Chapter 8

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 produces 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 organization. How get the bread to the hungry mouths when the Germans were using 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 anyone 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 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 sparser population makes social organization comparatively loose.

The people to be relieved were in their homes. Belgium is so old a country, her population so dense, 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 realized 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 organize local distribution.

The small force of Americans required to oversee the transit must 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 were paid their expenses; the rest of their reward was experience, and it was "soom expeerience," 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 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, hang a passport carrier 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 whom 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 Liege," I remarked, peering into the darkness as we rode into the city, "the Legion of Honour conferred by France on Liege 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 luggage 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.

IX Christmas In Belgium

Christmas in Belgium with the bayonet and the wolf at the door taught me to value Christmas at home for more than its gifts and the cheer of the fireside. It taught me what it meant to belong to a free people and how precious is that old English saying that a man's house is his castle, which was the inception of so much in our lives which we accept as a commonplace. If such a commonplace can be made secure only by fighting, then it is best to fight. At any time a foreign soldier might enter the house of a Belgian and take him away for trial before a military court.

Breakfast in the same restaurant as before the city's fall! Again the big grapes which are a luxury of the rich man's table or an extravagance for a sick friend with us! The hothouses still grew them. What else was there for he hothouses to do, though the export of their products was impossible? A shortage of the long, white-leafed chicory that we call endive in New York restaurants? There were piles of it in the Brussels market and on the hucksters' carts; nothing so cheap!

One might have excellent steaks and roasts and delicious veal; for the heifers were being butchered as the Germans had taken all fodder. But the bread was the Commission's brown, which everyone had to eat. Belgium, growing quality on scanty acres with intensive farming, had food luxuries but not the staff of life.

I looked out of the windows on to the square which four months before I had seen crowded with people bedecked with the Allies' colours and eagerly buying the latest editions containing the communiqués of hollow optimism. No flag in sight now except a German flag flying over the station! But small revenges may be enjoyed. A German soldier tried to jump on the tail of a cart driven by a Belgian, but the Belgian whipped up his horse and the German fell off on to the pavement, whilst the cart sped around a corner.

Out of the station came a score of German soldiers returning from the trenches, on their way to barracks to regain strength in order that they could bear the ordeal of standing in icy water again. They were not the kind exhibited on Press tours to illustrate the "vigour of our indomitable army." Eyelids drooped over hollow eye-sockets; sore, numbed feet moved like feet which are asleep in their vain effort to keep step. Sensitiveness to surroundings, almost to existence, seemed to have been lost.

One was a corporal, young, tall, and full-bearded. He might have been handsome if he had not been so haggard. He gave the lead to the others; he seemed to know where they were going, and they shuffled on after him in dogged painfulness. Four months ago that corporal, with the spring of the energy of youth when the war was young, was perhaps in that green column that went through the streets of Brussels in the thunderous beat of their regular tread on their way to Paris. The group was an object lesson in how much the victor must suffer in war in order to make his victim surfer.

Some officers were at breakfast, too. Mostly they were reservists; mostly bespectacled, with middle age swelling their girth and hollowing their chests, but sturdy enough to apply the regulations made for conduct of the conquered. Whilst stronger men were under shell-fire at the front, they were under the fire of Belgian hate as relentless as their own hate of England. You saw them always in the good restaurants, but never in the company of Belgians, these ostracized rulers. In four months they had made no friends; at least, no friends who would appear with them in public. A few thousand guards in Belgium in the companionship of conquest and seven million Belgians in the companionship of a common helplessness! Bayonets may make a man silent, but they cannot stop his thinking.

At the breakfast table on that Christmas morning in London, Paris, or Berlin the patriot could find the kind of news that he liked. His racial and rational predilections and animosities were solaced. If there were good news it was "played up"; if there were bad news, it was not published or it was explained. L'Echo Belge and L'Indépendance Belge and all the Brussels papers were either out of business or being issued as single sheets in Holland and England.

The Belgian, keenest of all the peoples at war for news, having less occupation to keep his mind off the war, must read the newspapers established under German auspices, which fed him with the pabulum that German chefs provided, reflective of the stumbling degeneracy of England, French weariness of the war, Russian clumsiness, and the invincibility of Germany. If an Englishman had to read German, or a German English, newspapers every morning he might have understood how the Belgian felt.

