hurrying about among her helpers—twelve faithful Belgian women. They
had all been there since eight o’clock, for this was a _viande_ day
(there are three a week) and when there is meat that must be cut into
little pieces for between four and five hundred children, it means an
early start. Two women were still stirring (with long wooden spoons)
the great tub full of savory macaroni and carrots—a test in itself for
muscle and endurance. The meat was in separate kettles. The bread had
been cut into over 400 portions. The phosphatine dessert (of which the
children can not get enough) was already served at a side table. The
“Little Bees” originated this phosphatine dessert, which is a mixture
of rice, wheat and maize—flour, phosphate of lime and cocoa. They have
a factory for making it, and up to August, 1916, had turned out 638,000
kilos.
A gentleman in black frock suit and large hat came in to look about,
and then went back to the lengthening line. Madame explained that he
was the principal of the communal school of the quarter, and that he
came every day to keep the children in order. I learned, too, that on
every single day of the vacation, which had begun and was to continue
until the middle of September, he and one of his teachers went to
the school to distribute to all the school children the little roll
of white bread that they are allowed at eight-thirty each morning.
Many of these have but little at home. This roll helps them out
until the cantine meal at eleven-thirty, which can be had only on a
physician’s authorization. From now on a larger meal is to be given
in the schools—a joy not only to the pupils but to their teachers,
who everywhere are devoting themselves to this work of saving their
children. Several of the younger women helping Madame had been working
wearily all the year in the professional schools, but as soon as
their vacations arrived, begged to be allowed to give their time to
the cantines. They were all most attractive in their white aprons and
caps—most serious in their attention to the individual wants of that
hungry family.
A few minutes later the principal appeared again—all was ready
now. Then the little ones began to march in. They came by way of
an anteroom, where they had their hands washed, if they needed
washing—and most of them did—and quite proudly held them up as they
passed by us. They were of all sizes between three and fourteen. One
pale little fellow was led in by his grandmother who was admitted (tho
no mothers or grandmothers are supposed to come inside), because he
wailed the minute she left him. It was easy to see why mothers could
not be allowed, tho one was glad the rule could be broken, and that
this sad, white-faced grandmother could feed her own charge. It was
terrible, too, to realize what that plate of savory stew would have
meant to her, and to see that she touched no morsel of it. Even if
there had been an extra portion, the women could not have given it to
her: the following day the street would have been filled with others,
for whom there could not possibly be extra portions.
If a child is too ill to come for its dinner, a member of the family
can carry it home. Practically all the cantines have a visiting nurse
who investigates such cases, and keeps the number much lower than it
would otherwise be.
When I asked Madame how she was able to give so much time (from about 8
A.M. till 1 or 2 P.M. every day of the year), she smiled and shrugged
her shoulders: “But that is the least one can do, the very least!
One never thinks of the work, it is of the children—and we know
they love us—we see them being kept alive! Some of them are getting
stronger—these weaklings. What more can we wish?”
V
MRS. WHITLOCK’S VISIT
The second time, I visited Madame’s cantine with the wife of the
American Minister, and I found what it meant to be the wife of the
United States Minister in Belgium! From the corner above to the
entrance of the court the street was lined with people. At the gateway
we were met by a committee headed by the wife of the Bourgmestre
of Brussels. Within the court were the hundreds of children—with
many more mothers this time—all waiting expectantly, all specially
scrubbed, tho no amount of scrubbing could conceal their sad lack of
shoes. There were smiles and greetings and little hands stretched out
all along the line as we passed.
Inside there was no more than the usual cleanliness—for the cantines
are scrupulously kept. Madame and her assistants had tiny American
flags pinned to their white uniforms. In the corridors the American and
Belgian flags hung together. A special permission had been obtained to
take a photograph of their guest at the window.
The tables were laid, the lines began moving. As the little girls filed
in, one of them came forward, and with a pretty courtesy offered Mrs.
