ian fronts, but it meant little to Eastern Europe. There was a score of very lively little wars going on at once over there: Poland alone was fighting with four different adversaries, one at each corner of her land.
But the climax of the situation was reached in the realization by all immediately concerned that something saving had to be done at once, or the whole thing would become literal anarchy, with red and howling death rampant over all. Bolshevik Russia, just over the Eastern borders, was not only a vivid reality to these countries, but it was constantly threatening to come across the borders and engulf them.
Its agents were working continuously among their peoples; there were everywhere the sinister signs of the possibility of a swift removal of the frontiers of Bolshevism from their Eastern to their Western borders. In Paris the eminent statesmen and famous generals of the Peace Conference and the Supreme Council sat and debated. They sent out occasional ultimata ordering the cessation of fighting, the retirement from a far advanced frontier, and what not else. Inter-Allied Economic and
Military Missions came and looked on and conferred and returned. But nobody stopped fighting, and the conferences settled nothing. The Allies were not in a position—this need be no secret now—to send adequate forces to enforce their ultimata. An Inter-Allied Military Mission of four generals of America, Great Britain, France and Italy started by special train from Cracow to Lemberg to convey personally an ultimatum to the Ruthenians and Poles ordering them to stop fighting. The train was shelled by the Ruthenians east of Przemsyl, and the generals came back. Eastern Europe expected the great powers to do something about this, but nothing happened, and the discount on ultimata became still more marked.
Somebody had to do something that counted. So Hoover did it. It was not only lives that had to be saved; it was nations. It was not only starvation that had to be fought; it was approaching anarchy, it was Bolshevism.
As already stated, Hoover's food ships had left America for Southern and Northern European ports before Hoover's men had even
got into the countries to be fed. As a consequence, food deliveries closely followed food investigations. That counted with the people. One of Hoover's rules was that food could only go into regions where it could be safeguarded and controlled. That counted against Bolshevism. Shrewd Bela Kun was able to play a winning game in Hungary against the Peace Conference and Supreme Councils at Paris, but he was out-played by soft-voiced, square-jawed Captain "Tommy" Gregory, Hoover's general director for Southeast Europe, and it was this same California lawyer in khaki, turned food man, who, when the communist Kun had passed and the pendulum had swung as dangerously far in the other direction, allowing the audacious Hapsburg, Archduke Joseph, to slip into power, had done most to unseat him.
Gregory had been able to commandeer all the former military wires in the Austro-Hungarian countries for use in the relief work. So he was able to keep Hoover advised of all the news, not only promptly, but in good Americanese. His laconic but fully descriptive mes
sage to Paris announcing the Archduke's passing read: "August 24th, Archie went through the hoop at 8 P. M. today."
Relief in Eastern Europe was spelled by Hoover with a capital R and several additional letters. It really spelled Rehabilitation. It meant, in addition to sending in food, straightening out transportation, getting coal mines going, and the starting up of direct exchange of commodities among the unevenly supplied countries. There was some surplus wheat in the Banat, some surplus coal in Czecho-Slovakia, some extra locomotives in Vienna. So under the arbitrage of himself and his lieutenants there was set up a wholesale international bartering, a curious reversion to the primitive ways of early human society.