a mouthful from Germany or anywhere else unless you give up the blockade and open the ports of Belgium and Germany alike to incoming foods.
On the other side were von Bissing and his German governing staff in Belgium, together with most of the men of the military General Staff at Great Headquarters. Von Bissing tried, in his heavy, stupid way, to placate the Belgians; that was part of his policy. So he would offer them food—always for work—with one hand, while he gave them a slap with the other. He wanted Belgium to be tranquil. He did not want to have openly to machine-gun starving mobs in the cities, however many unfortunates he allowed to be quietly carried out to the Tir National at gray dawn to stand for one terrible moment before the ruthless firing squad. And the hard-headed men of the General Staff knew that starving people do not lie down quietly and die. All the northern lines of communication between the west front and Germany ran through the countries of these ten million imprisoned French and Belgians. Even without arms they could make much
trouble for the guards of bridges and railways in their dying struggles. At least it would require many soldiers to kill them fast enough to prevent it. And the soldiers, all of them, were needed in the trenches. In addition the German General Staff earnestly desired and hoped up to the very last that America would keep out of the war. And these extraordinary Americans in Belgium seemed to have all of America behind them; that is what the great relief propaganda and the imposing list of diplomatic personages on the C. R. B. list were partly for. Hoover had realized from the beginning what this would mean. "No," said the higher German officials, "it will not do to interfere too much with these quixotic Americans."
But the Germans, most of them at least, never really understood us. One day as Hoover was finishing a conversation with the head of the German Pass-Zentral in Brussels, trying to arrange for a less vexing and delaying method of granting passes for the movements of our men, the German officer said: "Well, now tell me, Herr Hoover, as man to man, what do you get out of all this? You
are not doing all this for nothing, surely." And a little later, at a dinner at the Great Headquarters to which I had been invited by one of the chief officers of the General Staff, he said to me, as we took our seats: "Well, how's business?" I could only tell him that it was going as well as any business could that made no profits for anybody in it.
It was impressive to see Hoover in the crises. We expected a major crisis once a month and a minor one every week. We were rarely disappointed in our expectations. I may describe, for illustration, such a major crisis, a very major one, which came in August, 1916. The Commission had been making a hard fight all summer for two imperatively needed concessions from the Germans. We wanted the General Staff to turn over to us for the civil population a larger proportion of the 1916 native crop of Occupied France than we had had from the 1915 crop. And we wanted some special food for the 600,000 French children in addition to the regular program imported from overseas. We sorely needed fresh meat, butter, milk and eggs for them and we had discov
ered that Holland would sell us certain quantities of these foods. But we had to have the special permission of both the Allies and Germany to bring them in.
Hoover, working in London, obtained the Allied consent. But the Germans were holding back. I was pressing the General Staff at Great Headquarters at Charleville and von Bissing's government at Brussels. Their reasons for holding back finally appeared. Germany looked on Holland as a storehouse of food which might some time, in some way, despite Allied pressure on the Dutch Government, become available to Germany. Although the French children were suffering terribly, and ceasing all growth and development for lack of the tissue-building foods, the Germans preferred not to let us help them with the Dutch food but to cling to their long chance of sometime getting it for themselves.
Hoover came over to Brussels and, together, we started for Berlin. We discovered von Bissing's chief political adviser, Baron von der Lancken and his principal assistant, Dr. Rieth, on the same train. These were the two
men who, after the armistice, proposed to Hoover by wire through our Rotterdam office, to arrange with him for getting food into Germany and received by prompt return wire through the same intermediary: "Mr. Hoover's personal compliments and request to go to hell. If Mr. Hoover has to deal with Germany for the Allies it will at least not be with such a precious pair of scoundrels."