r and directing head, there still seems
to be, if I may judge by the questions often asked me, no very wide
knowledge of just why there had to be such relief of Belgium and how
Herbert Hoover came to undertake it. A fairly full answer to these
queries makes a proper introduction to any account, however brief, of
his participation in this extraordinary part of the history of the war.

The World War began, as we all most vividly remember, with the
successful, although briefly but most importantly delayed invasion of
Belgium. And this invasion resulted in producing very promptly not only
a situation appalling in its immediate realization, but one of even
more terrifying possibilities for the near future. For through the haze
of the smoke-clouds from burning towns and above the rattle of the
machine guns in Dinant and Louvain could be seen the hovering specter of
starvation and heard the wailing of hungry children. And how the specter
was to be made to pass and the children to hush their cries was soon the
problem of all problems for Belgium.

Within ten weeks after the first shots of the War all of Belgium except
that dreary little stretch of sand and swamp in the northwestern corner
of it that for over four years was all of the Kingdom of Belgium under
the rule of King Albert, was not only in the hands of a brutal enemy but
was enclosed and shut away from the rest of the world by a rigid ring of
steel. Not only did the Germans maintain a ring of bayonets and
electrified wire fence--this latter along the Belgian-Dutch
frontier--around it, but the Allies, recognizing that for all practical
purposes, Occupied Belgium was now German territory, had to include it
in their blockade of the German coast. Thus no persons or supplies could
pass in or out of Belgium except under extraordinary circumstances,
such as a special permission from both Germany and Allies or a daring
and almost impossible blockade-running.

Now Belgium is not, as America is, self-sustaining as to food. If an
enemy could completely blockade us, we could go on living indefinitely
on the food we produce. But Belgium could not; nor could England or
France or Italy. Belgium is not primarily an agricultural country,
despite the fact that what agriculture it does have is the most
intensive and highly developed in Europe. It is an industrial country,
the most highly industrialized in Europe, with only one sixth of its
people supporting themselves by agriculture. I