When these gentlemen, who had helped greatly in making our work and life in Belgium very difficult, saw us, they were somewhat confused but finally told us they were called to Berlin for a great conference on the relief work. When we reached Berlin we found three important officers from Great Headquarters in the Hotel Adlon. Two of them we knew well; they had always been fairly friendly to us. The third was General von Sauberzweig, military governor of Brussels at the time of Miss Cavell's execution, and the man of final responsibility for her death. As a result of the excitement in Berlin because of the world-wide indignation over the Cavell affair he had been removed from Brussels by promotion to the Quarter
master Generalship at Great Headquarters!
The Berlin conference of important representatives of all the government departments and the General Staff had been called as a result of the influence of zu Reventlow and the jingoes who wished to break down the Belgian relief. We were not invited; we just happened to be there. We could not attend the conference, but we could work on the outside. We went to Ambassador Gerard for advice. The Allies were pressing the Commission to get the concessions on the 1916 native crop. Our effort to get the food for the children was entirely our own affair. Mr. Gerard advised Hoover to rely entirely on the Commission's reputation for humanity and neutrality; to keep the position of the Allies wholly out of the discussion. But this was indeed only the confirmation by a wise diplomat of the idea of the situation that Hoover already had.
Most of the conference members were against the relief. At the end of the first session Lancken and one of the Headquarters officers told us that things were almost certainly going wrong. They advised Hoover to give
up. What he did was to work harder. He forced the officials of the Foreign Office and Interior to hear him. He pictured the horrible consequences to the entire population of Belgium and Occupied France of breaking off the relief, and painted vividly what the effect would be on the neutral world, America, Spain, and Holland in very sight and sound of the catastrophe. He pleaded and reasoned—and won! It was harder than his earlier struggle with Lloyd-George, already entirely well inclined by feelings of humanity, but in each case he had saved the relief. Not only did the conference not destroy the work, but by continued pressure later at Brussels and Great Headquarters we obtained the agreements for an increase of the civilian allotment out of the 1916 French crop and for the importation of some of the Dutch food for the 600,000 suffering children. It was a characteristic Hooverian achievement in the face of imminent disaster.
Hoover and the C. R. B. were in Belgium and France for but one purpose, to feed the people, to save a whole nation from starvation. To them the political aspects of the work were
wholly incidental, but they could not be overlooked. So with the Germans disagreeing among themselves, it was the impossibility of France's letting the two and a half million people of her own shut up in the occupied territory starve under any circumstances possible to prevent, and the humanitarian feeling of Great Britain and America, which Hoover, by vivid propaganda, never allowed to cool, and the strength of which he never let the diplomats and army and navy officials lose sight of, that turned the scale and enabled the Commission for Relief in Belgium to continue its work despite all assault and interference. Over and over again it looked like the end, and none of us, even the sanguine Chief, was sure that the next day would not be the last. But the last day did not come until the last day of need had passed, and never from beginning to end did a single commune of all the five thousand of Occupied Belgium and France fail of its daily bread. It was poor bread sometimes, even for war bread, and there were many tomorrows that promised to be breadless, but no one of those tomorrows ever came.