the boat in money before crossing the frontier. The Governor General had reason to fear, he said, that some of the boats that went out would not come back, and he was going to lose no Belgian property subject to German seizure without full compensation. As the boats were worth, roughly, about $5,000 each, and we were using about 500 boats it would have tied up two and a half million dollars of our money to meet this demand, and tied it up in German hands! We simply could not do it. So we began negotiations.
Oh, the innumerable beginnings of negotiations, and oh, the interminable enduring of negotiations, the struggling against form and "system," against obstinate and cruel delay—for delay in food matters in Belgium was always cruel—and sometimes against sheer brutality! How often did we long to say: Here, take these ten million people and feed them or starve them as you will! We quit. We can't go on fighting your floating mines and too eager submarines, your brutal soldiers and more brutal bureaucrats. Live up to your agreements to help us, or at least do not ob
struct us; or, if you won't, then formally and officially and publicly before the world kick us out as your arch-jingo, Reventlow, demands.
But we could not say it; we could not risk it; it was too certain to be starving rather than feeding. So we did not say it, but went on with the negotiations. In this particular case of the canal boats we finally compromised by putting up the value of five boats. If one did not come back the Germans were to take out its value and we were to replace the money so as to keep the pot full. Of course all the boats did come back, and now the Belgians and not the Germans have them.
Thus, guarded by guarantees and recognition marks, there came regularly, and mostly safely, across wide oceans and through the dangerous mine-strewn Channel or around the Faroe Islands, the rice from Rangoon, corn from Argentina, beans from Manchuria, and wheat and meat and fats from America at the rate of a hundred thousand tons a month through all the fifty months of the relief. At Rotterdam these precious cargoes were swiftly transhipped into sealed canal boats—a fleet of
500 of them with 35 tugs for towing was in service—and hurried on through the canals of Holland and across the guarded border, and then on to the great central depots in Belgium, and from there again by smaller canal boats and railway cars and horse-drawn carts under all the difficulties of carrying things anywhere in a land where anything and everything available for transport was subject to requisition at any time by an all-controlling military organization, to the local warehouses and soup-kitchens of every one of the 5,000 Belgian and French communes in the occupied territory. And always and ever through all the months and despite all difficulties on water or land the food had to come in time. This was the transportation undertaking of Hoover's C. R. B.
Finally when the food was brought to the end of its journeying it had to be protected from hungry Germans and divided fairly among hungry Belgians. Always the world asked: But don't the Germans get the food? and it still asks: Yes, didn't they? Our truthful answer then and now is: No. And you need not take our answer alone. Ask the Brit
ish and French foreign offices. They knew almost as much as we did of what was going on inside of the steel ring around Belgium and occupied France. Their intelligence services were wonderful. Remember the guarantees of the German government to us and our protecting ministers and ambassadors, the diplomatic representatives of neutral America and Spain and Holland. The orders of von Bissing and the General Staff were explicit. Official German placards forbidding seizure or interference by German soldiers or officials were on all the canal boats and railway cars and horse carts and on all the warehouses used by the Commission.
Of course there were always minor infractions but there were no great ones. The Germans after the early days of wholesale seizure during the invasion and first few months after it, got but a trifling amount of food out of Belgium and almost none of it came from the imported supplies. Every Belgian was a detective for us in this ceaseless watch for German infractions and we had our own vigilant service of "Inspection and Control" by
keen-eyed young Americans moving ceaselessly all over the country and ever checking up consumption and stocks against records of importation.