My Year of the War. Frederick Palmer
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, hardworking 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 heard 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 his 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 realized 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 a full cartridge-box 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, whilst 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 it 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, 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. Someone 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 an Englishman, or a German, or a Hottentot, or any other kind of a human being gets to know Whitlock, he recognizes 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 that which has the most—his own land.
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