British hospitality to the Belgians—A Dutch refugee camp—The American Commission for relief—Its generals—From Holland to Belgium—A forlorn Landsturm guard—Life in a conquered Land—The overlords in Antwerp—Belgium’s hatred—The problem of feeding Belgium—American volunteers—“Some experience”—The conqueror’s net—Relics of the former rÉgime.

No week at the front, where war is made, left the mind so full as this week beyond the sound of the guns with war’s results. It taught the meaning of the simple words life and death, hunger and food, love and hate. One was in a house with sealed doors, where a family of seven millions sat in silence and idleness, thinking of nothing but war and feeling nothing but war. He had war cold as the fragments of a shrapnel shell beside a dead man on a frozen road; war analysed and docketed for exhibition, without its noise, its distraction, and its hot passion.

In Ostend I had seen the Belgian refugees in flight and I had seen them pouring into London stations, bedraggled outcasts of every class, with the staring uncertainty of the helpless human flock flying from the storm. England, who considered that they had suffered for her sake, opened her purse and her heart to them; she opened her homes, both modest suburban homes and big country houses which are particular about their guests in time of peace. No British family without a Belgian was doing its duty. Bishop’s wife and publican’s wife took whatever Belgian was sent to her. The refugee packet arrived without the nature of contents on the address label. All Belgians had become heroic and noble by grace of the defenders of LiÉge.

Perhaps the bishop’s wife received a young woman who smoked cigarettes and asked her hostess for rouge and the publican’s wife received a countess. Mrs. Smith of Clapham, who had brought up her children in the strictest propriety, welcomed as playmates for her dears, whom she had kept away from the contaminating associations of the alleys, Belgian children from the toughest quarters of Antwerp, who had a precocity that led to baffling confusion in Mrs. Smith’s mind between parental responsibility and patriotic duty. Smart society gave the run of its houses sometimes to gentry who were used to getting the run of that kind of houses by lifting a window with a jimmy on a dark night. It was a refugee lottery. When two hosts met one said: “My Belgian is charming!” and the other said: “Mine isn’t. Just listen—” But the English are game; they are loyal; they bore their burden of hospitality bravely.

The strange things that happened were not the more agreeable because of the attitude of some refugees, who when they were getting better fare than they ever had at home, thought that, as they had given their “all” for England, they should be getting still better, not to mention wine on the table in temperance families; while there was a disinclination toward self-support by means of work on the part of certain heroes which promised a Belgian occupation of England that would last as long as the German occupation of Belgium. England was learning that there are Belgians and Belgians. She had received not a few of the “and Belgians.”

It was only natural. When the German cruisers bombarded Scarborough and the Hartlepools, the first to the station were not the finest and sturdiest. Those with good bank accounts and a disinclination to take any bodily or gastronomic risks, the young idler who stands on the street corner ogling girls and the girls who are always in the street to be ogled, the flighty-minded, the irresponsible, the tramp, the selfish, and the cowardly are bound to be in the van of flight from any sudden disaster and to make the most of the generous sympathy of those who succour them.

The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to remain with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian nation had taken the Allies’ side and now all individual Belgians expected the Allies to help them.

England did not get the worst of the refugees. They could travel no farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated money to care for them at the same time that it was under the expense of keeping its army mobilised. Looking at the refugees in the camp at Bergen op Zoom, an observer might share some of the contempt of the Germans for the Belgians. Crowded in temporary huts in the chill, misty weather of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless, marooned human wreckage. They would not dig ditches to drain their camp; they were given to pilfering from one another the clothes which the world’s charity supplied. The heart was out of them. They were numbed by disaster.

“Are all these men and women who are living together married?” I asked the Dutch officer in charge.

“It is not for us to inquire,” he replied. “Most of them say that they have lost their marriage certificates.”

They were from the slums of that polyglot seaport town Antwerp, which Belgians say is anything but real Belgium. To judge Belgium by them is like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets, where saloons and pawnshops are numerous and the red lights twinkle from dark doorways.

Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals, who were organising a different kind of campaign from that which brought glory to the generals who conquered Belgium. It was odd that Dr. Rose—that Dr. Rose who had discovered and fought the hook worm among the mountaineers of the Southern States—should be succouring Belgium, and yet only natural. Where else should he and Henry James, Jr., of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mr. Bicknell, of the American Red Cross, be, if not here directing the use of an endowment fund set aside for just such purposes?

They had been all over Belgium and up into the Northern departments of France occupied by the Germans, investigating conditions. For they were practical men, trained for solving the problem of charity with wisdom, who wanted to know that their money was well spent. They had nothing for the refugees in London, but they found that the people who had stayed at home in Belgium were worthy of help. The fund was allowing five hundred thousand dollars a month for the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, which was the amount that the Germans had spent in a single day in the destruction of the town of Ypres with shells. Later they were to go to Poland; then to Serbia.

