he ships and the men who helped
him manage the details, and converted all of the activities of these men
and all of these things into food for Warsaw--and for all Poland. It was
food that the people of Warsaw and all Poland simply had to have to keep
alive, and it was food that they simply could not get for themselves.
They all knew that. The name of another great American spelled freedom
for them; the name Herbert Hoover spelled life to them.

So it was no wonder that the high officials of the Polish Government and
capital city were in a state of great excitement when the news suddenly
came that the man whom they had so often urged to come to Poland was
really moving swiftly on from Prague to Warsaw.

Ever since soon after Armistice Day he had sat in Paris, directing with
unremitting effort and absolute devotion the task of getting food to the
mouths of the hungry people of all the newly liberated but helpless
countries of Eastern Europe, and above all, to the children of these
countries, so that the coming generation, on whom the future of these
struggling peoples depended, should be kept alive and strong. And now he
was preparing to return to his own country and his own children to take
up again the course of his life as a simple American citizen at home.

But before going he wanted to see for himself, if only by the most
fleeting of glimpses, that the people of Poland and Bohemia and Servia
and all the rest were really being fed. And especially did he want to
see that the children were alive and strong.

When he came to Paris in November, 1918, at the request of the President
of the United States, to organize the relief of the newly liberated
peoples of Eastern Europe, terrible tales were brought to him of the
suffering and wholesale deaths of the children of these ravaged lands.
And when those of us who went to Poland for him in January, 1919, to
find out the exact condition and the actual food needs of the
twenty-five million freed people there, made our report to him, a single
unpremeditated sentence in this report seemed most to catch his eyes and
hold his attention. It did more: it wetted his eyes and led to a special
concentration of his efforts on behalf of the suffering children. This
sentence was: "We see very few children playing in the streets of
Warsaw." Why were they not playing? The answer was simple and
sufficient: The children of Warsaw were not strong enough to play in the
streets. They could not