Those who had sons or fathers or husbands in the Belgian army could not send or receive letters, let alone presents. Families scattered in different parts of Belgium could not hold reunions. But at mass I saw a Belgian standard in the centre of the church. That flag was proscribed, but the priests knew it was safe in that sacred place and the worshippers might feast their eyes on it as they said their avis.

A Bavarian soldier came in softly and stood a little apart from the worshippers, many in mourning, at the rear; a man who was of the same faith as the Belgians and who crossed himself with the others in the house of brotherly love. He would go outside to obey orders; and the others to nurse their hate of him and his race. This private in his faded green, bowing his head before that flag in the shadows of the nave, was war-sick, as most soldiers were; and the Belgians were heartsick. They had the one solace in common. But if you had suggested to him to give up Belgium, his answer would have been that of the other Germans: "Not after all we have suffered to take it!" Christians have a peculiar way of applying Christianity. Yet, if it were not for Christianity and that infernal thing called the world's opinion, which did not exist in the days of Caesar and the Belgse, the Belgians might have been worse off than they were. More of them might have been dead. When they were saying, "Give us this day our daily bread" they were thinking, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," if ever their turn came.

A satirist might have repeated the apochryphal naïveté of Marie Antoinette, who asked why the people wanted bread when they could buy such nice cakes for a sou! For all the pâtisserie shops were open. Brussels is famous for its French pastry. With a store of preserves, why shouldn't the bakeshops go on making tarts with heavy crusts of the brown flour, when war had not robbed the bakers of their art? It gave work to them; it helped the shops to keep open and make a show of normality. But I noticed that they were doing little business. Stocks were small and bravely displayed. Only the rich could afford such luxuries, which in ordinary times were what ice- cream cones are to us. Even the jewellery shops were open, with diamond rings flashing in the windows.

"You must pay rent; you don't want to discharge your employees," said a jeweller. "There is no place to go except your shop. If you closed it would look as if you were afraid of the Germans. It would make you blue and the people in the street blue. One tries to go through the motions of normal existence, anyway. But, of course, you don't sell anything. This week I have repaired a locket which carried the portrait of a soldier at the front and I've put a mainspring in a watch. I'll warrant that is more than some of my competitors have done."

Swing around the circle in Brussels of a winter's morning and look at the only crowds that the Germans allow to gather, and any doubt that Belgium would have gone hungry if she had not received provisions from the outside was dispelled. Whenever I think of a bread-line again I shall see the faces of a Belgian bread-line. They blot out the memory of those at home, where men are free to go and come; where war has not robbed the thrifty of food.

It was fitting that the great central soup kitchen should be established in the central express office of the city. For in Belgium these days there is no express business except in German troops to the front and wounded to the rear. The dispatch of parcels is stopped, no less than the other channels of trade, in a country where trade was so rife, a country that lived by trade. On the stone floor, where once packages were arranged for forwarding to the towns whose names are on the walls, were many great cauldrons in clusters of three, to economize space and fuel.

"We don't lack cooks," said a chef-who had been in a leading hotel. "So many of us are out of work. Our society of hotel and restaurant keepers took charge. We know the practical side of the business. I suppose you have the same kind of a society in New York and would turn to it for help if the Germans occupied New York?"

He gave me a printed report in which I read, for example, that "M. Arndt, professor of the École Normale, had been good enough to take charge of accounts," and "M. Catteau had been specially appointed to look after the distribution of bread." Most appetizing that soup prepared under direction of the best chefs in the city! The meat and green vegetables in it were Belgian and the peas American. Steaming hot in big cans it was sent to the communal centres, where lines of people with pots, pitchers, and pails waited to receive their daily allowance. A democracy was in that bread-line such as I have never seen anywhere except at San Francisco after the earthquake. Each person had a blue or a yellow ticket, with numbers to be punched, like a commuter. The blue tickets were for those who had proved to the communal authorities that they could not pay; the yellow for those who paid five centimes for each person served. A flutter of blue and yellow tickets all over Belgium, and in return life I With each serving of soup went a loaf of the American brown bread. The faces in the line were not those of people starving--they had been saved from starvation. There was none of the emaciation which pictures of famine in the Orient have made familiar; but they were pinched faces, bloodless faces, the faces of people on short rations.