Whitlock a large bouquet of red roses. The boys followed, and their
representative, struggling with shyness, recited a poem as he gave
his flowers. All the children were very much imprest with this simple
ceremony, and under the two flags, as the quavering little voice gave
thanks to “those who were bringing them their daily bread,” there were
no grown-ups without tears in their eyes.
American flags of one kind or another hang in all the cantines, along
with pictures of President Wilson, mottos expressing thanks to America,
C. R. B. flour-sacks elaborately embroidered—on all sides are attempts
to express gratitude and affection.
That morning, as the Legation car turned a corner, a little old Flemish
lady in a white frilled cap stept forward and clapped her hands as the
American flag floated by. Men lift their hats to it, children salute
it. In the shop windows one often sees it draping the pictures of the
King and Queen!
This is not a tribute to the American flag alone, but also to the
personality of the man who has so splendidly represented this flag and
to the men who carried the American soul and its works into Belgium
through the C. R. B. Belgium will never forget its immediate debt
to Brand Whitlock and to these hundreds of Americans whose personal
service to this country in its darkest hour is already a matter
of history. Just as Mrs. Whitlock was leaving, Madame fortunately
discovered a shabby little girl who still squeezed a bedraggled bunch
of white roses—and made her happy by bringing her forward to present
it.
These children, as I have said, are all in need of special
nourishment, they are those who have fallen by the wayside in the
march, brought down by the stern repression of the food supply. One of
the most striking effects of the war has been the rapid increase in
tuberculosis. Many of the thousands in the cantines are the victims of
“glands” or some other dread form of this disease.
However, in some respects the children of the very poor are better
off than they have ever been. For the first time they are receiving
nourishing food at regular hours. And this ration, along with the
training in hygiene and medical attention, is having its good effect.
One hundred and twenty-five physicians are contributing their services
to the “Little Bees” in Brussels alone, where, during the first six
months of 1916, infant mortality had decreased 19 per cent. It would be
difficult to estimate the time given by physicians throughout the whole
country, but probably half of the 4,700 are contributing practically
all their time, and almost all are doing something. It is a common
sight in the late afternoon to see a physician who has had a full, hard
day, rushing to a cantine to examine hundreds of children. Outside the
zone of military preparation, 200,000 sub-normal children of from three
to seventeen years, and over 53,000 babies under three months, are on
their “relief” lists, besides a large number of adults.
Outside Brussels, the cantines are conducted in much the same way as
those of the “Little Bees.” Committees of women everywhere are devoting
themselves to the children.
VI
THE BATHTUB
Way over in the northeast, in Hasselt, a town of 17,000 inhabitants,
there is an especially interesting cantine—only one of thousands in
Belgium, mind you! A year ago, when a California professor was leaving
San Francisco to become a C. R. B. representative, he was offered a
farewell dinner—and in the hall his hostess placed a basket, with
obvious intent! The money was not for the general fund, but to be spent
by him personally for some child in need.
He was assigned to Hasselt, for the Province of Limbourg, and there
he very soon decided that a splendid young Belgian woman who had
been giving her whole time to nursing wounded soldiers would be the
person to know which of their children was most in need of his little
fund. When he proposed turning it over to her, she quite broke down
at the opportunity it offered. She and her mother were living in a
rather large house, but on a limited income. She would find the sick
child and care for it in her own home. A few days later the professor
called to see her “child”—and he found twelve! She had not been able
to stop—most of them were children whose fathers were at the front.
They were suffering from rickets, arrested development, paralysis,
malnutrition. She was bathing them, feeding them, and following the
instructions of a physician, whom she had already interested. Her
fund was two hundred and fifty dollars, but in her hands it seemed
inexhaustible. She added children, one after another. Then, finally,
the Relief Committee came to the support of her splendid and necessary
work with its usual monthly subsidy, with which the women buy the
supplies most needed from the relief shops. She is now installed in the
middle of the town—with a kitchen and dining-room downstairs, and a
little clinic and bathroom upstairs. The forty-six centimes (less than
ten cents) a day which she received per child, enabled her to furnish
an excellent meal for each. But she soon found that her children could
not be built up on one meal, and she stretched her small subsidy to
cover a breakfast at eight and a dinner at four to 100 children. She
balances the ration, makes the daily milk tests, looks after every
detail personally. Upstairs in the prized tub devoted helpers bathe
the children who need washing, care for their heads, and for all the
various ailments of a family of 100 sub-normal children. Because of
the glycerine it contains, soap has been put on the “non-entry” list,
which makes it so expensive that the very poor are entirely without it.
