to despatch newly loaded
boats from Rotterdam. 
CHAPTER ELEVEN
          WHAT THE BELGIANS EAT
       THE story of Belgium will never be told.  That
        is the word that passes oftenest between us.
        No one will ever by word of mouth or in writ-
ing give it to others in its entirety, or even tell what
he himself has seen and felt.   The longer he stays
the more he realises the futility of any such attempt;
the more he becomes dumb."
  My wife wrote these words in Brussels just a year
ago as the first paragraph of an attempt to describe
a single phase of the story of Belgium in martyrdom
—the phase of the work, beautiful in its loyalty, its
intelligence  and its  sacrifice,  of the *" women of
Belgium turning tragedy into triumph."
  The words  are  literally true. My own feeling,
in the  face of my  wish to make real to my readers
the actual situation and the  actual course of the
relief work in Belgium during the past three  years,
  * Women of Belgium, by Charlotte Kellogg, 1917. Funk and Wagnalls
Company.  $1.00.  All profits of the book go to The Commission for
Relief in Belgium.
                       154 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 155
is one of helplessness—of despair.  How I have held
back from attempting this  chapter  about the de-
tails of the relief work inside Belgium, its organi-
sation, its  methods,  above all its intimate relation
to the Belgium people in all their misery and nobility!
And I know  now that it will be a chapter like the
others before it, of dry facts and figures, of cata-
loguing but not revealing details of human suffering
and  human activity  in an amazing emergency and
an equally amazing effort to meet this emergency.
The  time I spent inside of Belgium between May,
1915 and March, 1917, is  now all a dream; or is it
the rest of life in a country of safety and comfort,
among a generation of mankind that knows not
war, that has been all a  dream?  Can there exist
on the same earth, at the same world time in reality,
the two kinds of human experience represented, one
by the days and events of a Kansas village and a
California college through the years of a generation,
and  another of Belgium through the months since
August, 1914?  One of these must be the long sweet
sleep of childhood or  the other the horror of a drug-
created delirium.  One or the other must be unreal.
  In those first  days of November and December, 
 156  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 1914, the requirements of the organisation of the
 work of the Commission in New  York, London,
 Rotterdam and Brussels were serious and had to be
 met swiftly and effectively.  To meet them Mr.
 Hoover called on engineer  friends; Lindon Bates,
 as first director  in New  York; Millard  Hunsiker
 and  John B. White, as first directors in London;
 Capt. J. F. Lucey, first  director  in  Rotterdam;
 and  Dannie Heineman, first  director  in  Brussels,
 were all engineers or men of engineering affairs, so
 that the Commission started work on a basis of
 "engineering efficiency."   Its maintenance on that
 basis has undoubtedly been due to the successive
 incoming of other engineers to fill its active director-
 ships.
  New York's later directors have been J. B. White,
 J. F. Lucey and W.  L.  Honnold—all engineers.
 London's later  directors  have  been  Mr.  Honnold
 and Wm. B. Poland—both engineers.  Rotterdam's
 later directors  have been  C. A. Young and  W.  L.
Brown—also both engineers.   Only in the Brussels
office have men  other than engineers sat in the
director's chair.  And  there have  been twice  as
many men used to fill that chair as have been used 
 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  157
in any of the other head offices; the Brussels director-
ship wore out  men's nerves.  Following Mr. Heine-
man, Captain  Lucey, who had thoroughly organised
the Rotterdam oflfice and work, was in  charge in
Brussels  for a few months.  He  was followed by
A.  N. Connett, an engineer, and he in turn, by
0.  T. Crosby, another man  of  engineering affairs,
now  assistant  secretary of  the  Treasury.   I  fol-
lowed Mr. Crosby.  It was  the first break in the
engineer's  monopoly!  After me  came  Wm. B.
Poland another engineer and now director in London.
After Mr. Poland the oflfice was in my hands again
for several months, and again following  me came
Warren Gregory, an attorney of San Francisco, and
thus the second exception to  the engineer character
of  the  service. Finally, when Mr. Gregory  left
Brussels  with all but seven  of the Americans on
March 31, he turned  the director's oflfice over for
the last  month of its  occupation by an American,
a month of great stress and difficulty, to Prentiss
Gray, a Californian shipping man.
  Under these successive directors—all of them in
turn  under the stimulus and  inspiration and  imme-
diate supervision of the "Big Chief," Mr.  Hoover— 
 158 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 the manifold details and relations of the relief work
 inside Belgium gradually unfolded.   From  the be-
 ginning this unfolding has gone hand in hand  with
 the development of the many and widely inclusive
 activities of the great relief machinery of the native
 Belgian organisations headed by the Comite National
 with its most capable heads,  Francqui, de Wouters,
 Janssens, Van Bree, and the rest.
  But it would be very unfair to leave the impression
 that the initiating and working out of the  myriad
 details of the relief work  was exclusively or even
 chiefly due to the merit of the head offices of the
 American and Belgian organisations in Belgium. On
 the contrary, the credit for these details of  control
 should go principally to the field men of the Com-
 mission, the few active young American delegates in
 the provinces, and to the many devoted Belgians of
 the provincial, regional, communal and special com-
mittees.  It was these men—and women—who came
constantly in immediate contact with the conditions
and needs of the people, conditions and needs vary-
ing from region to region, and who determined on a
basis of observation  and experiment—the trial  and
error method of experimental scientists—the forms 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 159
taken by the relief work in its various phases.  The
coordination  of all  the variety  of  work  and the
various methods  of  accomplishing it, and  the gen-
eral organisation  necessary to support it, were the
functions of the head oflfices.  But the actual work
was done in the thousands of communes; the thou-
sands of canteens and soupes, the hundreds of cen-
tres of the special charities,  the  scores of regional
and provincial headquarters.
  Next, probably, in  difficulty and complexity to
the problems of internal transportation referred to
in our last chapter came the problems of flour mak-
ing, baking and bread-rationing.   In order that per-
fect control could be maintained over the supply of
breadstuffs—the basis of the whole food ration—and
a fair distribution of  bread to rich and poor alike be
accordingly insured,  the entire business of milling
and baking in  Belgium was  carried out under the
immediate direction of the relief organisation.  The
amount of wheat to be milled was  determined for
each mill, and only  that much grain was  assigned
it; the kind of flour to be made was determined, and
finally  its distribution to the bakers adjusted in
detail. 
160  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  No baker who baked bread from relief flour could
use, or even have in his bake-shop, any other flour—
there was always some smuggled in from Holland,
and there was always German flour to be baked for
the German officials and their casinos.  Each baker
was assigned so much flour; he had to produce from
it  so many  loaves of a  determined  quality  and
weight, and he gave out these loaves only to certain
listed canteen or communal depots or to a listed
number of clients, each furnished with a personal or
family bread-card, which allowed them to  obtain at
a fixed price a fixed amount of bread, determined by
the number of persons dependent on them.  If  the
customer was destitute he received the  money or a
ticket for his  bread from  the benevolent committee
of his commune.
  The baker's profit was precisely determined by the
relief organisation, and for any  infraction of  the
regulations governing him and his work he was haled
before a "baker's court," wholly outside  of  any
Belgian  or German legality but presided over by
members of the relief organisation. There he could
be "warned," or flour withheld from him for a week,
a fortnight, a month, or for all the rest of the time 
 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN  BELGIUM  161
of the relief work,  according to the seriousness of
his offence.  Offences on the part of the customers—
as, for example, attempted padding of their family
list, or attempts to get on the rolls of more than one
baker—were promptly made known by the neigh-
bours and the proper corrections, or penalties, en-
forced.  It was absolute control.
  All the  bread used in Belgium for the last three
years has been war bread made of flour derived from
wheat milled at 80% to 97%  (changing  with the
varying need at different times  of "stretching" the
wheat), mixed  with a varying  percentage of  flour
made from other cereals, as rye, barley, corn,  and
rice.  "Wheat milled at 80%"  means that 80% of
the  wheat grains  goes  into  the  flour;  the  rest
composes the "grain offal"  (middlings, shorts, bran)
and  is used for animal feed.   Our experience has
shown that a whole population (except for a few
invalids and weakly children) can  be safely fed on
bread made from wheat flour of from 80% to 85%
milling, but that when coarser  flour is used a part
of the population cannot stand it.  This has  also
been the  experience of  the other war-bread eating
countries.  Germany mills at 82%,  England at 81%, 
162  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
France at 85%, and only Italy at 90%.  The mill-
ing percentage  of American standard white flour is
considerably lower than 80%; of the fancy patents
much lower.  The Belgian  daily ration of this war-
bread has averaged about twelve ounces, varying at
times in accordance with the abundance or scarcity
of the wheat available.
  The other items, of the  daily relief ration were
listed on a separate card.   These were bacon (trifle
over 1 oz.), lard (trifle over  ^ oz.), rice (23^ oz.),
dried beans and peas (1%  oz.), cerealine {\% oz.),
potatoes  (103^ oz.), and brown sugar (trifle over %
oz.).  The ration of all of  these together,  with the
addition of bread, which the relief organisation has
tried to maintain, amounts to about 870 grams (303^
ounces) in weight.  The  protein content in it is
about 45 grams and the fat content about 43 grams.
It is capable  of  producing about  2,000 utilisable
calories, which  is nearly enough for an ordinary in-
dividual doing no work, but is hardly more than half
enough for a man at work.
  This ration,  all of it except the potatoes composed
of foodstuffs imported into Belgium by the Commis-
sion, cost about eight cents a day laid down  in  the 
  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 163
communal depots.  It is a ration worked out very
carefully to make money go as far and as effectively
as possible  in the providing of  a scientifically bal-
anced, readily transportable and storable and easily
divisible food supply to a people whose whole eating
could be  controlled and directed.  Many Belgians
have lived on it almost exclusively for three long
years.
  But in  the  same breath it must be added that
many Belgians have had more.  All those who could
afford it have bought certain native supplies,  espe-
cially vegetables, fruit,  milk, eggs, and some meat.
On the other hand many have not been able, for lack
of suflficient money from  charity, to  have all this
ration.  The hundreds of thousands of unemployed
have found their little weekly allowance insufficient
to allow them to purchase the whole ration.  And
the truly  destitute, the millions of the soup and
bread lines!  What of them?—and the little children
who  need special food, above all milk?  And the
young mothers, the mothers-to-be, and the aged and
ill?   And at the other extreme, the strong miners in
the coal mines that have to be worked if Belgium is
not to freeze—and is to have light, and some mov- 
 164  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 ing trains and trams—what of these, whose ration is
 enough for a  man resting but not more than half
 enough for a man at hard work?  What happens here
 is that their wives give up part of their share that
 the men may have more.  We have seen women fall
 fainting from hunger weakness in the miner's homes;
 they had given their food to the husband and chil-
 dren.
   It is all this side of the picture that is indescrib-
 able.  We have  neither the brush nor the  color to
 paint it.  And yet it is the struggle and the  incident
 of this phase of the work, of this personal contact
 and effort with misery; this heart-breaking, nerve-
 stretching race against death, that stand out in the
 memory of every Commission man who worked in
 Belgium.  And it  is  what  he saw,  in connection
 with this, of fortitude and nobility, of self-sacrifice
and untiring effort for others among  the men and
women of Belgium that makes his memory a glorious
one despite  the background of all the harrowing
scenes of suffering  and tragedy that he can never
efface from the picture.
  The most conspicuous revelation of the degree to
which a great portion of the Belgian people is de- 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 165
pendent on charity for its daily bread is that afforded
by the long "soup lines" visible in every hamlet and
every section of every town  and city in the land.
Over a million and a half people were standing every
day  in  these lines by  the  end of  1916.   How
many there are now, as time  and events have gone
on bringing with them increasing exhaustion of na-
tional and individual resources and a steady lessen-
ing in the monthly totals  of imported food for dis-
tribution from the communal depots, I cannot say.
In the province of the Hainaut  alone  the number
jumped from 60,000 in February of 1917 to 400,000
at the time the  last American   delegates had to
leave in May.   In Antwerp the  number increased
in the first half of this year  from one-third of the
whole population to one-half  of it.  On the first of
May in one of the Antwerp soup lines twelve persons
fainted and fell from  the line as they waited their
turn.  It is probable that  every third man, woman
and child in Belgium  to-day depends for continued
existence on the daily pint of soup and ten ounces
of bread doled out in the soup lines.
  One of our Commission representatives in the
Province of Liege made a careful study in November 
166  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
and December of last year of the actual economic and
food conditions of a considerable number of working
men's families.   A few of these  working men had
full work; more had but partial work, while some
were idle and wholly dependent on charity.   He
found the families of these men  to  average five to
six persons and the weekly family income from work
and charity to average 20.81 francs (about $4) being
an average daily income per person of 53 centimes
(10 cents). Of this income 72.7% was expended for
food, 2.7% for rent, 7.2% for clothing, 6.5% for  heat
and light, and 10.9% for miscellaneous items.  The
food value averaged 1,500 calories per day per per-
son.  Taking the minimum number of calories per
person per day necessary for those who are at rest
to be 2,000 (or 2,250 as most physiologists hold), it
will be seen that the individuals of these Liege fami-
lies were actually living on a ration considerably less
than the actual minimum need for safe bare existence
when at rest. Yet some of the  men are at work.
That they can work at all means that the women and
children  are making sacrifices for the wage-earning
husbands and fathers.  The daily bill of fare for many
of these families reads thus: Breakfast:  bread  with 
                WILLIAM  L. HONNOLD

