ttered villages or take refuge in towns which
cannot feed their own citizens.

Abyss of Want and Woe.

Many cities and towns have been completely destroyed; others, reduced or
shattered, struggle in vain to feed their poor and broken populations.
Stones and ashes mark the places where small communities lived their
peaceful lives before the invasion. The Belgian people live now in the
abyss of want and woe.

All this I knew in England, but knew it from the reports of others. I
did not, could not, know what the destitution, the desolation of Belgium
was, what were the imperative needs of this people, until I got to
Holland and to the borders of Belgian territory. Inside that territory I
could not pass because I was a Britisher, but there I could see German
soldiers, the Landwehr, keeping guard over what they call their new
German province. Belgium a German province!

There at Maastricht I saw fugitives crossing the frontier into Holland
with all their worldly goods on their shoulders or in their hands, or
with nothing at all, seeking hospitality of a little land which itself
feels, though it is neutral, the painful stress and cost of the war.
There, on the frontier, I was standing between Dutch soldiers and German
soldiers, so near the Germans that I could almost have touched them, so
near three German officers that their conversation as they saluted me
reached my ears.

I begin to understand what the sufferings and needs of Belgium are. They
are such that the horror of it almost paralyzes expression. I met at
Maastricht Belgians, representatives of municipalities, who said that
they had food for only a fortnight longer. And what was the food they
had? No meat, no vegetables, but only one-third of a soldier's rations
of bread for each person per day. At Liege, as I write, there is food
for only three days.

What is it the people of Belgium ask for? They ask for bread and salt,
no more, and it is not forthcoming. They do not ask for meat; they
cannot get it. They have no fires for cooking, and they do not beg for
petrol. Money is of little use to them, because there is no food to be
bought with money.

Belgium under ordinary circumstances imports five-sixths of the food she
eats. The ordinary channels of sale and purchase are closed. They
cannot buy and sell if they would. Representatives of Belgian
communities told me at Maastricht yesterday that the crops were taken
from their fields--the wheat and potatoes--a