Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals who were organizing a different kind of campaign from that which brought glory to the generals who conquered Belgium.  It was odd that Dr. Rose—­that Dr. Rose who had discovered and fought the hook worm among the mountaineers of the Southern States—­should be succouring Belgium, and yet only natural.  Where else should he and Henry James, Jr., of the Rockefeller Foundation, and Mr. Bicknell, of the American Red Cross, be, if not here directing the use of an endowment fund set aside for just such purposes?

They had been all over Belgium and up into the Northern Departments of France occupied by the Germans, investigating conditions.  For they were practical men, trained for solving the problem of charity with wisdom, who wanted to know that their money was well spent.  They had nothing for the refugees in London, but they found that the people who had stayed at home in Belgium were worthy of help.  The fund was allowing five hundred thousand dollars a month for the American Commission for Relief in Belgium, which was the amount that the Germans had spent in a single day in the destruction of the town of Ypres with shells.  Later they were to go to Poland; then to Serbia.

With them was Herbert C. Hoover, a celebrated mining engineer, the head of the Commission.  When American tourists were stranded over Europe at the outset of the war, with letters of credit which could not be cashed, their route homeward must lie through London.  They must have steamer passage.  Hoover took charge.  When this work was done and Belgium must be helped, he took charge of a task that could be done only by a neutral.  For the adjutants and field officers of his force he turned to American business men in London, to Rhodes scholars at Oxford, and to other volunteers hastening from America.

When “Harvard, 1914,” who had lent a hand in the American refugees’ trials, appeared in Hoover’s office to volunteer for the new campaign, Hoover said:  “You are going to Rotterdam to-night.”  “So I am!” said Harvard, 1914, and started accordingly.  Action and not red tape must prevail in such an organization.

The Belgians whom I wished to see were those behind the line of guards on the Belgo-Dutch frontier; those who had remained at home under the Germans to face humiliation and hunger.  This was possible if you had the right sort of influence and your passport the right sort of vises to accompany a Bescheinigung, according to the form of “31 Oktober, 1914, Sect. 616, Nr. 1083,” signed by the German consul at Rotterdam, which put me in the same motor-car with Harvard, 1914, that stopped one blustery, snowy day of late December before a gate, with Belgium on one side and Holland on the other side of it, on the Rosendaal-Antwerp road.  “Once more!” said Harvard, 1914, who had made this journey many times as a dispatch rider.