Director in London, October, 1915, to July, 1916;  Director in
        New York from September, 1916, to present 
                               Copyright Underwood 13 Underwood, N.Y.
                     VERNON  KLLLOGG
   Assistant Director for Northern.France, German Great Headquar-
ters  (Charleville) June  to  September,  1915:  Director  in  Brussels
September to November, 1915, and July to October,  1916;  Director-
at-large in America, London,  and Brussels,  November,   1916, to
present.  Also now on "the staff of the U. S. Food Administration. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  167
a little lard  (for butter) and a hot drink made of
roasted grain;  dinner (at noon):  soup and bread
from the soup line for the father and mother, charity-
school lunch for the children. Supper: rutabagas and
some  of the  soup  and bread saved from the noon
meal.
  But the long privation and semi-starvation are hav-
ing their effect. The people exist: yes;  but  how
many are wasting away?  In the coal-mining regions
of the Hainaut, about Mons and Charleroi,  this is
especially  apparent.   A certain  mining company
which looks closely after its  employees and does its
utmost for  them has determined  that the mortality
among its thousands of men in the first trimester of
1917 was three and one-half times as great as the
average for the same period during  the preceding
three years.  The weight of all the workers—except
the developing young men composing but 5% of the
total—has decreased;  among 35% of the men the
reduction has been from ten to forty pounds each.
Three times as many  men are on the sick and dis-
abled  list as there were before.   Everywhere over
Belgium, and among all ages there is an alarming
increase of tuberculosis.  It is simply the expression 
168  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
of the steadily weakening capacity to resist disease.
  The Commission to-day is struggling harder than
ever before to obtain and transport overseas and into
Belgium the needed food.  But the ever-increasing
shortage of ships, coupled with the ever-increasing
demands of the Allies and our own nation for these
ships for military transports—the carriage of men,
munitions and food, is making the "relief of Bel-
gium" more and more difficult. The real relief that
the Belgians and the civilized world are praying for
is the early  rescue of the Belgian land and  people
from German occupation.  That alone will really save
Belgium;  and even that  must not be too long de-
layed. 
CHAPTER TWELVE
       THE SAVING OF THE CHILDREN
      BUT in the meantime, and all the time, the work
       of caring for the Belgians must go on, and is
       going on.  It is not limited to the general ravi-
taillement and  the general secours of  the soup lines
which apply to the people, or to great groups of
them, en masse.   It takes also many special forms
adapted to the many special needs. The babies and
the aged; the young mothers and the women imme-
diately expectant of motherhood;  the "ashamed
poor"; the churches and the priests and sisters; the
farmers needing help to restore their wrecked build-
ings;  the mutilated soldiers of the early war days;
the distressed  special groups,  thrown out of oppor-
tunity to work;  the artisans, artists, and  profes-
sional men;  the lace-workers; the soldier-prisoners
in Germany, dependent for their  very life  on the
special food packages regularly sent them;  the wo-
men  and girls in the great ouvroirs,  where the old
clothing  from America,  Canada,  and England  is
                       169 
170  FIGHTING STARVATION IN  BELGIUM
worked over;  all these and other special needs are
struggled with every hour of every day.  And it is
in this special work, the work of these  special chari-
ties, that the Belgian resourcefulness, quiet persistent
heroism, and self-sacrificing devotion have been ex-
hibited in superlative degree.
  But American help has done what it can for these
special ceuvres as well as for the general ravitaillement
and  secours.  Side by side the Belgians and Ameri-
cans have worked for the saving of the unfortunate.
The Americans  have  offered all their resources of
world charity, all their influence with the occupying
authorities;  the Belgians have offered their intimate
knowledge of the condition and  psychology of their
own people, and given their brains and hands and their
own charity as well, to  an amount as yet incalculable.
  Take the  special care of the  babies  and children
for example.  Besides the carefully developed system
of school lunches by which over a million Belgian
children of school age  are  having their  insufficient
home feeding eked out  by a daily simple meal in the
schoolroom, the special children's canteens are giv-
ing food and—no less important—medical attention
to over 200,000 infants under three years.  In  the 
           PRENTISS N. GRAY
  Assistant Director in Brussels from June, 1916,
to March,  1917, and  Director in  April,  1917.
Later Assistant  Director in  London and  now
Assistant Director  in New  York.
          WILLIAM  B.  POLAND
  Assistant  Director in Brussels, September to
November, 1915, then Director, December, 1915,
to June, 1916, and now  Director in London. 
       WARREN GREGORY                           WALTER L. BROWN
Director in Brussels, November, 1916, to          Director in Rotterdam,  July.  1916. to present
             April, 1917 
 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  171
province of Liege alone there are 111 special chari-
ties for children faithfully looked after by 1,500 vol-
unteer workers giving all their time day after day
through the long months to the service of love and
patriotism.
  In Brussels  the famous "Little Bees" are taking
care of  practically every child  needing help in the
whole great city.  These "Little  Bees" existed be-
fore the war as a benevolent organisation composed
of the  daughters  of  well-known Brussels  families
banded together to help poor children, especially
those sub-normal in health or mentality.  With the
outbreak  of  war,  mothers joined the daughters,
funds were swiftly increased, canteens expanded in
number, over  a  hundred well-known Brussels phy-
sicians added to  the volunteer helping staff, and now
the "Little Bees"  mean the difference between life
and death to  tens of thousands of Belgium's rising
generation.
  Here is a swiftly drawn picture  of a visit to one of
the Little Bees' canteens.  (Charlotte Kellogg, in
"Women of Belgium.")

