German
patrols.

When our car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it.
Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium--unless
German--with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance,
persistent even when they smiled. When? When were the Allies
coming? Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared
not. Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by
Belgian waiters were dining. Who were our little party? What were we
doing there and speaking English--English, the hateful language of
the hated enemy? Oh, yes! We were Americans connected with the
relief work. But between the officers' stares at the sound of English
and the appealing inquiry of the faces in the street lay an abyss of
war's fierce suspicion and national policies and racial enmity, which
America had to bridge.

Before we could help Belgium, England, blockading Germany to keep
her from getting foodstuffs, had to consent. She would consent only if
none of the food reached German mouths. Germany had to agree
not to requisition any of the food. Someone not German and not
British must see to its distribution. Those rigid German military
authorities, holding fast to their military secrets, must consent to
scores of foreigners moving about Belgium and sending messages
across that Belgo-Dutch frontier which had been closed to all except
official German messages. This called for men whom both the
German and the British duellists would trust to succour the human
beings crouched and helpless under the circling flashes of their steel.

Fortunately, our Minister to Belgium was Brand Whitlock. He is no
Talleyrand or Metternich. If he were, the Belgians might not have
been fed, because he might have been suspected of being too much
of a diplomatist. When an Englishman, or a German, or a Hottentot,
or any other kind of a human being gets to know Whitlock, he
recognizes that here is an honest man with a big heart. When leading
Belgians came to him and said that winter would find Belgium without
bread, he turned from the land that has the least food to that which
has the most--his own land.

For Belgium is a great shop in the midst of a garden. Her towns are
so close together that they seem only suburbs of Brussels and
Antwerp. She has the densest population in Europe. She produces
only enough food to last her for two months of the year. The food for
the other ten months she buys with the products of her factories. In