With them was Herbert C. Hoover, a celebrated mining engineer, the head of the Commission. When American tourists were stranded over Europe at the outset of the war, with letters of credit which could not be cashed, their route homeward must lie through London. They must have steamer passage. Hoover took charge. When this work was done and Belgium must be helped, he took charge of a task that could be done only by a neutral. For the adjutants and field officers of his force he turned to American business men in London, to Rhodes scholars at Oxford, and to other volunteers hastening from America.

When Harvard, 1914, who had lent a hand in the American refugees’ trials, appeared in Hoover’s office to volunteer for the new campaign, Hoover said:

“You are going to Rotterdam to-night.”

“So I am!” said Harvard, 1914, and started accordingly. Action and not red tape must prevail in such an organisation.

The Belgians whom I wished to see were those behind the line of guards on the Belgo-Dutch frontier; those who had remained at home under the Germans to face humiliation and hunger. This was possible if you had the right sort of influence and your passport the right sort of visÉs to accompany a Besheinigung, according to the form of “31 Oktober, 1914, Sect. 616, Nr. 1083,” signed by the German consul at Rotterdam, which put me in the same automobile with Harvard, 1914, that stopped one blustery, snowy day of late December before a gate, with Belgium on one side and Holland on the other side of it on the Rosendaal-Antwerp road.

“Once more!” said Harvard, 1914, who had made this journey many times as a despatch rider.

One of the conquerors, the sentry representing the majesty of German authority in Belgium, examined the pass. The conqueror was a good deal larger around the middle than when he was young, but not so large as when he went to war. He had a scarf tied over his ears under a cracked old patent leather helmet, which the Saxon Landsturm must have taken from their garrets when the Kaiser sent the old fellows to keep the Belgians in order, so that the young men could be spared to get rheumatism in the trenches if they escaped death.

You could see that the conqueror missed his wife’s cooking and Sunday afternoon in the beer garden with his family. However much he loved the Kaiser, it did not make him love home any the less. His nod admitted us into German-ruled Belgium. He looked so lonely that as our car started I sent him a smile. Surprise broke on his face. Somebody not a German in uniform had actually smiled at him in Belgium! My last glimpse of him was of a grin spreading under the scarf toward his ears.

Belgium was webbed with these old Landsturm guards. If your Passerschein was not right, you might survive the first set of sentries and even the second, but the third, and if not the third some succeeding one of the dozens on the way to Brussels, would hale you before a Kommandatur. Then you were in trouble. In travelling about Europe I became so used to passes that when I returned to New York I could not have thought of going to Hoboken without the German consul’s visa, or of dining at a French restaurant without the French consul’s.

“And again!” said Harvard, 1914, as we came to another sentry. There was good reason why Harvard had his pass in a leather-bound case under a celluloid face. Otherwise, it would soon have been worn out in showing. He had been warned by the Commission not to talk and he did not talk. He was neutrality personified. All he did was to show his pass. He could be silent in three languages. The only time I got anything like partisanship out of him and two sentences in succession was when I mentioned the Harvard-Yale football game.

“My! Wasn’t that a smear! In their new stadium, too! Oh, my! Wish I had been there!”

When the car broke a spring halfway to Antwerp, he remarked, “Naturally!” or, rather, a more expressive monosyllable which did not sound neutral.

While he and the Belgian chauffeur, with the help of a Belgian farmer as spectator, were patching up the broken spring, I had a look at the farm. The winter crops were in; the cabbages and Brussels sprouts in the garden were untouched. It happened that the scorching finger of war’s destruction had not been laid on this little property. In the yard the wife was doing the week’s washing, her hands in hot water and her arms exposed to weather so cold that I felt none too warm in a heavy overcoat. At first sight she gave me a frown, which instantly dissipated into a smile when she saw that I was not German.

If not German, I must be a friend. Yet if I were I would not dare talk—not with German sentries all about. She lifted her hand from the suds and swung it out to the west toward England and France with an eager, craving fire in her eyes, and then she swept it across in front of her as if she were sweeping a spider off a table. When it stopped at arm’s length there was the triumph of hate in her eyes. I thought of the lid of a cauldron raised to let out a burst of steam as she asked: “When?” When? When would the Allies come and turn the Germans out?

She was a kind, hard-working woman, who would help any stranger in trouble the best she knew how. Probably that Saxon whose smile had spread under his scarf had much the same kind of wife. Yet I knew that if the Allies’ guns were driving the Germans past her house and her husband had a rifle, he would put a shot in that Saxon’s back, or she would pour boiling water on the enemy’s head if she could. Then, if the Germans had time, they would burn the farmhouse and kill the husband who had shot one of their comrades.