  "On  the  second floor, between two large con- 
172  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
necting rooms, I found Madame, in white, superin-
tending the day's preparation of the tables for 1,662.
That was the size of her family.  Fourteen young
women, with bees embroidered in the Belgian colors
on their white caps, were flying to  and fro from the
kitchen to the long counters in the hallway  piled
with plates,  then to the shelves against the walls of
the dining room, where they deposited their hundreds
of slices of bread and saucers for dessert.   Some were
hurrying the soup plates and the 1,662 white bowls
along the tables, while others poured milk or  went
on with the bread-cutting.  Several women  were
perspiring in the kitchens and vegetable rooms. The
potato-peeling machine, the  last proud acquisition
which was saving them untold labour, had turned
out the day's kilos of potatoes, which were already
cooked with meat, carrots and green vegetables into
a thick, savory stew.  The big fifty-quart cans were
being filled  to be carried to the dining  room; the
dessert of boiled rice was getting  its final stirring.
Madame was darting about,  watching every detail,
assisting in every department.
  "It was raining  outside, but all was white, and
clean, and inviting  within.  Suddenly  there was a 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  173
rush of feet in the court-yard below.   I looked out
the window;  in the  rain, 1,662 children  between
three and fourteen years,  mothers often leading the
smaller ones—not an umbrella  or  rubber among
them—were lining up with their cards, eager to be
passed by the sergeant.  These  kind-hearted, long-
suffering sergeants kept this wavering  line  in place,
as the children noisily climbed the long stairway—
calling, pushing.  One little girl stepped out to put
fresh  flowers before  the bust  of  the Queen. Boys
and girls under six crowded into the first of the large,
airy rooms, older girls into the second, while the
bigger boys climbed to the floor above.   With much
chattering and shuffling of  sabots they slid along
the low benches to their places at the  long, narrow
tables.  The women  hurried between  the  wiggling
rows, ladling out the hot, thick  soup.  The air was
filled  with cries of  'Beaucoup,  mademoiselle, beau-
coup!9  A few even  said, 'Only a little, Mademoi-
selle.'  Everybody said something.  One tiny, golden-
haired thing pleaded:  'You know I like  the little
pieces of meat best.'   In no time they discovered
that I was new, and  tried slyly to induce me to give
them extra slices of bread, or bowls of milk. 
174  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
  "In this multitude each was clamouring for indi-
vidual attention, and  for the most part getting it.
Very little ones were being helped  to feed  them-
selves;  second portions of soup were often given if
asked for.  Madame  seemed to be  everywhere at
once, lifting one after another in her arms to get a
better look at eyes or glands.  Her husband, a phy-
sician of international reputation, was in the little
clinic at the end of the hall, weighing and examining
those whose  turn  it was to go to him  that day.
Later he came out and passed up and down the rows
to get an impression of the general condition of this
extraordinary family.   When,  for  a moment, hus-
band and wife  stood together in the middle of the
vast room, they seemed with infinite solicitude to be
gathering all the 1,662 in their arms—their own boy
is  at the front. And all the time the 1,662 were
rapidly devouring their bread and soup.
  "Then began the cries of 'Dessert, mademoiselle,
dessert!'  Tired arms  carried the 1,662 soup  plates
to the kitchen, ladled out 1,662 portions of rice, and
set them before eager rows.  Such a final scraping
of spoons, such fascinating play of voice and gesture.
Then, the last crumb eaten, they  crowded  up to 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  175
offer sticky hands with 'Merci, mademoiselle,*  and
'Au Revoir.9  The  clatter of sabots  and laughter
died away through the court-yard, and the hundreds
started back to school.
  "The strong American physician, who had helped
ladle the soup, tried to swing his arm back in posi-
tion.  I looked at the women who had been doing
this practically every day for seven hundred days.
Madame was apparently not thinking of resting—
only of the next day's ration.
  "I  discovered later that  at four  o'clock that
afternoon she had charge of  a canteen for  400
mothers  and  their  new  babies,  and that, after
that, she visited the family of a little  boy who  was
absent, according to the children, because his shirt
was being washed.
  "All  attempts  to  express admiration of  this
beautiful devotion are interrupted by  the cry: 'Oh,
but it is you—it is America—that  is doing  the
astonishing thing; we must give ourselves, but you
need not.   Your gift to us is the finest expression of
sympathy the world has known.''
    ******
  There are nearly 50,000 lace-workers—women and 
176  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
girls—in Belgium.  Before the war they supported
themselves, and some of their families also, by their
work.
  The Belgian laces have been long the pride of the
country.  The Queen had patronised the industry;
famous  artists vied  with one another in devising
beautiful patterns.  The laces found their way all
over the world.
  Came the war.  No more of  the  necessary fine
thread could be  brought in; no more lace could go
out.  Ruin faced the lace industry, starvation  the
lace-workers.   The Belgian and American relief or-
ganisations exerted  every  effort  to  make  some
arrangement with the blockading and the occupying
powers.  A number  of Belgium's noblest  women
gave their wits, their money and their whole hearts
to an effort to help save the precious industry—
and the more precious  bodies  and  souls of  the
stranded  girl  workers.  And  Mrs.  Whitlock—a
woman  finely  representing America's best type of
feminine development—capable, great-hearted, sim-
ply direct, devoted,  and radiating love of  home
and humanity, threw herself into the struggle with
all  her  energy  and  influence.   Needless  to say 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 177
she carried with  her all her  husband's official
and unofficial aid.
  The result of this struggle  has been to effect an
arrangement whereby over forty thousand of the
lace-workers have been enabled  to go on, in  some
degree,  with their  beautiful  work.  Each  woman
and girl can work two weeks out of every four.  The
Commission is made absolutely  responsible to the
Allied Governments for every bit of thread imported
by it.  For each pound of thread a pound of lace
must  be turned over by the lace-workers to the
Commission to take out of the country.   Sales are
made  in Paris,  London,  and  New York.  Part of
the money may be remitted into Belgium to pay the
wages of the lace-workers—who are thus kept from
the soup lines, and worse; and part is kept in Lon-
don for future payment when the  war is over.
  Another  charity  characterised equally by  kind-
ness of heart and good management is that known as
the "Assistance Discrete" with its significant motto:
Donne, et tais-toi  (Give,  and be silent).   It  looks
after ten thousand or more of the "Ashamed Poor"
of Brussels.  It is not possible to put all  of a proud
people into soup lines.  Some will starve in silence 
178  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
first.  And so a group of noble women, giving their
own service and money and with the assistance of
some funds that the relief organisation have assigned
to them, has developed discreet  methods  of saving
many of these honteux pauvres despite themselves.
They are helped by means they  do  not understand
—by persons they do not know.
  A most effective special charity  maintained ex-
clusively by  American aid is  one that  takes cog-
nisance  of "special cases."  It  is  known as  the
"Forbes  Fund,"  having  been  founded  by  Mrs.
Cameron Forbes of Boston.  One of the saddening
things ever before the  relief workers in  Belgium is
the inability to  give particular  help to individual
cases needing special  attention.   Our system calls
for an even distribution of the ration, but evenness
in distribution is not always synonymous with wisest
or most equitable distribution.   There may be two
war  widows, each with  three dependent  children;
one mother may be able to work and earn a little;
the other may  be ill,  or her  children may be ill.
This family needs more help than the other; but the
system which is devised primarily to effect an even
distribution to  millions  has difficulty  in  adapting 
Weak children (enfants debiles) being fed in a children's cantine in
                     Brussels
**J r         *if* r   i     !  •  ■
    fi  [  ill  '-      ^iL-*^—

                  J it   £  II.
A soup-line in Brussels 
ERCI *UX AMERICAlMS
mm.- mi mmmuvmm » ** ■ "a™


                                          Pioto Jy Pa«/ Thompson

Celebration in a large food-distributing centre in St.  Gilles,
                   a suburb of Brussels

The great central clothing supply  station  in  Brussels (formerly a
                       music hall and circus) 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 179
itself to the   special  case.  The  Forbes Fund is a
fund for special cases.  It has been a godsend both
to relief workers  and to their  wards.  Its founder
has been  blessed and prayed  for in Flemish and
French by hundreds of sick mothers, and despairing
husbands  and fathers.  Divided into little portions
it  has accomplished great results; it is one  of the
happiest inspirations in the  way  of special charity.

  But why catalogue the tears and  the  blessings?
Why try to enumerate a few of the special charities
where the list is so long?  It is only that the reader
may know that such special charities do exist; that
the work  of relief is not all  simply that of a great
commercial agency, a sublimated "grocery store," as
some thoughtless critic has expressed it.  The grocery
store is there; but it is only one part of  an organisa-
tion that  uses brains  and heart in no less measure
than commercial acumen and efficiency. The people
of Belgium do not  know the Americans as grocers;
they call them "saviours." 
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
FEEDING  NORTHERN  FRANCE  UNDER THE
        EYES OF THE GERMAN ARMY
       FRANCE and its friends peer anxiously across
       the  trench lines of the  western  front and
       wonder how it is going with Lille and Valen-
ciennes, St. Quentin and Sedan, and all that hidden
land lost for the moment to  the sight of the Allied
world.  Held in the merciless grasp of the invader;
ruled with the uncompromising rigour of an enemy
army embittered by checks and mounting losses;
with no friendly resident diplomats to inform them-
selves and  the world  outside of injustice, cruelty,
and tragedy, the people of occupied France exist in
silence and darkness.  Do they even exist?  And if
so, how?
  The Commission for Relief in Belgium should have
been named the Commission for Relief in Belgium
and Northern  France, for one-quarter of its activi-
ties have been devoted to the importation,  protec-
tion, and distribution of food and clothing in occupied
                      180 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  181
France, a region about twenty-one thousand square
kilometres in area and including a population (since
the invasion)  of  about two and a quarter million
French civilians.   These imprisoned French people
are mostly women and children and old men.  Al-
most every man of military age from this territory
is in the French army.  They had time and oppor-
tunity  to answer the call to the colours before the
steel ring was set about the land in September, 1914.
  Of the  present total  population of the German-
occupied territory of France,  hereafter usually re-
ferred  to as  Northern  France,  more  than half  is
included in the contiguous arrondissements of Lille,
Valenciennes  and  Douai, in the Departement du
Nord,  small in area, but thickly populated by an
industrial population depending always very largely
on food supplies imported into that region. There
are also other industrial centres in the occupied ter-
ritory,  notably the Longwy-Briey coal and iron-bear-
ing region in the Departement de Meurthe et Moselle.
Altogether, it is  undoubtedly fair  to  consider the
whole population of  the occupied territory as about
two-thirds industrial and one-third agricultural.
  Having this fact in mind, and recognising the in- 
182  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
evitable demands made on the resources of the region
by an invading and occupying army of great size,
and  the  serious situation of a population, largely
industrial, cut off suddenly from all normal external
sources of supply, it is easily understood that steps
would have to be taken  by local authorities and
philanthropic persons very soon after the occupation
to arrange  for food distribution to the poor and to
the workless people in the industrial districts.  Such
steps were, indeed, taken  at once; local authorities
and  citizen committees set themselves actively to
the task of obtaining possession  of local food sup-
plies and dealing them out economically and fairly.
Fortunately the harvest was just about completed
at the time of the occupation, and there was also a
considerable stock of cattle and sheep in the farm-
ing regions.  The town councils and local committees
arranged to  secure  resources by the  issuance of
"bons," notes, etc., and  by  borrowing from the
wealthier citizens.  Then grain and local food stocks
of groceries, clothing, etc., were purchased, mills com-
mandeered, and an equalised distribution begun.
  Despite the  good results of all this beneficent
activity, however, the time soon  came when it was 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 183
obvious that the local food supply what with Ger-
man requisitions and the needs of the people, was
rapidly nearing  exhaustion.  Indeed, it is only sur-
prising that the region was able to maintain itself
for as long as it did without external aid.  As a mat-
ter of fact, this  need for outside help, and appeals
for it, began to be sufficiently imperative in certain
parts of the occupied territory by December, 1914,
to attract the attention of the Commission, and in
January, February and March, 1915, some supplies of
flour, rice, dried beans and peas, bacon and condensed
milk were sent to Givet, Fumay,  Sedan, Charleville-
Mezieres and Longwy from its Belgian stocks.  Mau-
beuge and the immediately surrounding region had
already been attached to the Belgian Province of
Hainaut for ravitaillement purposes.
  It soon became apparent, however, that, instead
of casual  consignments from Belgium, an indepen-
dent and systematically distributed continuous sup-
ply of food-staples would have to be arranged if the
population of Northern France was  to  be spared
serious and  even dangerous suffering from lack of
food.   The Commission, therefore, began  to arrange
for this.  With the aid of the American Ambassadors 
 184  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 in London and Berlin, and the State Department,
 negotiations were undertaken, and in time effected,
 with the Allied and the German Governments and
 the Great Headquarters at Charleville for the regular
 ravitaillement by the Commission of all of occupied
 France.  Before these more general  negotiations
 were completed certain assurances  were given by
 the German General Government  of  Belgium  to
 Minister Whitlock at Brussels, which made possible
 the beginning of a regular despatch of food to  a
 limited region about Fumay  and Givet which had
 been attached to Belgium by the German authorities
 for administrative purposes.  So that by March,
 1915,  the Commission was sending food to about
 four  hundred thousand  persons  in the  occupied
 French territory.
  By  the end  of  this month  arrangements were
 practically completed for caring for  all  of the occu-
 pied  territory, although the formal  working agree-
 ment  between  the Commission and  the German
military authorities at Great Headquarters was not
signed  until the middle of April.   These arrange-
ments  provided for  suflficient funds from outside
French  sources  and  the  appointment of French 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 185
committees in all the villages—there are nearly two
thousand communes in the occupied territory—and
major French committees for the various regions and
districts into  which the territory was divided  for
military  administrative  purposes.  These commit-
tees  were to handle the details of the distribution
under the inspection and with the collaboration of a
small number  of  American representatives  of the
Commission, and I have no words capable of justly
appraising the devoted and self-sacrificing labours of
the many thousand members of these French volun-
teer  groups.  The Americans  were  to  reside  in
various centres and have with them, for their pro-
tection and escort, certain specially assigned German
officers able  to speak French and English.  These
officers were to be  present at all conferences between
the  Commission's representative and the French
committees; in fact, they were to be with the young
Americans at all times.  The  latter were to  live  in
houses provided by the army (by requisition)  for the
escort  officers, have  their  meals with  them, and
travel about with  them over the territory by train
and  motor on tours  of  inspection.  It was  an en-
forced close companionship for the sake of the safety 
186  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
of the Americans, and the assurance of the military
authorities that we should do no spying or inciting
of the French to uncomfortable behaviour.
  In a conference held  at the Great Headquarters
on March 21, between Major-General Zoellner, rep-
resenting  the  Supreme  Command  of the  German
Army in France, and Mr. A. N. Connett, at that time
director of the Commission  in Brussels, a telegram
from Mr.  Hoover, dated London, March 18, served
as basis for an agreement in principle on the gen-
eral provisions necessary for the arrangements, and
on April 13 a formally signed agreement was entered
into  at Brussels between the German Commander-
in-Chief of  the  Forces  in France (represented by
Major von Kessler, an officer of high capacity and
integrity)  and the  Commission  (represented by
Messrs.  Connett,  the director  just retiring, and
O. T. Crosby [now Assistant Secretary of the Treas-
ury] the incoming director, who alone signed).  This
all-important basic agreement is as follows:

