up to with limitless admiration, relied on with absolute
confidence, and served with entire devotion by all the other men in
them, the attribution is correct. No man in any of these
organizations--and Hoover gathered about him the best he could get--but
recognized him as the natural leader. He was the "one man," not by
virtue of any official or artificial rank but by sheer personal
superiority in both constructive administrative capacity and effective
practical action.

Whenever Hoover came, he tried to keep his presence unknown except to us
and Minister Whitlock and the heads of the Belgian organization and the
German Government with whom he had to deal. He would not go, if he could
help it, to the soup lines and children's canteens. Like many another
man of great strength, he is a man of great sensitiveness. He cannot see
suffering without suffering himself. And he dislikes thanks. The
Belgians were often puzzled, sometimes hurt, by his avoidance of their
heart-felt expression of gratitude. Mr. Whitlock was always there and
had to be always accessible. So they could thank him and thank America
through him. But they rarely had opportunity to thank Hoover.

I remember, though, how their ingenuity baffled him once. He had slipped
in quietly, as usual, at dusk one evening by our courier automobile from
the Dutch border. But someone passed the word around that night. And all
the next day, and for the remaining few days of his stay there went on
a silent greeting and thanking of the Commission's chief by thousands
and thousands of visiting cards and messages that drifted like
snowflakes through the door of the Director's house; engraved cards with
warm words of thanks from the nobility and wealthy of Brussels; plainer,
printed ones from the middle class folk, and bits of writing paper with
pen or pencil-scrawled sentences on them of gratitude and blessing from
the "little people." My wife would heap the day's bringing on a table
before him each evening and he would finger them over curiously--and try
to smile.

When the Armistice had come the Belgian Government tried to thank him.
He would accept no decorations. But once again Belgian ingenuity
conquered. One day just after the cessation of the fighting he was
visiting the King and Queen at La Panne in their simple cottage in that
little bit of Belgium that the Germans never reached. After luncheon the
members of the Cabinet appeared; they had come by motors from Le Havr