To the Belgian bread is not only the staff of life; it is the legs. At home we think of bread as something that goes with the rest of the meal; to the poorer classes of Belgians the rest of the meal is something that goes with bread. To you and me food has meant the payment of money to the baker and the butcher and the grocer, or the hotel- keeper. You get your money by work or from investments. What if there were no bread to be had for work or money? Sitting on a mountain of gold in the desert of Sahara would not quench thirst. Three hundred grammes, a minimum calculation--about half what the British soldier gets--was the ration. That small boy sent by his mother got five loaves; his ticket called for an allowance for a family of five. An old woman got one loaf, for she was alone in the world.

Each one as he hurried by had a personal story of what war had meant to him. They answered your questions frankly, gladly, with the Belgian cheerfulness which was amazing considering the circumstances. A tall, distinguished-looking man was an artist.

"No work for artists these days," he said.

No work in a community of workers where every link of the chain of economic life had been broken. No work for the next man, a chauffeur, or the next, a brass worker; the next, a teamster; the next, a bank clerk; the next, a doorkeeper of a Government office; whilst the wives of those who still had work were buying in the only market they had. But the husbands of some were not at home. Each answer about the absent one had an appeal that nothing can picture better than the simple words or the looks that accompanied the words.

"The last I heard of my husband he was fighting at Dixmude--two months ago."

"Mine is wounded, somewhere in France."

"Mine was with the army, too. I don't know whether he is alive or dead. I have not heard since Brussels was taken. He cannot get my letters and I cannot get his."

"Mine was killed at Liege, but we have a son."

So you out in Nebraska who gave a handful of wheat might know that said handful of wheat reached its destination in an empty stomach. If you sent a suit of clothes, or a cap, or a pair of socks, come along to the skating-rink, where ice-polo was played and matches and carnivals were held in better days, and look on at the boxes, packed tight with gifts of every manner of thing that men and women and children wear except silk hats, which are being opened and sorted and distributed into hastily-constructed cribs and compartments.

A Belgian woman whose father was one of Belgium's leading lawyers--her husband was at the front-was the busy head of this organization, because, as she said, the busier she was the more it "keeps my mind off------" and she did not finish the sentence. How many times I heard that "keeps my mind off------" a sentence that was the more telling for not being finished. She and some other women began sewing and patching and collecting garments; "but our business grew so fast"--the business of relief is the one kind in Belgium that does grow these days--"that now we have hundreds of helpers. I begin to feel that I am what you would call in America a captainess of industry."

Some of the good mothers in America were a little too thoughtful in their kindness. An odour in a box that had evidently travelled across the Atlantic close to the ship's boilers was traced to the pocket of a boy's suit, which contained the hardly-distinguishable remains of a ham sandwich, meant to be ready to hand for the hungry Belgian boy who got that suit. Broken pots of jam were quite frequent. But no matter. Soap and water and Belgian industry saved the suit, if not the sandwich. Sweaters and underclothes and overcoats almost new, and shiny old morning coats and trousers with holes in seat and knees might represent equal sacrifice on the part of some American three thousand miles away, and all were welcome. Needlewomen were given work cutting up the worn-outs of grown-ups and making them over into astonishingly good suits or dresses for youngsters.

"We've really turned the rink into a kind of department store," said the lady. "Come into our boot department. We had some leather left in Belgium that the Germans did not requisition, so we bought it and that gave more Belgians work in the shoe factories. Work, you see, is what we want to keep our minds off------"

Blue and yellow tickets here, too! Boots for children and thick-set working-women and watery-eyed old men!

And each was required to leave behind the pair he was wearing.

"Sometimes we can patch up the cast-offs, which means work for the cobblers," said the captainess of industry. "And who are our clerks? Why, the people who put on the skates for the patrons of the rink, of course!"