                AGREEMENT
  Between  the German Commander-in-Chief, represented
by Major von Kessler, General Staff Officer, at the Gen-
eral Intendant des Feldheeres: and 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  187
  The Commission for Relief in Belgium, represented by
Mr. O. T. Crosby, acting for C. R. B. at Brussels (who
alone  will sign), and Mr. A. N. Connett.
  1. The G. C. I.  Ch. gives his consent for the C. R. B.
to undertake the supply of the population of the occupied
French territory with food stuffs.
  2. The G. C. I.  Ch. gives the assurance that the goods
imported for the said purposes will never be called upon
for the use of the German army, but shall be used solely
for the French population of the occupied territory.  The
G. C. I.  Ch. will issue strict orders to all the respective
subordinate  authorities to the effect  that  these  goods
must  never  be  seized.  Any goods which may not have
been distributed at any time will remain at the exclusive
disposal of the C. R.  B.
  3. The C. R. B.  is authorized to appoint in the occupied
territory of Northern France American citizens  as  its
delegates, who may,  subject to  the supplementary  agree-
ment  No. 1, attached hereto, satisfy themselves of the
carrying out of the assurance given under par. 2.
  4. The requests  to the C. R.  B.  for the distribution of
the goods will be effected according to the determination
of the C. R. B. in  conjunction with the German Military
authorities, by French trustees,  who are to be nominated
by the French communities, subject  to the approval of
the German Military  authorities and of the C.  R.  B.
These trustees  will represent the French committees in
the transactions with the delegates of  the C. R. B., more
particularly  in  connection with accounts and payments.
  5. The  G. C. I. Ch. will afford every facility for the
carriage of the goods  to the place of destination.  The
goods will be admitted free of  duty, and freight will be 
 188 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 charged  according  to  similar principles as  may, from
 time to  time, be in  force for the  supply  of  Belgium.
 The transport is  regulated by the supplementary agree-
 ment No. 2 attached hereto.
  6. In order to  eliminate doubts as to the origin and
 destination of goods supplied, all means of transport and
 storing rooms will  be labelled officially by  the  German
 Military  authorities in  such  a manner as to make  the
 goods recognisable  as those covered by the regulations
 of par. 2.
  7. If military exigencies should so require, this agree-
 ment may be cancelled by the G. C. I. Ch. at any time,
 without giving any reasons, by a notice to that effect to
 the C. R. B.  However, all goods imported by the C. R. B.
 then being already  within the occupied French territory
 shall be  disposed of in  accordance  with the stipulation
 of this agreement, the American delegates remaining long
enough to  discharge their duties with respect  to such
 goods, in  so far as  this is considered practicable for military
 reasons.
  8. The right of  the  German  Military authorities  to
requisition  for military purposes against  "bons"  the
food stuffs for men or animals still existing in the country
is in no way affected by this agreement.
  Likewise the German Military authorities reserve  to
themselves  all rights in respect to the new crop.
                          (s.) von Kessler, Major
Brussels, April 13th, 1915.   (s.) 0. T. Crosby.


