My Year of the War. Frederick Palmer
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