meat
and green vegetables in it were Belgian and the peas American.
Steaming hot in big cans it was sent to the communal centres, where
lines of people with pots, pitchers, and pails waited to receive their
daily allowance. A democracy was in that bread-line such as I have
never seen anywhere except at San Francisco after the earthquake.
Each person had a blue or a yellow ticket, with numbers to be
punched, like a commuter. The blue tickets were for those who had
proved to the communal authorities that they could not pay; the
yellow for those who paid five centimes for each person served. A
flutter of blue and yellow tickets all over Belgium, and in return life I
With each serving of soup went a loaf of the American brown bread.
The faces in the line were not those of people starving--they had
been saved from starvation. There was none of the emaciation which
pictures of famine in the Orient have made familiar; but they were
pinched faces, bloodless faces, the faces of people on short rations.

To the Belgian bread is not only the staff of life; it is the legs. At home
we think of bread as something that goes with the rest of the meal; to
the poorer classes of Belgians the rest of the meal is something that
goes with bread. To you and me food has meant the payment of
money to the baker and the butcher and the grocer, or the hotel-
keeper. You get your money by work or from investments. What if
there were no bread to be had for work or money? Sitting on a
mountain of gold in the desert of Sahara would not quench thirst.
Three hundred grammes, a minimum calculation--about half what the
British soldier gets--was the ration. That small boy sent by his mother
got five loaves; his ticket called for an allowance for a family of five.
An old woman got one loaf, for she was alone in the world.

Each one as he hurried by had a personal story of what war had
meant to him. They answered your questions frankly, gladly, with the
Belgian cheerfulness which was amazing considering the circumstances.
A tall, distinguished-looking man was an artist.

"No work for artists these days," he said.

No work in a community of workers where every link of the chain of
economic life had been broken. No work for the next man, a
chauffeur, or the next, a brass worker; the next, a teamster; the next,
a bank clerk; the next, a doorkeeper of a Government office; whilst
the wives of those who still had work were buying in the only market
they had.