  At the same time of the signing  of the basic agree-
ment,  the two  supplementary agreements  referred 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  189
to were formulated and signed.  One of these de-
termined the conditions of the transportation of the
food  supplies through the  occupied territory of
Belgium  as well  as  France—for all the foodstuffs
had to be brought to Northern France from Rotter-
dam through Belgium.  The other, and more inter-
esting one, concerned the position  of the Commis-
sion representatives in the occupied French territory.
  The more important points in the transportation
agreement provided for the free use of such  canals
as could be used, and  a half freight tariff on the
railways.   The loaded canal boats and  the railway
cars  were to be sealed at Rotterdam, or at Belgian
points, as Brussels and elsewhere from which ship-
ments were made into France, and delivered, sealed,
at destination. They were also to be placarded to
show that their contents were the property  of the
Commission, and  the waybills were to contain an
attestation that  the  goods  were  destined for the
French civilian population.
  The second supplementary  agreement  provided
that  the Commission's  representatives should be
able to assure themselves that the food supplies were
being used exclusively in accordance with the guar- 
 190  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
 antees given, i. e., were not being taken at all by the
 Germans.   This  meant  that  each  representative
 must have  a certain freedom of movement (in com-
 pany  with  his oflficer), within  his district; which
 movement should be restricted only by special mili-
 tary  conditions and necessities.  Our slogan was:
 the American must follow the food.
   The agreement also provided that the French-
 occupied territory was to be divided  into six  dis-
 tribution districts, at a centre in each of which  two
 Americans and a German escort oflficer were to be
 stationed, with an additional chief  representative
 and chief escort officer at Great Headquarters.   As
 a matter of fact, most of the time, we kept but one
 American in  each district centre.  The  Commis-
 sion's representative  for the Lille district was  not
 allowed to live in Lille, but was stationed at Valen-
 ciennes where he and his oflficer lived  with the rep-
 resentative for Valenciennes district and his oflficer.
  By the  agreement  the  Commission's representa-
 tives were entitled to receive free of charge, quarters,
 officer's rations, suitable  attendance  and military
motor car for the use of themselves and escort
officers.  These motor cars were maintained even 
 mi
mmmmmm
Paper money issued by Belgian and French communes for local circulation 
H~
^
x£y
"B*
tt
Xy
   Group of Americans and German officers at Great Headquarters;
the Americans are, from  left: J. B. White, Vernon Kellogg, Herbert
Hoover, Philip Chadbourn.
The house at Great Headquarters at Charleville in which the Com-
 mission's representatives lived with their German escort officers. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  191
after  the cars  of  higher  officers had to be  discon-
tinued, because of lack of tires, oil and gasoline in
Germany.   Each  American had a special passport
which entitled him to move about in his district,
and to go and come between Brussels and his centre.
He had a railway pass; his necessary official corre-
spondence, censored by his oflficer, and telephoning
and telegraphing  over the  military wires,  through
the medium of his oflficer,  were not charged  for.
Even though the passports were limited to the par-
ticular districts,  any  representative could go into
other districts if his oflficer was willing to take him,
so a certain amount of visiting from district to dis-
trict was done, and occasional gatherings for con-
ference of all the representatives and escort officers
at Great Headquarters were held.  Each American,
on  assuming his position as Commission  represen-
tative in Northern France "takes upon himself the
obligation to carry out his duties in such a manner
as may be expected from an honourable citizen of
a neutral state."
  It is gratifying to be able to  say that in the whole
history of the stay  of  the Commission's men in
Northern France, during which at least thirty differ- 
192 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
ent men were  used,  no single  complaint  of dis-
honourable or unneutral conduct on their part was
made  by the German military authorities.   Some
of the escort officers occasionally had complaints to
make of the immaturity of some of the Americans,
or of their manner, not sufficiently stiff or precise
properly  to impress  other  German officers dining
with them, and one  complained  rather bitterly—
I remember, to my amazement—that his American
persisted in wearing a ragged overcoat! But de-
spite the  strain of sympathy  and  anger imposed
on them by being compelled to see the sufferings of
the helpless French under the rigours of military con-
trol,  and, too often,  military  brutality our  men
held their strong feelings in check. They were not
only bound in  honour,  but they knew that  their
mission  could be accomplished only by the main-
tenance of a correct behaviour; they could help the
imprisoned people much more by  limiting them-
selves to the all-important work of the ravitaille-
ment than by giving way to any temptation, however
strong, of unneutral acts or speech.
  The personal work and experiences of the Commis-
sion's representatives in Northern France were very 
 FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM  193
different from those of the workers in Belgium.  Bel-
gium, except West Flanders and part of East Flan-
ders, is administered by  the Germans  by a quasi-
civil government with, to be sure, a strong military
flavour, but  Northern France  from  the first  has
always been under the direct and sole control of the
German army, or, perhaps it would be better to say
"armies," as each of the half dozen armies occupy-
ing the territory exercises a considerable autonomy
in the region occupied by it.  All these  armies,  and
hence the whole territory, were, however, under the
final control of the Great Headquarters.   It was the
distinctness of these armies and the occupation by
each of a specific part of the occupied territory that
determined the limits of the half dozen ravitaillement
districts.  The rigours of the  military rule  varied
somewhat with  the different armies, the Bavarians
occupying Lille and vicinity, under Prince Rupprecht,
being, in curious contradiction to the popular notions
about Bavarians, the most rigorous  and brutal in
their treatment  of the civil population.
  This military  rigour and the fact that each of the
districts extended westward to the very  trench lines,
greatly restricted the freedom  of the Commission's 
194  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
representatives both in movement and personal re-
lations with the civil population.  It was understood
that no American could hold conversation with any
French civilian except in the presence of his escort
officer.  However, this was not always enforced  in
cases where the American had lived long enough with
his officer  to  establish a feeling  of confidence and
trust in his honour.   On the other hand one or two
of the officers were very  rigorous about this, and
always promptly interrupted any conversation that
seemed  to  be straying in  the least from  subjects
strictly related to the food relief.   And these poor
shut-in people  did  so much want to talk  a little
about other things!  Also,  with each recrudescence
of military  operations here  or there along the front,
the American was carefully kept away from  the vil-
lages near that particular part of the front, or was
even occasionally held so closely  to his centre that
he could not even go to Brussels for the weekly meet-
ings of all  the Commission workers.  Our represen-
tative  at  St.  Quentin was once  kept away from
Brussels for seven weeks.
  On the other hand, the  necessary close acquain-
tanceship of each  American  and his  escort officer; 
 FIGHTING  STARVATION IN BELGIUM  195
the mutual participation in seeing and hearing the
woes of the population; and the fact that no man,
not even the most militaristic German—and  our
officers  were  not the most  militaristic of Germans
— could have  anything to do with the relief work
without  getting deeply interested in it  and being
gripped by it, gave our Northern  France men a cer-
tain advantage in having a friend at court in their
necessary dealings with the  army  heads  of  their
respective districts.
   I remember hearing in Brussels one of the escort
officers—these  officers  often accompanied  their
American charges to Brussels—complaining, partly
 quizzically, but more in bitter  earnest,  that his
 brother officers and the army commanders in his
 district  had  begun to suspect him of  being  pro-
 French, because he had always to be backing up his
 American in  his struggling for the  amelioration of
 the sad lot of the civil population.
   There were adventures and incidents, too, in the
 experience of all  our men  in this district.  French
 and  English  flyers were  always bombing railway
 stations behind the lines.   One of these casual bombs
 dropped on one of our regional depots and blew sev- 
196  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
eral tons  of good food into nothingness.  The St.
Quentin representative especially saw and heard war
at close quarters.
  But for the most part it was not danger, but irri-
tation and indignation, that wore on these men of
ours. Especially  during the deportations from Lille
in April,  1916, of men and women, boys and girls,
torn without warning or farewells from their homes
or picked up on the streets by  squads of brutal
Bavarian soldiery, was it hard for Commission men
to keep silent.  As a matter of fact, it was impossible;
and, headed by the director  himself, Mr. Poland, the
Commission protested.  It  was  just at the moment
of Ambassador  Gerard's  visit to  the Great Head-
quarters, and a general meeting of Commission rep-
resentatives and escort officers had been arranged to
meet him there.   The meeting was also attended by
some of the principal officers of the Headquarters
and the matter was dropped like  a bombshell into
the midst of the  conference.  The  Germans  never
forgave the Commission for that  incident, but the
happy result was  an  interruption in the  brutal per-
formance. 
CHAPTER  FOURTEEN
  THE  GREAT HEADQUARTERS AND  THE
       NORTHERN FRANCE  RATIONS
      THE Great Headquarters was a place of extraor-
       dinary interest.  It was in the plain little gray
       town of Charleville on the Meuse, just where
the river  gives up its  swift and  winding course
through the beautiful Ardennes to run out more
sedately into the broad lower valley.  The principal
buildings and residences of the town had been requi-
sitioned for the oflfices and residences for the thou-
sand and  more staff officers of the  various army
departments. The Kaiser, when he came, lived in a
house in a large garden  near the railway  station,
but later,  because  of the danger from the bombs
aimed at the station by French flyers, used a villa
on the outskirts of the town.
  It was a place  of quietness, much quieter than
any  ordinary  lesser headquarters  of any  of the
separate armies.  But it always seemed to me an
oppressive and significant quietness, as of some re-
                      197 
198  FIGHTING STARVATION  IN BELGIUM
strained but ever-growing terrible pressure ready to
break at any moment into a huge roar and storm.
And that was true of it, only the cataclysm when it
came would occur farther to the  west, somewhere
along those fatal lines of malevolent activity.   For
several months  I  lived as the Commission's  chief
representative for Northern France  among these
grey-uniformed officers, who busied themselves as-
siduously  all day  in their plain offices with maps
and despatches, with telephones and telegraphs tying
them to every part of the various fronts, east as well
as west, playing on little tables the great game of
war and destruction and death.  At night they would
dine and drink their requisitioned French wines, and
then they  would  talk and  debate anything  from
music and poetry to German militarism and Ameri-
can munitions-sending.  They rather liked  explain-
ing to the listening American the secret of  German
greatness, which is, simply,  autocratic government
from the top, based on military organisation.  And
they would point out vigorously the hopeless future
of a country, even of great material resources, that
perversely and stupidly persists in  trying to govern
itself by democracy, that is, from the bottom. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 199
  But whatever the fascinating interest or the wear-
ing strain of life at Headquarters, or the adventures
and excitement and anger-breeding days of living in
a theatre of war and a  sad land  of  war's  de-
struction and  human  misery, there was  just one
thing that was always the thing in our life; the ravit-
aillement.  As  in  Belgium, and  even more  impor-
tantly than in Belgium, the importation of the daily
bread of the people simply had to be assured.  For
Northern France was not only sustaining the weight
of an occupying army, but of a great active army
as well, and we were unable to make any such satis-
factory arrangements as were effected  in Belgium
for saving native crops for the civil population.
  However, we did succeed by  constant efforts at
Headquarters in arranging to have part  of the local
grain and potato crops so reserved.  It should  be
recalled that the  last paragraph  in the basic agree-
ment of April, 1915,  between the German Com-
mander-in-Chief and the Commission, expressly re-
served to the Germans "all rights  in respect to the
new crop."  That is, the Germans reserved the right
to take all of this crop for the use of the army, or to
send it back to Germany to help feed their  civilian 
200 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
population.  Under pressure,  however,  from  the
Commission, it was agreed in July that "beginning
with September  11, 1915, at the latest, there is to
be put  at  the  disposal of the population of the
occupied French territory  from the  crop  produced
in the country, per capita and per day, according to
the wish of the commune, not more than 100 grams
of flour" (about three and  a half  ounces).  This
was agreed to by the Germans only on the under-
standing that the Commission would provide 150
grams (a little more than five ounces) of imported
flour per capita per day.  This flour ration of 250
grams was equivalent to 345 grams (12 % ounces) of
bread daily for  each  person  and, as  the German
agreement ran, "in consideration of the lack of foods
of other kinds, this amount is not to be considered
too great."   This was by way of explanation to the
civil  population  in Germany, then living on  250
grams of bread a day.
  By  a later agreement (September  3rd)  it  was
arranged also that the Germans would assign out of
the native crop 200 grams of potatoes per person per
day to the  French civil population.  All the rest of
the native crops, except the produce  of small house- 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 201
gardens,  orchards  and barnyards, was at the dis-
posal of the German army.
  In the early summer of 1916, the Commission took
up with the Great Headquarters the matter of the
disposition of the 1916 crop and was able to come to
a better  arrangement.  An  agreement  signed  in
Brussels  on August 26th,  by Major von Kessler,
representing the General  Staff,  and myself repre-
senting the Commission—after long debating and
negotiation by the Commission both with the Allied
Governments and the General Staff, with  a final
reference to Berlin—doubled the amounts of flour
and potatoes which the German authorities  agreed
to turn  over  to  the civil  population.  But  the
struggle  over  the matter  was so  serious that it
became a grave question  at  one time  whether  the
relief  work would  be permitted to continue at  all.
It was an  extremely trying experience for us, with
the very  lives  of the helpless French  citizens  as
stakes in  the game.
  Unfortunately the local potato crop turned out to
be so poor that there were not enough potatoes
to provide 400 grams per person per day;  in fact
the people got a pitifully meagre supply out of the 
202  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
1916 crop.   The Germans, also, claiming a poorer
grain crop  than expected reduced the  daily  200
grams of flour to 150 grams.   The arrangements for
the 1917 crop, effected by the Spanish-Dutch neutral
committee which succeeded the Americans within the
occupied territory have been made less favorable to
the  civil  population.  This is  explained  by  the
Germans as due to the very poor crops for the year.
  This brings us now to a consideration of just what
food, altogether, what kinds and  what  quantities,
the imprisoned people of Northern France have had
to eat during the  last three years.   The definite
knowledge  of just how  much flour  and potatoes
of the native crops  were available to the  civil popu-
lation, and  the  equally definite knowledge of how
small  were the food  quantities  available from
orchards, vegetable gardens and barnyards  in this
stripped land, placed the Commission in  a position
where it could know, with near approach to exact-
ness, just how much and what kinds of food had to
be provided by it to keep the people alive.  It  was
possible, in  a word, to institute  a precise ration for
Northern France, which  was something  that could
only be approached in  Belgium. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN  BELGIUM  203
  The determination of just what  kinds, and what
amounts of each kind, of food should be imported
was made on the  basis of several factors, such as
the amount of money and number of ships available
and the most economical use  of  these  funds  and
ships; it depended also on what permission for such
imports was obtainable from the Allied Governments
which quite properly maintained a close scrutiny and
control  on this carrying of food, especially fats, into
 a region so entirely in  the hands of the active Ger-
 man army.  And finally,  the determination took
 into account the scientific knowledge of how money
 and food can  go farthest to  establish  a properly
 balanced daily  ration,  just suflficient to  maintain a
 people  in life and  comparative health. However, to
 do this, taste, convenience, and simplicity  of prepa-
 ration, and the  traditional food habits of the people
 had to be taken into consideration, as  well as the
 proper proportions  of  protein, fats, and carbohy-
 drates, necessary  to produce a minimum total num-
 ber of calories (energy units) and  minimum amount
 of tissue-building material.
   The ration necessarily varied with the changing
 circumstances of purchase and importation; it varied 
204  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
in amount, it varied as to its component parts, but
on the  whole  it has  been sufficiently uniform to
allow a statement  of  its average make-up to indi-
cate fairly what the people of Northern France have
had for daily diet for three years.
  The average daily ration provided  by the Com-
mission has been  as  follows: bread,  190  grams
(trifle under 7 ounces); dried peas and beans, 30
grams (trifle over  1  ounce);  rice,  61 grams (2 +
ounces); bacon  and  lard, 49 grams (If ounces);
coffee, 16  grams  (T  ounce);  condensed  milk, 25
grams (a little less than 1 ounce); sugar, 20 grams
(j ounce); maize  products,  20  grams  (y ounce);
dried fish, 15 grams (trifle over 3^ ounce); biscuits—
for children and the  infirm—24  grams (f ounce);
very  small  quantities,  irregularly,  of  cocoa  (for
children and the sick); cheese, torrealine (a  roasted
grain substitute for coffee), salad oil, chicory,  vinegar
and  pepper.   Salt was mostly obtained from Ger-
many.  A single small consignment of fresh meat,
1,000 sheep, was made from Holland in the fall of
1916, and a few larger ones have been made since.
  In  addition, this ration was increased  by what-
ever  portion  the  people  really  have had  of the 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN  BELGIUM 205
promised German ration of flour (wheat, rye, and
other things—often very bad, indeed—mixed) and
potatoes.  The flour ration they have, for the most
part, had; the potato ration has been very irregular
and  far below the amounts agreed on.  It must  be
said in justice to the Germans that their reasons for
not living up to the agreement as to potatoes,, is
valid to the extent that the crop  really was poor.
  It will be  asked how the people have been able
to live, and keep well on such a meagre and monot-
onous diet—a diet that has yielded them a total of
energy-units  whose  aggregate  is  markedly  below
that asserted by physiologists as being the minimum
necessary for human  beings under normal condi-
tions, and  a protein, or tissue-building component
lower than any estimates of the necessary minimum,
except those of  a few radical modern physiologists.
The answer is that not all of the people have been
able to do it, although, up to the time of the begin-
ning  of the  unrestricted submarine warfare (Feb-
ruary, 1917), most  of them had.  Since then the
general world shortage of food, the difficulties and
interruption   of overseas transportation, and the
actual loss of several of our cargoes by torpedoes 
206 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
and  mines, have made it impossible for us to im-
port suflficient foodstuffs to maintain even the small
ration  first described, and the resulting marked in-
crease of illness and deaths among the weaker and
the older—and to a less extent among  the children
(the children  have always been  first  looked after
both in  Belgium  and  Northern France)—shows
that the Northern France  ration was really  the
irreducible minimum consistent with safety.
  There has been a notable increase of  tuberculosis,
due  to the  rapid  development  of incipient  cases,
because of under-nutrition,  and a markedly lower
resistance to other disease, all over occupied France.
Even before  this last disastrous  period, there had
been noted a marked  falling  off in weight  among
all  classes  of the population,  but up—or  rather,
down—to a certain point,  this loss of weight was
not  accompanied  by  any  evidence   of  impaired
health.  Indeed, for the first  two years, or nearly
that,  the health of the people  was,  if anything,
bettered by their enforced simple diet.
  But now they  are beginning to go to  pieces.  The
birth-rate in the  crowded Lille district has decreased
by  nearly 50  per cent, and the death-rate has  in- 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  207
creased also by nearly 50 per cent.  Among the older
men and women the death-rate  has doubled.  The
Commission is straining every effort to increase its
importations, but shortage of tonnage and the high
rates  of  transportation and of  cost of food,  are
serious handicaps  to its  work.   The  obvious  and
only real relief of  occupied France is  that present
great object  of  the Allies and America, the early
expulsion, from every foot of its soil, of the heart-
less invader.   May "The Day" come soon!
  Until  then, the magnificent   spirit, the  moral
courage, and the physical bravery of this imprisoned
people,  existing under  conditions  of  mental  and
physical suffering literally  indescribable, must con-
tinue to be the  admiration and inspiration of  the
civilized  nations.   France is  to-day the  torch
before the world. 
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
            BELGIAN RELIEF TO-DAY
      THE impression is widespread that the American
       part in the relief of Belgium and Northern
       France ceased with the entrance of our country
into the war.  This impression is wholly erroneous.
The work of the American Commission for Relief in
Belgium  is going  on as importantly and  as per-
sistently  as ever, with, however, one notable differ-
ence. There are,  of  course, no Americans  within
Belgium and France  to receive and protect the im-
ported food and control its disposition.  That part
of the work is being performed by Spanish and
Dutch neutrals, organised  as  a  special committee
for that purpose and working  under the patronage,
advice, and protection of  the Spanish and Dutch
Ministers in  Brussels, Marques  de Villalobar and
Mynheer von Vollenhoven.  All  the German guar-
antees for the protection  of  the  food  originally
given to the C. R.  B. and its protecting and patron
Ministers  have been re-confirmed  to the  present
                       208 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM 209
Dutch committee and its protecting Ministers, and
the work inside the occupied  territories—both  in
relation to the Belgian and French committees and
all of the people, and  to the German Government
of Belgium  and the German Military Control  of
Northern France—is going on exactly as when the
neutral relief workers inside  the  occupied territory
were Americans instead of Spanish and Dutch.
  But outside of those territories the whole work
still remains in the hands of the American Commis-
sion.   Its Rotterdam, London, and New York offices
and staffs are intact; Mr. Hoover is still its active
head; it is buying the food in  the markets of the
world, chartering  its ships  and  sending  them  to
Rotterdam under its flag and under the same guar-
antees of safety on the high seas as before.  It trans-
ships the cargoes at Rotterdam  from the overseas
ships into the canal boats, and starts them off for
Belgium and Northern  France.   Only when  they
reach the borders  and pass into the occupied terri-
tory do they pass from the control of the American
Commission  into that  of the Hispano-Dutch Com-
mittee.
   In one feature of the outside work also, there is a 
210  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
difference from the situation as it existed before we
entered the war.  It is not  an important feature
from one point  of view, although very  important
from another, but it is one which has had, as a corol-
lary, the interruption by  the Commission of its
energetic nation-wide propaganda for charity, and
hence has withdrawn, to a  large extent, the activi-
ties of  the  Commission from  before the public eye.
Instead of  deriving its special subsidies from  Great
Britain and France as before, the Commission now
receives a regular monthly subsidy from the French
and the  Belgian Governments, which subsidies are
in turn  derived from loans  made  by the United
States  to these  governments.  The sums thus re-
ceived  monthly are $7,500,000  on account of  the
Belgian  work and  $5,000,000  on account  of the
work  in occupied France.  These  sums, although
less in  total than was being spent before the com-
mencement of the unrestricted submarine warfare,
in February of this year, have yet been sufficient
to pay for  all the food  for which  the Commission
has been able to  find cargo space in the face of
the swiftly decreasing availability of  ships for its
work.  Under these conditions, therefore, the Com- 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  211
mission has  not  felt justified  in calling on  the
charity of the  world for additional  money  with
which  to  purchase any food that has  to be trans-
ported overseas.
  On  the  other  hand, the very  lessening of the
opportunity  to  use money beyond that  provided
by the loan of this Government, has created a situa-
tion within the occupied territories that makes even
more urgent the rendering of assistance to  many of
the special local charities  that can use  funds within
the country  for the purchase  of local  supplies, the
payment for labour and building, and the sending
of large numbers of  weak children to  Holland for
longer or shorter periods  of recuperation.  So that
a number of the State and local American Commit-
tees have continued their devoted efforts to help in
these ways, and  their charity has done inestimable
good.
  It  is needless to say that the world shortage of
food and shipping has made very  much more diffi-
cult the work of the Commission in its attempts to
maintain  a  sufficient and regular supply  of food
from overseas.  It has, indeed,  been such  a handi-
cap that  ever since last  spring it has been impos- 
212  FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM
sible for the Commission to maintain the  figures of
its former regular programme of importations, and
the food supply of the  unfortunate  people  within
the occupied territories  has  been materially less
during this last year than  in either of the previous
two years of the enemy occupation.   Consequently
the ration, already put at what seemed the minimum
of safety^, has had to be  cut, with the  inevitable
result of an increased suffering.  The suffering has
revealed  itself in  the  concrete way of a marked
increase of illness and deaths.
  But the relief of Belgium and France is still going
on and the American Commission is as much a part
of it as ever, except for the actual presence of Ameri-
cans inside the occupied  territories.  And the relief
work must go on as long as the war lasts, or, at least,
as long as the present conditions of encirclement and
isolation of Belgium and Northern France continue.
What the Belgians pray for, what they maintain so
bravely and nobly their marvellous spirit for, and
what  the whole world hopes for and a large part of
it is fighting for, is that real relief of Belgium which
will come only with the  driving off from  its sacred
soil of every grey-coated invader now on it. 
 FIGHTING STARVATION IN BELGIUM  213
  When that time comes, and not till then, can the
whole story of fighting starvation in Belgium  and
Northern  France be  told.  And it will be such a
story of heroism opposing brutality, of spirit  per-
sistent in the face of bodily suffering  and mental
anguish, of  the higher humanness in struggle with
the lower, that the world emerging from the hideous
maelstrom of a final war that marks the end, let us
earnestly pray, of all war, will count the experience
of Belgium as one of those parts of the terrible trial
not entirely without its compensations.  The Story
of Belgium in the Great War is  as truly destined to
be  as  familiar to future generations in their  look
to history for encouragement and inspiration in the
belief that man is more  than animal,  as it is  des-
tined to be familiar to  pessimistic  searchers  for
evidences of the persistence of brute instinct in man. 
                       LIST OF MEMBERS  OF THE COMMISSION FOR  RELIEF IN BELGIUM
Who Have Served as Volunteers in Belgium and North France, or in the New York, London and Rotterdam Offices (as Issued
       in November,  1917, by the London Office).   No List of the Many Thousands of Devoted Volunteer Workers
          Engaged in the Collection or Money and Goods all Over the World, Especially in America and the
                                             British Empire, is Yet Available
(Work began in London,  Belgium and Rotterdam, October, 1914; in New York, November, 1914; and in Northern France, April, 1915;  American
     representatives were withdrawn from Belgium and Northern France in April,  1917; B.F. indicates  service in Belgium or France; the
                         omission oj the second date means that the member is still, November, 1917, in service)
Member,
Allen, Ben S...............
Ames, W. C.................
Angell, Frank..............
Arrowsmith, Robert........
Bain, H. Foster............
Baker, George B...........
Barrows, David P...........
Barry, Griffin R...........
Bates, Lindon W............
•Bates, Lindon W., Jr.......
Bell, Jarvis E..............
Belsose, Louis.............
Bertron,  S. Reading........
Bowden, Carlton G.........