The price has increased 300 per cent. since the war. Incidentally, one
of the reasons for the high price of butter is that it can be sold for
making soap, at an extraordinary figure.
This particular tub is a tribute to the ingenuity of the present
American representative—also a professor, but from farther East.
Before the terrific problem of giving children enough bread and
potatoes to keep them alive, bathrooms sometimes appear an unnecessary
luxury. The relief committee could not furnish Mademoiselle a bathroom!
But to those working with the sick and dirty children it seemed
all-essential. Hasselt is not a rich town, everybody’s resources had
been drained—how should the money be found? Finally the C. R. B.
delegate had an inspiration—there was a big swimming-tank in Hasselt.
To the people, the American representative, tho loved, is always a more
or less surprizing person. If it could be announced that by paying
a small sum they could see the strange American swim, everybody who
had the small sum would come—he would swim for the bathroom! It was
announced, and they came, and that swimming fête will go down in the
annals of the town! The cantine got its bathroom, and there was enough
left over to buy a very necessary baby-scales.
Mademoiselle took us to the houses where we saw the misery of mothers
left with seven, nine, eleven children, in one or two little rooms.
There was no wage-earner—he was at the front; or there was no work.
One woman was crying as we went in. She explained that her son, “a bad
one,” had just been trying to take his father’s boots. She pulled out
from behind the basket where the twins were sleeping under the day’s
washing, a battered pair of coarse, high boots. There were holes in the
hob-nailed soles, there was practically no heel left. The heavy tops
still testified to an original stout leather, but never could one see a
more miserable, run-down-at-the-heel, leaky, and useless pair of boots.
Yet to that woman they represented a fortune—there is practically no
leather left in the country, and if there were, how could her man, when
he came back, have the money to buy another pair, and how could he work
in the fields without his boots? There were eight children—eight had
died.
And she wept bitterly because of the son who had tried to take his
father’s boots, as she hid them behind the twin’s basket. I had heard
of the sword as the symbol of the honor and power of the house; in
bitter reality it is the father’s one pair of boots!
VII
THE BREAD IN THE HAND
I soon came to have the curious feeling about the silent stone fronts
of the houses that if I could but look through them I should see
women sorting garments, women making patterns for lace, women ladling
soup, painting toys, washing babies. Up and down the stairs of these
inconvenient buildings they are running all day long, back and forth,
day after day, seeking through a heroic cheerfulness, a courageous
smile, to hold back tears.
And chiefly I was overwhelmed by the enormous quantities of food they
are handling. The whole city seems turned into a kitchen—and there
follows the inevitable question: “Where does it all come from?” The
women who are doing the work connect directly with the local Belgian
organizations, by the great system of decentralization, which is the
keynote of the C. R. B. Just these three magic letters spell the answer
to the inevitable question.
At the C. R. B. bureau I had seen the charts lining the corridors.
They seemed alive, changing every day, marking the ships on the ocean,
the number of tons of rice, wheat, maize or sugar expected; and how
these tons count up! In the two years that have passed, 1,000,000 tons
each year, meaning practically one ship every weekday in the month;
90,000 tons at one time on the Atlantic! Other charts show the transit
of goods already unloaded at Rotterdam. Over 200 lighters are in
constant movement on their way down the canals to the various C. R. B.
warehouses, which means about 50,000 tons afloat all the time. I had
seen, too, the reports of the enormous quantities of clothing brought
in—4,000,000 dollars worth, almost all of it the free gift of the
United States.