I recollect a youth who had been in a railroad accident saying: “That was the first time I had ever seen death; the first time I realised what death was.” Exactly. You don’t know death till you have seen it; you don’t know invasion till you have felt it. However wise, however able the conquerors, life under them is a living death. True, the farmer’s property was untouched. But his liberty was gone. If you, a well-behaved citizen, have ever been arrested and marched through the streets of your home town by a policeman, how did you like it? Give the policeman a rifle and a fixed bayonet and full cartridge boxes and transform him into a foreigner and the experience would not be any more pleasant. That farmer could not go to the next town without the permission of the sentries. He could not even mail a letter to his son who was in the trenches with the Allies. The Germans had taken his horse; theirs the power to take anything he had—the power of the bayonet. If he wanted to send his produce to a foreign market, if he wanted to buy food in a foreign market, the British naval blockade closed the sea to him. He was sitting on a chair of steel spikes, hands tied and mouth gagged, while his mind seethed, solacing its hate with hope through the long winter months. If you lived in Kansas and could not get your wheat to Chicago, or any groceries or newspapers from the nearest town, or learn whether your son in Wyoming were alive or dead, or whether the man who owned your mortgage in New York had foreclosed or not—well, that is enough without the German sentry.

Only, instead of newspapers or word about the mortgage, the thing you needed past that blockade was bread to keep you from starving. America opened a window and slipped a loaf into the empty larder. Those Belgian soldiers whom I had seen at Dixmude, wounded, exhausted, mud-caked, shivering, were happy beside the people at home. They were in the fight. It is not the destruction of towns and houses that impresses you most, but the misery expressed by that peasant woman over her washtub.

A writer can make a lot of the burst of a single shell; a photographer showing the ruins of a block of buildings or a church makes it appear that all blocks and all churches are in ruins. Running through Antwerp in a car, one saw few signs of destruction from the bombardment. You will see them if you are specially conducted. Shops were open, the people were moving about in the streets, which were well lighted. No need of darkness for fear of bombs dropping here! German barracks had safe shelter from aerial raids in a city whose people were the allies of England and France. But at intervals marched the German patrols.

When our car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it. Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium—unless German—with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance, persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies coming? Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared not. Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by Belgian waiters were dining. Who were our little party? What were we doing there and speaking English—English, the hateful language of the hated enemy? Oh, yes! We were Americans connected with the relief work. But between the officers’ stares at the sound of English and the appealing inquiry of the faces in the street lay an abyss of war’s fierce suspicion and national policies and racial enmity, which America had to bridge.

Before we could help Belgium, England, blockading Germany to keep her from getting foodstuffs, had to consent. She would consent only if none of the food reached German mouths. Germany had to agree not to requisition any of the food. Some one not German and not British must see to its distribution. Those rigid German military authorities, holding fast to their military secrets, must consent to scores of foreigners moving about Belgium and sending messages across that Belgo-Dutch frontier, which had been closed to all except official German messages. This called for men whom both the German and the British duellists would trust to succour the human beings crouched and helpless under the circling flashes of their steel.

Fortunately, our Minister to Belgium was Brand Whitlock. He is no Talleyrand or Metternich. If he were, the Belgians might not have been fed, because he might have been suspected of being too much of a diplomatist. When a German, or an Englishman, or a Hottentot, or any other kind of a human being gets to know Whitlock, he recognises that here is an honest man with a big heart. When leading Belgians came to him and said that winter would find Belgium without bread, he turned from the land that has the least food to his own land, which has the most.

For Belgium is a great shop in the midst of a garden. Her towns are so close together that they seem only suburbs of Brussels and Antwerp. She has the densest population in Europe. She raises only enough food to last her for two months of the year. The food for the other ten months she buys with the products of her factories. In 1914–15 Belgium could not send out her products; so we were to help feed her without pay, and England and France were to give money to buy what food we did not give.

But with the British navy generously allowing food to pass the blockade, the problem was far from solved. Ships laden with supplies steaming to Rotterdam—this was a matter of easy organisation. How get the bread to the hungry mouths when the Germans were using all Belgian railroads for military purposes? Germany was not inclined to allow a carload of wheat to keep a carload of soldiers from reaching the front, or to let food for Belgians keep the men in the trenches from getting theirs regularly. Horse and cart transport would be cumbersome, and the Germans would not permit Belgian teamsters to move about with such freedom. As likely as not they might be spies.

Anybody who can walk or ride may be a spy. Therefore, the way to stop spying is not to let any one walk or ride. Besides, Germany had requisitioned most of the horses that could do more than draw an empty phaeton on a level. But she had not drawn the water out of the canals; though the Belgians, always whispering jokes at the expense of the conquerors, said that the canals might have been emptied if their contents had been beer. There were plenty of idle boats in Holland, whose canals connect with the web of canals in Belgium. You had only to seal the cargoes against requisition, the seal to be broken only by a representative of the Relief Commission, and start them to their destination.