Brackett, Frank P..........
Bradford, Henry P.........
Branscomb,  Bennett H......
*Brodrick, C. T.............
Brown, Milton M..........
Brown, W. Lyman..........
Bryant, Floyd S............
JBulle, German............
Carmichael, Oliver C.......
Carstairs, Chas. Haseltmb.

Chadbourn,  Philip H......„
University.
.Stanford.
Vermont and Leipzig.
Columbia and Berlin.
Chicago............
California and Chicago.
Stanford.............
Yale.................
Yale.................
B.F
Georgetown.........
Yale...............
Sewanee and Oxford.
B.F.Dartmouth.........
B.F....................
B.F.Alabama and Oxford.
B.F.Princeton....................
   .California...................
B.F.Nevada and Oxford...........
B.F.............................
B.F.Alabama and Oxford..........
B.F.Yale and  Ecole  des  Sciences
      Politiques..................
B.F.Minnesota...................
Period of Service.
October, 1914-
July, 1916-
January-August, 1916.
Dec, 1915, to withdrawal
June, 1915-Sept, 1916.
October, 1915-
January-March, 1916.
Aug., 1915-Dec, 1916.
Nov., 1914-Oct., 1915.
Nov., 1914-May, 1915.
Oct., 1914-Jan., 1915.
June-August, 1916.
November, 1915.
Dec., 1914-Jan., 1916,
  June-October, 1916.
July-December, 1916.
January-May, 1916.
Dec, 1914-Feb., 1915.
Dec, 1914-Jan., 1915.
Feb., 1916-August, 1917.
December, 1916-
Dec, 1914-Jan., 1915.
Beginning to Dec, 1916.
Dec, 1914-April, 1915.
Jan., 1915, to withdrawal.

