In addition to this form of plunder special pretexts were made use of to obtain money. At Arlon a telephone wire was broken, whereupon the town was given four hours to pay a fine of $20,000 in gold, in default of which one hundred houses would be sacked. When the payment was made forty-seven houses had already been plundered. Instance after instance could be given of similar unjustifiable and exorbitant fines.
Under treatment like this Belgium was brought in a short time into immediate sight of starvation. They made frantic appeals for help. First they appealed to the Germans, but the German authorities did nothing, though in individual cases German soldiers shared their army rations with the people. Then an appeal was made to Holland, but Holland was a nation much like Belgium. It did not raise food enough for itself, and was not sure that it could import enough for its own needs.
From all over Belgium appeals were sent from the various towns and villages to Brussels. But Brussels, too, was face to face with famine. To cope with famine there were many relief organizations in Belgium. Every little town had its relief committee, and in the larger cities strong branches of the Red Cross did what they could. Besides such secular organizations, there were many religious organizations, generally under the direction of the Roman Catholic Church.
In Brussels a strong volunteer relief organization was formed on September 5th under the patronage of the American and Spanish Ministers, Mr. Brand Whitlock and the Marquis of Villalobar. This committee, known as the Central Relief Committee, or more exactly La Comité Central de Secours et d’Alimentation pour l’Agglomération bruxelloise, did wonderful work until the end of the war. But though there was plenty of organization there were great difficulties ahead.
In order to import food, credit had to be established abroad, permission had to be obtained to transport foodstuffs into Belgium through the British blockade. Permission to use the railroads and canals of Belgium had to be obtained from Germany, and, most important of all, it had to be made certain that no food thus imported should be seized by the German troops.
Through the American and Spanish ministers permission was obtained from Governor-General Kolmar von der Goltz to import food, and the Governor-General also gave assurance that, “Foodstuffs of all sorts imported by the committee to assist the civil population shall be reserved exclusively for the nourishment of the civil population of Belgium, and that consequently these foodstuffs shall be exempt from requisition on the part of the military authorities, and shall rest exclusively at the disposition of the committee.”
With this assurance the Central Relief Committee sent Emil Francqui and Baron Lambert, members of their committee, together with Mr. Hugh Gibson, secretary of the American Legation, whose activities in behalf of Belgium attracted much favorable notice, to the city of London, to explain to the British Government the suffering that existed in Belgium, and to obtain permission to transport food through the British blockade. In the course of this work they appealed to the American Ambassador in England, Mr. Walter Hines Page, and were introduced by him to an American mining engineer named Herbert Clark Hoover, who had just become prominent as the chairman of a committee to assist Americans who had found themselves in Europe when the war broke out, and had been unable to secure funds.
Mr. Hoover took up the matter with great vigor, and organized an American committee under the patronage of the ministers of the United States and of Spain in London, Berlin, The Hague and Brussels, which committee obtained permission from the British Government to purchase and transport through the British blockade, to Rotterdam, Holland, cargoes of foodstuffs, to be ultimately transferred into Belgium and distributed by the Belgian Central Relief Committee under the direction of American citizens headed by Mr. Brand Whitlock.
The following brief notices, in connection with this committee appeared in the London Times:
October 24, 1914.—A commission has been set up in London, under the title of The American Commission for Relief in Belgium. The Brussels committee reports feeding 300,000 daily.