And how make sure that only those who had money should pay for their bread, while all who had not should be reached? The solution was simple compared to the distribution of relief after the San Francisco earthquake and fire, for example, in our own land, where a scantier population makes social organisation comparatively loose.

The people to be relieved were in their homes. Belgium is so old a country, her population so dense, and she is so much like one big workshop, that the Government must keep a complete set of books. Every Belgian is registered and docketed. You know just how he makes his living and where he lives. Upon marriage a Belgian gets a little book, giving his name and his wife’s, their ages, their occupations, and address. As children are born their names are added. A Belgian holds as fast to this book as a woman to a piece of jewellery that is an heirloom.

With few exceptions, Belgian local officials had not fled the country. They realised that this was a time when they were particularly needed on the job to protect the people from German exactions and from their own rashness. There were also any number of volunteers. The thing was to get the food to them and let them organise local distribution.

The small force of Americans required to oversee the transit must both watch that the Germans did not take any of the food and retain both British and German confidence in the absolute good faith of their intentions. The volunteers got their expenses and the rest of their reward was experience; and it was “some experience” as a Belgian said, who was learning a little American slang. They talked about canal-boat cargoes as if they had been from Buffalo to Albany on the Erie Canal for years; they spoke of “my province” and compared bread lines and the efficiency of local officials. And the Germans took none of the food; orders from Berlin were obeyed. Berlin knew that any requisitioning of relief supplies meant that the Relief Commission would cease work and announce to the world the reason.

However many times the Americans were arrested they must be patient. That exception who said, when he was put in a cell overnight because he entered the military zone by mistake, that he would not have been treated that way in England, needed a little more coaching in preserving his mask of neutrality. For I must say that nine out of ten of these young men, leaning over backward to be neutral, were pro-Ally, including some with German names. But publicly you could hardly get an admission out of them that there was any war. As for Harvard, 1914, hand a passport carried around the Sphinx’s neck and you have him done in stone.

Fancy any Belgian trying to get him to carry a contraband letter or a German commander trying to work him for a few sacks of flour! When I asked him what career he had chosen he said, “Business!” without any waste of words. I think that he will succeed in a way to surprise his family. It is he and all those young Americans of which he is a type, as distinctive of America in manner, looks, and thought as a Frenchman is of France or a German of Germany, who carried the torch of Peace’s kindly work into war-ridden Belgium. They made you want to tickle the eagle on the throat so he would let out a gentle, well-modulated scream, of course, strictly in keeping with neutrality.

Red lanterns took the place of red flags swung by Landsturm sentries on the run to Brussels as darkness fell. There was no relaxation of watchfulness at night. All the twenty-four hours the systematic conquerors held the net tight. Once when my companion repeated his “Again!” and held out the pass in the lantern’s rays, I broke into a laugh, which excited his curiosity, for you soon get out of the habit of laughing in Belgium.

“It has just occurred to me that my guidebook states that passports are not required in Belgium!” I explained.

The editor of that guidebook will have a busy time before he issues the next edition. For example, he will have a lot of new information about Malines, whose ruins were revealed by the motor lamps in shadowy, broken walls on either side of the main street. Other places where less damage had been done were equally silent. In the smaller towns and villages the population must keep indoors at night; for egress and ingress are more difficult to control there than in large cities, where guards at every corner suffice—watching, watching, these disciplined pawns of remorselessly efficient militarism; watching every human being in Belgium.

“The last time I saw that statue of LiÉge,” I remarked, peering into the darkness as we rode into the city, “the Legion of Honour conferred by France on LiÉge for its brave defence was hung on its breast. I suppose it is gone now.”

“I guess yes,” said Harvard, 1914.

We went to the hotel at Brussels which I had left the day before the city’s fall. English railway signs on the walls of the corridor had not been disturbed. More ancient relic still seemed a bulletin board with its announcement of seven passages a day to England, traversing the Channel in “fifty-five minutes via Calais” and “three hours via Ostend,” with the space blank where the state of the weather for the despair or the delight of intending voyagers had been chalked up in happier days. The same men were in attendance at the office as before; but they seemed older and their politeness that of cheerless automatons. For five months they had been serving German officers as guests with hate in their hearts and, in turn, trying to protect their property.

A story is told of how that hotel had filled with officers after the arrival of the Germanic flood and how one day, when it was learned that the proprietor was a Frenchman, guards were suddenly placed at the doors and the hall was filled with baggage as every officer, acting with characteristic official solidarity, vacated his room and bestowed his presence elsewhere. Then the proprietor was informed that his guests would return if he would agree to employ German help and buy his supplies from Germany. He refused, for practical as well as for sentimental reasons. If he had consented, think what the Belgians would have done to him after the Germans were gone! However, officers were gradually returning, for this was the best hotel in town, and even conquerors are human and German conquerors have particularly human stomachs.