Feb. to Dec, 1915.
Permanent Home or Business Address.
Associated Press, New York City.
Oakville, Napa County, Cal.
Bryant Street, Palo Alto, Cal.
253 Highland Avenue, Orange, N. J.
c/o Mining Magazine, Salisbury House, E.C.
375 Park Avenue, New York City.
2600 Etna Street, Berkeley, Cal.
c/o G. A. Barry, Monrovia, Cal.
615 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
6 Dupont Circle, Washington, D. C.
40 Wall Street, New York City.
St. Louis, Mo.

Pomona College, Claremont, Cal.
c/o Brown, Shipley & Co., London.
Goodwater, Alabama.

Glendale, Cincinnati, Ohio.
C. R. B., Rotterdam.
Reno, Nevada.

Goodwater, Alabama.
Mariemont, Belgium.

223 East  17th Street, New York City. 
Member.
University.
Period of Service.
Permanent Home or Business Address.
Chadbourn, William H__
Chamberlain,  D. C........
Chasseaud, H. Gordon__

Chatfield, Frederick H...
Chew, Oswald............
Clark, Archibald D.......
Clark, Arthur W.........
Clark, Stanley...........
Clason, Charles R........
Coffin, C. A..............
Connett,  Albert N.......
B.F.Cornell.
Connett, T. 0..........
Crocker, W. H..........
Croll, W.  Morris......
Crosby, Oscar T........
Curtis, Edward D......
Cutler, Henry F.......
Cutting, R. Fulton.....
Dana,  Paul.............
Dangerfield,  James, Jr.
Dawson, Thomas B......
Dickson, J. W...........
Dunn, Harry  L.........
Dunn, William McKee.
Dutton, Robert M.....
Dyer, Richard T.......
Eckstein,  Frederick. ..
Edgar, William C......
Fleming, J. H..........
Fletcher, Alfred C. B.
B.F.Amherst.
F.Harvard....................
F.Harvard....................
F.Cambourne School of Mireic..
F.Meadville Theological School.
F............................
.F.Maine and Oxford...........
B.FRennselaer Polytechnic  (Troy,
      N.Y.)....................
B.F.Harvard Law and Cambridge..
... .California...................
B.F.Princeton....................
B.F.West Point..................
B.F.Harvard and Cambridge......
B.F.Amherst, Genoa and Berlin....
___Columbia....................
B.F.Harvard.....................
B.F.............................
B.F.............................
.F.California and Columbia  Law
    School....................
B.F.Yale................
B.F.U. S. Naval Academy.
B.F.Princeton............
B.F.Yale................
B.F.
 March-July, 1915.
 November, 1914-
 Feb.-August, 1915.

 Jan.-August, 1916.
 Feb.-June, 1916.
 Dec, 1914-Dec, 1915.
 Dec, 1915-April, 1916.
 Dec, 1914-Dec, 1915.
 Dec, 1914-Jan., 1915.
 November, 1915-

 Feb.-April, 1915.
 January-April, 1915.
 November, 1914-
 June-Sept., 1915.
 May-Sept., 1915.
 Beginning to withdrawal.
 August, 1916-Jan., 1917.
 November, 1915-
 April—June, 1915.
 Dec, 1914, to withdrawal.
 June-August, 1915.
 Nov., 1914-Dec, 1914.

July, 1916, to withdrawal.

February-June, 1916.
April, 1915-Nov., 1916.
Dec,  1916-Feb., 1917.
Feb.-Aug.,   1916,  Nov.
  1916, to withdrawal.
November, 1914-
Jan., 1915-Feb., 1916.
B.F.California and Gen. Theological
      Seminary..................| February," 1916-
 223 East 17th Street, New York City.
 Des Moines, Iowa.
 c/o National  City Bank,  55  Wall Street,
   New York.
 1939 Madison  Road, Cincinnati, Ohio.
 1715 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, Pa.
 Utah Copper Co., Bingham Canyon, Utah.
 c/o General Electric Co., Schenectady, N. Y.
 Utah Copper Co., Bingham Canyon, Utah.
 Gardiner, Maine.
 c/o General Electric Co., 120 Broadway, N. Y.

 c/o J. G.White & Co., 43 Exchange Place, N.Y.
 c/o J. G. White & Co., 43 Exchange PI., N. Y.
 First National  Bank, San Francisco, Cal.
 Princeton, N. J.
 Warrenton, Va.
 Hammond Street, Chestnut Hill, Boston.
 Mount Hermon, Mass.
 320 Nassau Street, New York City.
 1 Fifth Avenue, New York City.
 36 Garden Place, Brooklyn, N. Y.
 Box 287, Providence, R. I.
 6 Haymarket, London, S. W. 1.

 c/o Mrs. E. P.  Dunn, Arlington Hotel, Santa
    Barbara, Cal.
 118 Mutual Building, Richmond, Va.
 Insurance Exchange Bid:;., San Francisco, Cal.
 62 Prospect Street, East Orange, N. J.

 25 East 30th Street, New York City.
 The Northwestern Miller, Minneapolis, Minn.
 66 Pingree Avenue, Detroit, Mich.

410 Hearst Building, San Francisco, Cal. 
Member.
    Fletcher, Horace.........
    Flint, William W., Jb.....
    Gadb, John A.............
    Gailob, Frank H..........
    Galpin, Perrin C..........
    Gary, Elbert H...........
    Gay, George Inness......,
    Gerard, James W.........
    Gibson, Carleton B.......,
    Gibson, Hugh S............
    Glenn, John L.............

    Gray, Prentiss N..........
    Green, Joseph C...........
M  Gregory, Donald Munson..
m  Gregory, Warrbn..........
°*  Gwynn,  William M.........
    Hall, Guillermo F.........
    Hall, William Chapman....
    Hamilton,  Herbert F......
    Harper, George M.........
    Hawkins, Charles H.......
    Heineman, Dannie  N.......
    Hemphill,  Alexander J.....
    HOLLMANN, EMIL F..........
    Honnold, William L.......
University.
B.F.Dartmouth (Hon. A.M.)....
B.F.New Hampshire and Oxford.
B.F.Harvard...................
B.F.Sewanee and Oxford.......
B.F.Yale and Oxford...........
   . Wheaton and Chicago.......
   .Colorado..................
   .Columbia..................
B.F.Illinois....................
B.F.Paris......................
B.F.Wofford and Oxford........
Hoover, Herbert C...
House,  Roy T.........
Hulse,  William.......
Humbert, Pierre.....
Hunsiker,  Millard___
Hunt, Edward E......
Iliff, John G..........
Irwin, Will................I___Stanford
Jackson, George S..........iB.F.Harvard.
B.F.California..................
B.F.Princeton and Paris..........
B.F.California..................
B.F.California..................
B.F.California..................
B.F.Morris Scientific School......
B.F.Harvard....................
B.F.Amherst....................,
B.F.Princeton...................,
B.F.Williams and Oxford.........,
BJP.No. Carolina, Liege and Bonn.,
B.F.Stanford and Oxford.......
   .Michigan College of Mines.
   .Stanford...............
B.F.Miami University (Ohio).
B.F.......".................
B.F........................
B.F.Harvard...
B.F.California.
Period of Service.
 Feb.-Nov., 1915.
 Dec, 1914-Jan., 1915.
 Sept., 1916-Jan., 1917.
 Dec, 1914-July, 1915.
 Dec, 1914-May, 1915.
 November, 1915-
 July, 1916-
 Oct., 1914-Feb., 1917.
 Dec, 1914-April, 1915.
 October, 1914-
 Dec, 1914-Sept., 1915,
  June-Oct., 1916.
 February, 1916-
 Oct., 1915-July, 1917.
 Oct., 1916, to withdrawal.
 Nov., 1916, to withdrawal.
 July, 1916, to withdrawal.
 Feb., 1916-Jan., 1917.
 July, 1916-July, 1917.
 Feb.,-July 1916.
 May-June, 1915.
 Dec, 1914-April, 1915.
 Beginning to withdrawal.
 November, 1914-
 Dec, 1914-Feb., 1915.
 October, 1915-

 October, 1914-
Feb.-May, 1916.
Beginning to Nov., 1916.
April, 1915-May, 1917.
Oct., 1914-Oct., 1915.
 Dec, 1914-Oct., 1915.
May-Sept., 1915.
October, 1914-
Nov., 1914-Nov.. 1915.
Permanent Home or Business Address.
 Lotos Club, New York City.
 Balliol College, Oxford.
 107 East 71st Street, New York.
 Memphis, Tennessee.
 New Haven, Conn.
 71 Broadway, New York.
 434 S. 2nd Avenue, Mt. Vernon, N. Y.
 Union Club, 1 East 51st Street, New York.
 208 Bull Street, Savannah, Georgia.
 c/o State Department, Washington, D. C.

 Chester, So. Carolina.
 110 Market Street, San Francisco, Cal.
 Avondale Avenue, Cincinnati, Ohio.
 Berkeley, Cal.
 Berkeley, Cal.
 1632 Ingraham Street, Los Angeles, Cal.
 Austin, Texas.
 Kent School, Kent, Conn.
 207 Minnesota Avenue, San Jose', Cal.
 Mercer Street, Princeton, N. J.
 Warwick, N. Y.

 Guaranty Trust Co., 140 B'dway, N. Y. City.
 Oakland, Cal.
 Metropolitan Club, Fifth Ave. and 60th  St.,
  New York.
 Mills Building, San Francisco, Cal.
 327 West Symnes Street.^Norman, Okla.
Brussels.
 c/o Lazard Bros., N. Y.
 33 Cornhill, London.
27 West 44th Street, New York City.
 1612 Edith Street, Berkeley, Cal.
Players Club, New York City.
462 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass. 
Member,
University.
Period of Service.
Permanent Home or Business Address.
Jackson, Robert A.........
Jackson, William B........
Johnson, Amos D., Jr.......
Jones, Thomas H...........
Kellogg, Charlotte.......
Kellogg, Vbrnon..........

Kite, St. Alban...........

KlTTRBDGE, TRACY B........
Knox, Nhwton B............
Lanqhornb, Marshall......
Lathrop, Rev. Charles N...
Leach, Dr. Charles N......

Liefeld, Ernest Thbophilus

Lowdermilk, Walter C......
Lucas, Dr. William Palmer,
Lucey, John  F..............
Lytle, R. Ridgley, Jr.......
MacCarter,  Robert........
Macloskib, Charles H......
Malabre, Dr. Alfred L.....
Mann, R. A.................
B.F.Harvard....................
B.F.Yale (Sheffield).............
B.F.Kansas.....................
B.F.Kentucky State and Oxford...
B F.California..................
B.F.Kansas, Cornell and Leipzig..

