But the husbands of some were not at home. Each answer
about the absent one had an appeal that nothing can picture better
than the simple words or the looks that accompanied the words.

"The last I heard of my husband he was fighting at Dixmude--two
months ago."

"Mine is wounded, somewhere in France."

"Mine was with the army, too. I don't know whether he is alive or
dead. I have not heard since Brussels was taken. He cannot get my
letters and I cannot get his."

"Mine was killed at Liege, but we have a son."

So you out in Nebraska who gave a handful of wheat might know that
said handful of wheat reached its destination in an empty stomach. If
you sent a suit of clothes, or a cap, or a pair of socks, come along to
the skating-rink, where ice-polo was played and matches and
carnivals were held in better days, and look on at the boxes, packed
tight with gifts of every manner of thing that men and women and
children wear except silk hats, which are being opened and sorted
and distributed into hastily-constructed cribs and compartments.

A Belgian woman whose father was one of Belgium's leading
lawyers--her husband was at the front-was the busy head of this
organization, because, as she said, the busier she was the more it
"keeps my mind off------" and she did not finish the sentence. How
many times I heard that "keeps my mind off------" a sentence that was
the more telling for not being finished. She and some other women
began sewing and patching and collecting garments; "but our
business grew so fast"--the business of relief is the one kind in
Belgium that does grow these days--"that now we have hundreds of
helpers. I begin to feel that I am what you would call in America a
captainess of industry."

Some of the good mothers in America were a little too thoughtful in
their kindness. An odour in a box that had evidently travelled across
the Atlantic close to the ship's boilers was traced to the pocket of a
boy's suit, which contained the hardly-distinguishable remains of a
ham sandwich, meant to be ready to hand for the hungry Belgian boy
who got that suit. Broken pots of jam were quite frequent. But no
matter. Soap and water and Belgian industry saved the suit, if not the
sandwich. Sweaters and underclothes and overcoats almost new,
and shiny old morning coats and trousers with holes in seat and
knees might represent equal sacrifice on the part of some American
three thousand miles away, and all were welcome. Ne