at these
countries knew would soon be necessary to meet the growing demands of
their armies and civilians drawn from production into the great game of
destruction. Once obtained, the food had to be transported overseas and
through the mine-strewn Channel to Rotterdam, the nearest open port of
Belgium, and thence by canals and railways into the starving country and
its use there absolutely restricted to the civil population. Finally,
the feeding of Belgium had to begin immediately and arrangements had to
be made to keep it up indefinitely. The war was not to be a short one;
that was already plain. It was up to Hoover to get busy, very busy.

The first officials of the C. R. B. and all the men who came into it
later, agree on one thing. We relied confidently on our chairman to
organize, to drive, to make the impossible things possible. We did our
best to carry out what it was our task to do. If we had ideas and
suggestions they were welcomed by him. If good they were adopted. But
principally we worked as we were told for a man who worked harder than
any of us, and who planned most of the work for himself and all of us.

He had the vision. He saw from the first that the relief of Belgium
would be a large job; it proved to be a gigantic one. He saw that all
America would have to be behind us; indeed that the whole humanitarian
world would have to back us up, not merely in funds but in moral
support. For the military logic of the situation was only half with us;
it was half against us. The British Admiralty, trying to blockade
Germany completely, saw in the feeding of ten million Belgians and
French in German-occupied territory a relief to the occupiers who would,
by the accepted rules of the game, have to feed these people from their
own food supplies. The fact that the Germans declared from the first
that they never would do this and in every test proved that they would
not, was hard to drive home to the Admiralty and to many amateur English
strategists safely far from the sufferings of the hungering Belgians.

On the other hand other influential governmental officials, notably the
Prime Minister and the heads of the Foreign Office, saw in the Allied
help for these people the only means to prevent them from saving their
lives in the one other way possible to them, that is, by working for the
Germans. Fathers of families, however patriotic, cannot see their wives
and children starve to death when rescue is possible. And th