B.F.Pennsylvania  School of Social
      Science.................
B.F.California and Oxford......
.Stanford.
B.F.California.
B.F.Stanford..
B.F.Yale (Sheffield), Leipzig, Frei-
      burg.....................
B.F.Arizona and Oxford..........
B.F.Western Reserve............
B.F............................
B.F.Princeton and Oxford........
B.F.Princeton...
B.F.Georgetown.
Maurice,  Arthur B .
Maverick, Robert  V.
Mayreis,  Louis J.....
Meert, Frederick W.
Morgan, Dudley S__
Nelson, David T......
Oliver, Thomas E.....
B.F.Princeton
B.F.Princeton.
   .Stanford..
B.F.Brussels and Louvain..
B.F.Harvard..............
B.F.N. Dakota and Oxford.
B.F.Harvard..............
May, 1915, to withdrawal.
Dec, 1916, to withdrawal.
Dec.  1914-July, 1915.
Dec, 1914-April, 1915.
June, 1916-Dec, 1916.
June-Nov., 1915, July,
  1916-

Nov., 1915-August, 1916.
Dec, 1914-July, 1915,
  May, 1916-
April, 1915-July, 1915.
November, 1914-
Sept.-Dec, 1915.
Mar., 1916, to withdrawal.
July, 1916, to withdrawal.
Dec, 1914-Jan., 1915.
May-August, 1916.
January, 1915-
May-August, 1915.
Nov., 1914-Nov., 1P15.
Beginning to Jan, 1915.
Jan.-April, 1916.
Dec, 1914-July, 1915.

Jan., 1917, to withdrawal.
Sept., 1916, to withdrawal
Jan.-June, 1916.

Beginning to withdrawal.
June, 1916, to withdrawal.
Dec, 1914-Oct.  1915.
Sept., 1915-May, 1916.
 462 Beacon Street, Boston, Mass.
 Silver Springs, Md.
 Rialto Building, Kansas City, Mo,
 Arcadia, Florida.
 Stanford University, Cal.

 Stanford University, Cal.

 c/o Miss Elizabeth S. Kite, Morton, Pa.,

 Berkeley, Cal.

 State Department, Washington, D. C.
 All Saints' Cathedral, Milwaukee, Wis.
 c/o Dr.  R.  L.  Wilbur, Lane Hospital,  San
  Francisco, Cal.

 New Haven, Cona.
 Willcox, Arizona.
 Berkeley, Cal.
 233 Broadway, New York City.
 300 W. 100th Street, New York City."1
 165 Broadway, New York City.
 Brussels.
 454 Fort Washington Avenue, New York City.
 c/o J. F. Lucey Co.,  Broad Street  House,
  London, E.C. 2.
 Rahway, N. J.
 San Antonio, Texas.
 c/o  Burma  Mines, Ltd.,  1 London Wall
  Buildings, London, E.C. 2.
Brussels.
Harvard Club, New York City.
Mayville, N. Dakota.
912 W. California Avenue, Urbane, 111. 
Member.
   Osborn, Earl D........

   Page,  Walter Hines. ..
   Paradise, Scott H......
   Pate,  Maurice.........
   Percy, William A.....

   Pinchot, Gifford.......
   Platt, Philip S........

   Poland, William B.....
   Potter, Francis H.....
   Potter, Philip B. K__
   Pratt,  Henry S........

oJj Richards, Lewis.......

   Richardson, Gardner ..
   Rickard, Edgar........
   Seward, Samuel S., Jr..
   Shaler,  Millard K.....
   Sharp,  William Graves
   Simpson, John L........

   Simpson, Richard H....
   Skinner, Robert P.....
   Smith, Charles A......

   Smith, Robinson.......
   Spauldinq, George F...
   Sperry, William H.....
   Stacy, T. Harwood. ...
   Stephens, F. Dorsey. ..
   Stevenson,  William C.

   Stimson, Henry L......
University.
Period of Service.
Permanent Home or Business Address.
B.F.Princeton.
B.F.Yale and Oxford.............
B.F.Princeton....................
B.F.Sewanee  and  Harvard  Law
      School....................
   .Yale........................
B.F.Yale and Mass. Institute of
      Technology................
B.F.Mass. Institute of Technology.
B.F.Harvard.....................
B.F.Harvard and Cornell..........
B.F.Michigan, Leipzig, Freiburg,
      Geneva.................
B.F.Royal Conservatory of Music,
      Brussels...................
B.F.Yale........................
   .California...................
B.F.Columbia and Oxford.........
   .Kansas......................
B.F.California.........

B.F.Indiana and Oxford.
B.F.Yale................
B.F.Arizona and Oxford...
B F
BJTexas'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'..
B.F.California and Oxford.
B.F.Princeton and Oxford.
Oct., 1915-April, 1916,
  Sep., 1916, to withdrawal.
October, 1914-
Dec, 1914-April, 1915.
July, 1916-June, 1917.

Dec, 1916, to withdrawal.
April, 1915-May, 1915.

June, 1916-Jan., 1917.
September, 1915-
Feb.-Oct., 1916.
Feb., 1916, to withdrawal.

Sept., 1916-Jan., 1917.

January, 1915-
May, 1915, to withdrawal.
October, 1914-
June-Dec, 1915.
October, 1914-
April, 1915-
Dec, 1915-July, 1917.

Dec, 1914-April, 1916.
October, 1914-
March, 1915-Aug., 1915.

December, 1914-
Dec, 1914-Jan., 1915.
Dec, 1914, to withdrawal.
Dec, 1914-March, 1916.
Jan., 1915-April, 1916.
June-October, 1915.
.Yale-Harvard—Harvard Law.. November, 1916—
40 E. 36th Street, New York City.

American Embassy, London.
Balliol College, Oxford.
2053 Clermont Street, Denver, Colorado.

Greenville, Mississippi.
1617 Rhode Island Avenue, Washington, D. C.

Scranton, Pa.
Engineers Club, New York,  U. S. A.
22 West 9th Street, New York City.
22 West Oth^Street, New York City.

Haverford College, Haverford, Penn.

368 Chaussee deBruxelles.Forest-lez-Bruxelles.
Woodstock, Conn.
120 Broadway, New York.
262 Kingsley Avenue, Palo Alto, Cal.
3 Montagne du Pare, Brussels.
Elyria, Ohio.
c/o  D.  Brookman, 833 Market Street, San
  Francisco, Cal.
243 Merrill Road, Indianapolis, Ind.
State Department, Washington, D. C.
c/o  Caucasian Copper Co.,  81  Palmerston
  House, London,  E.C.
195 Oxford Street, Hartford, Conn.
Los Angeles, Cal.
c/o G. B.  Sperry,  Redwood City,  Cal.
Austin, Texas.
Hollywood, Cal.
c/o Rev. W. P. Stevenson, 111 N. Broadway,
  Yonkers, N. Y.
32 Liberty Street,  New York. 
Member
University
Period of Service
Permanent Home or Business Address
Stockton, Gilchrist B.

Stone, Carlos H.......

Stratton, William W..
Straus, Oscar S........
Stubbs, Roscoe.......
Sullivan, William M..
Thurston, E. Coppbb. .
Thwaits,  Frederick C.
Torrey, Clare M.....
Trumbull, Frank......
Tuck,  William H......
B.F.Princeton and Oxford.
B.F.Hamilton and Auburn Theol.
      Seminary................
B.F.Utah and Oxford...........
   .Columbia..................
B.F.Brown and Oxford......
B.F.Lehigh................
B.F.Wisconsin and Harvard.
B.F.California.............
B.F.Princeton.
m   Van Dyke,  Henry.........
«   Van Hee, Julius A.........
    Van Schaick, J. Broadhead.
    JWarren, Robert H........
    Wellington, Laurence C...
___Princeton...........
B.F....................

B.F.Yankton and Oxford.
B.F.Williams and Oxford.
White, John Beaver.....
Whiting, Almon C.......
Whitlock, Brand........
Whitney, Caspar........
Wickes, Francis C.......

Williams, Edgar.........
Williams, Dr. Percy D...
Withington, Robert.....
Young, Carl A...........
B.F.Mass. Normal Art School.....
B F
B.R Yale.'!.".".'.'!'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.'.
B.F.Williams  and Harvard  Law
      School...................
B.F.Cornell.....................
B.F.Columbia...................
B.F.Harvard....................
April, 1915-Jan., 1916,
  July, 1916-Oct., 1916.

Dec, 1916, to withdrawal.
Feb.-July, 1915.
November, 1915-
November, 1914-
Dec, 1914-Jan., 1915.
Dec, 1914-Aug., 1916.
Aug., 1916, to withdrawal.
Dec, 1915-Oct., 1916.
November, 1915-
Sept., 1915-Dec, 1916.

Nov., 1914-April, 1917.
Jan., 1915, to withdrawal.
Sept., 1915-Sept., 1916.
Dec, 1914-May, 1915.
Dec  1914-May, 1915,
  Aug., 19Jfr-Sept., 1916.
October, 1914-
Sept., 1916, to withdrawal.
October, 1914-
May, 1915-April, 1916.

Aug., 1915-June, 1917.
June, 1916-Feb., 1917.
Dec, 1914-Jan., 1915.
March-December, 1916.
Dec, 1914-June, 1916.
1754 Riverside Avenue, Jacksonville, Florida.

Cornwall-on-Hudson, N. Y.
Salt Lake City, Utah.
5 West 76th Street, New York.
Abilene, Kansas.
Fall River, Mass.
608 Crocker Bldg., San Francisco, Cal.
405 Iron Block, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
2208Parker Street, Berkeley, Cal.
61 Broadway, New York.
c/o Judge  S. P. Tuck, San Stefano,  Alexan-
  dria, Egypt.
Princeton, N. J.
State Department, Washington, D. C.
Huntington Station, Long Island, N. Y.
34 Amity Street, Amherst, Mass.
120 Broadway, New York.
Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, Ohio.
State Department, Washington, D. C.
Oakby House, Bronxville, N. Y.

47 Fitzhugh Street, Rochester, N. Y.
141 St. Mark's Place, New Brighton, N. Y.
249 West 72nd Street, New York.
35 Bay State Road, Boston, Mass.
c/o Lucey Mfg. Corpn., Woolworth Building,
  233 Broadway, N. Y.
* Lost on S.S. Lusitania, May 7th, 1915.
t Died at Brussels, December 27th, 1916.
t Died at Bordeaux, November, 1916.
END 
THE COUNTRY LIFE PRE98
   GARDEN CITY, N. Y. 
 
 
 
 
L-fiEfil  Jsao 
D 638.B4 K29f 1918




01110580R
NLfl  050Q725A  T
national library of medicine
NLM050072589