In the director’s room were other maps showing the territory in charge
of each American. Back of every cantine and its power to work stands
this American, the living guaranty to England that the Germans are not
getting the food, the guaranty to Germany of an equal neutrality, and
to the Belgians themselves the guaranty that the gifts of the world
to her, and those of herself to her own people, would be brought in
as wheat through the steel ring that had cut her off. One had only to
think of the C. R. B. door in the steel ring as closed, to realize the
position of this neutral commission. The total result of their daily
and hourly co-ordination of all this organization inside Belgium,
their solitude for each class of the population, their dull and dry
calculations of protein, fat and carbohydrates, bills of lading, cars,
canal boats, mills and what not, is the replenishing of the life-stream
of a nation’s blood.
Thus, the food dispensed by the women is part of the constantly
entering mass, and between its purchase, or its receipt as gift by
the C. R. B., and its appearance as soup for adults, or pudding for
children, is the whole intricate structure of the relief organization.
The audible music of this creation is the clatter of hundreds of
typewriters, the tooting of tugs and shrieks of locomotives, but the
undertones are the harmonies of devotion.
Everybody who can pay for his food must do so—it is sold at a fair
profit, and it is this profit, gained from those who still have
money, that goes over to the women in charge of the cantines for the
purchase of supplies for the destitute. They often supplement this
subsidy through a house-to-house appeal to the people. For instance,
in Brussels, the “Little Bees” are untiring in their canvass. Basket
on arm, continually they solicit an egg, a bunch of carrots, a bit of
meat, or a money gift. They have been able to count on about 5,000 eggs
and about 2,500 francs a week, besides various other things. Naturally,
the people in the poorer sections can contribute but small amounts, but
it is here that one finds the most touching examples of generosity—the
old story of those who have suffered and understood. One woman who
earns just a franc a day and on it has to support herself and her
family, carefully wraps her weekly two-centime piece (two-fifths of a
cent) and has it ready when one of the “Little Bees” calls for it.
OUR AMERICAN YOUNG MEN
Monsieur ..., a committee leader in the Hainaut, once said to me,
“Madame, one of the big things Belgium will win in this war is a true
appreciation of the character and capacity (quite aside from their
idealism) of American young men.
“I’ll confess,” he continued, “that when that initial group of young
Americans came rushing in with those first heaven-sent cargoes of
wheat, we were not strongly reassured. We knew that for the moment
we were saved, but it was difficult to see how these youths, however
zealous and clear-eyed, were going to meet the disaster as we knew it.
“We organized, as you know, our local committees, and headed them by
our Belgians of widest experience; our lawyers of fifty or sixty, our
bankers, our leaders of industry. We could set all the machinery, but
nothing would work unless the Americans would stand with us. The
instructions read: ‘The American and your Belgian chairmen will jointly
manage the relief.’
“And who came to stand with us? Who came to stand with me, for
instance? You see,” and he pointed to splendid broad-shouldered C.
ahead of us, “that lad—not a day over twenty-eight—just about the age
of my boys in the trenches, and who, heaven knows, is now almost as
dear to us as they!
“But in the beginning I couldn’t see it; I simply couldn’t believe C.
was going to be able to handle his end of our terrific problem. But day
by day I watched this lad quietly getting a sense of the situation,
then plunging into it, getting under it, developing an instinct for
diplomacy along with his natural genius for directness and practicality
that bewildered me. It has amazed us all.
“We soon learned that we need not fear to trust ourselves to that type
of character, to its adaptability and capacity, no matter how young it
seemed.”
Of course there have been older Americans who have brought to their
Belgian co-workers equal years as well as experience, but one of the
pictures I like best to remember is this of Monsieur ..., a Belgian
of fifty-five or sixty, in counsel with his eager American délégué of
twenty-eight. To the partnership, friendship, confidence, the Belgian
added something paternal, and the American responded with a devotion
one feels is lifelong.
Between the visits to mills and docks, and the grinding over accounts,
orders of canal boats and warehouses, there are hours for other things.
