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!"
One could write volumes on this systematic relief work, the businesslike industry of succouring Belgium by the businesslike Belgians, with American help. Certainly one cannot leave out those old men stragglers from Louvain and Bruges and Ghent—venerable children with no offspring to give them paternal care—who took their turn in getting bread, which they soaked thoroughly in their soup for reasons that would be no military secret, not even in the military zone. On Christmas Day an American, himself a smoker, thinking what class of children he could make happiest on a limited purse, remembered the ring around the stove and bought a basket of cheap brier pipes and tobacco. By Christmas night some toothless gums were sore, but a beatific smile of satiation played in white beards.
Nor can one leave out the very young babies at home, who get their milk if grown people do not, and the older babies beyond milk but not yet old enough for bread and meat, whose mothers return from the bread-line to bring their children to another line, where they got portions of a syrupy mixture which those who know say is the right provender. On such occasions men are quite helpless. They can only look on with a frog in the throat at pale, improperly nourished mothers with bundles of potential manhood and womanhood in their arms. For this was woman's work for woman. Belgian women of every class joined in it: the competent wife of a workman, or the wife of a millionaire who had to walk like everybody else now that her motor- car was requisitioned by the army.
Pop-eyed children, ruddy-cheeked, aggressive children, pinched- faced children, kept warm by sweaters that some American or English children spared, happy in that they did not know what their elders knew! Not the danger of physical starvation so much as the actual presence of mental starvation was the thing that got on your nerves in a land where the sun is seldom seen in winter and rainy days are the rule. It was bad enough in the "zone of occupation," so called, a line running from Antwerp past Brussels to Mons. One could guess what it was like in the military zone to the westward, where only an occasional American relief representative might go.
This is not saying that the Germans were stricter than necessary, if we excuse the exasperation of their militarism, in order to prevent information from passing out, when a multitude of Belgians would have risked their lives gladly to help the Allies. One spy bringing accurate information might cost the German army thousands of casualties; perhaps decide the fate of a campaign. They saw the Belgians as enemies. They were fighting to take the lives of their enemies and save their own lives, which made it tough for them and the French and the British—tough all round, but very particularly tough for the Belgians.
It was good for a vagrant American to dine at the American Legation, where Mr. and Mrs. Whitlock were far, very far, from the days in Toledo, Ohio, where he was mayor. Some said that the place of the Minister to Belgium was at Havre, where the Belgian Government had its offices; but neither Whitlock nor the Belgian people thought so, nor the German Government, since they had realized his prestige with the Belgians and how they would listen to him in any crisis when their passions might break the bonds of wisdom. Hugh Gibson, being the omnipresent Secretary of Legation in four languages, naturally was also present. We recalled dining together in Honduras, when he was in the thick of vexations.
Trouble accommodatingly waits for him wherever he goes, because he has a gift for taking care of trouble, in the ascendancy of a cheerful spirit and much knowledge of international law. His present for the Minister, who daily received stacks of letters from all sources asking the impossible, as well as from Americans who wanted to be sure that the food they gave was not being purloined by the Germans, was a rubber stamp, "Blame-it-all-there's-a-state-of-war-in- Belgium!" which he suggested might save typewriting—a recommendation which the Minister refused to accept, not to Gibson's surprise.
On that Christmas afternoon and evening, the people promenaded the streets as usual. You might have thought it a characteristic Christmas afternoon or evening except for the Landsturm patrols. But there was an absence of the old gaiety, and they were moving as if from habit and moving was all there was to do.