I remember one restful one spent at this same Monsieur’s table—he is
an excellent Latin scholar and a wise philosopher—when he and his
young American friend for a time forgot the wheat and fat in their
delight to get back to Virgil and Horace.
Young D., a Yale graduate, furnished another example of these qualities
Monsieur stressed. If he had been a Westerner, his particular
achievement would have been less surprizing, but he came from the East.
He reached Belgium at the time of a milk crisis. We were attempting,
and, in fact, had practically arranged, the plan to establish C. R. B.
herds adjacent to towns, to insure a positive supply for tiny babies.
The local committees went at it, but one after another came in with
discouraging reports. Even their own people were often preventing
success by fearing and sometimes by flatly refusing to turn their
precious cows into a community herd. Then one day D., who, so far as I
know, had never in his career been within speaking distance of a cow,
put on something that looked like a sombrero and swung out across
his province. We had hardly had time to speculate about what he might
accomplish, before he returned to announce that he had rounded up a
magnificent herd, and that _his_ district was ready to guarantee so
much pure milk from that time on!
“What had he done, where we had failed?” asked Monsieur. “He had called
a meeting of farmers in each commune, and said: ‘We, the Americans,
want from this commune five or ten cows for the babies of your cities.
We give ourselves to Belgium, you give your cows to us. We will give
them back when the war is over—if they are alive!’ And he got them!”
They would have given this cheerful beggar anything—these stolid old
Flemish peasants.
VIII
ONE WOMAN
The world will be incredulous when it is given the final picture of the
complexity and completeness of the Belgian Relief Organization. In all
the communes, all the provinces, in the capital, for over two years,
groups of Belgians have been shut in their bureaux with figures and
plans, matching needs with relief.
There must be bread and clothing for everybody, shelter for the
homeless, soup for the hungry, food boxes for prisoners in Germany,
milk for babies, special nourishment for the tubercular, orphanages
and crèches for the tiny war victims, work for the idle, some means of
secours for merchants, artists, teachers and thousands of “ashamed
poor”—665,000 idle workmen with their 1,000,000 dependents, 1,250,000
on the soupes, 53,000 babies and 200,000 children under normal health
in the cantines—how much of the story can these figures tell?
Yet the efforts of the organization have been so continuous and
comprehensive, the C. R. B. has been so steadily bringing to them the
vital foodstuffs, and holding for them the guaranty of their freedom to
act, that from the committee-rooms it has sometimes seemed as if there
were really nothing more to be done for Belgium!
But one has only to spend a few days at the other end, to get quickly
disabused of this idea! No amount of organization can truly meet the
needs of the seven and a half million people of a small industrial
country, suddenly and entirely cut off from all normal contact with the
rest of the world. Despite all the food that has been distributed, the
resistance of the people has been lowered. Tuberculosis has seized its
opportunity, and is making rapid strides. I have visited home after
home where a heartbreaking courage was trying to cover up a losing
struggle. Over and above all the organized “Relief,” there remains an
enormous task for just such splendid women as Madame....
Madame is the wife of a lawyer, with two sons at the front. As soon as
the war broke out she organized a Red Cross center. Then the refugees
came pouring into Brussels, and she felt that among them there must
be many to whom it would be torture to be crowded into the big relief
shelters. She said little, but by the end of August she had managed
to squeeze five families in with her own. From the day the Germans
abolished the Belgian Red Cross she gave her entire time to helping the
homeless who had been in comfortable circumstances before the war to
some quiet corner where they might wait its end. There was never any
announcement of her work, but the word spread like wildfire—many had
to be turned away daily. Then she found a big home on the Boulevard,
rather shabby inside, but conveniently arranged for suites of two or
even three rooms. Here a considerable number of families might have
space for a complete ménage; plenty of light and air, and room to cook
and sleep. Before long she was housing ninety-eight, but a few of
these were able to re-establish themselves, so when I visited her in
September, 1916, there were sixty-five. As her own funds were limited,
and fast disappearing, she had in the end to appeal to the “Relief” to
subsidize this “Home.”