A writer can make a lot of the burst of a single shell; a photographer showing the ruins of a block of buildings or a church makes it appear that all blocks and all churches are in ruins.  Running through Antwerp in a car, one saw few signs of destruction from the bombardment.  You will see them if you are specially conducted.  Shops were open, people were moving about in the streets, which were well lighted.  No need of darkness for fear of bombs dropping here!  German barracks had safe shelter from aerial raids in a city whose people were the allies of England and France.  But at intervals marched the German patrols.

When our car stopped before a restaurant a knot gathered around it.  Their faces were like all the other faces I saw in Belgium—­unless German—­with that restrained, drawn look of passive resistance, persistent even when they smiled.  When?  When were the Allies coming?  Their eyes asked the question which their tongues dared not.  Inside the restaurant a score of German officers served by Belgian waiters were dining.  Who were our little party?  What were we doing there and speaking English—­English, the hateful language of the hated enemy?  Oh, yes!  We were Americans connected with the relief work.  But between the officers’ stares at the sound of English and the appealing inquiry of the faces in the street lay an abyss of war’s fierce suspicion and national policies and racial enmity, which America had to bridge.

Before we could help Belgium, England, blockading Germany to keep her from getting foodstuffs, had to consent.  She would consent only if none of the food reached German mouths.  Germany had to agree not to requisition any of the food.  Someone not German and not British must see to its distribution.  Those rigid German military authorities, holding fast to their military secrets, must consent to scores of foreigners moving about Belgium and sending messages across that Belgo-Dutch frontier which had been closed to all except official German messages.  This called for men whom both the German and the British duellists would trust to succour the human beings crouched and helpless under the circling flashes of their steel.

Fortunately, our Minister to Belgium was Brand Whitlock.  He is no Talleyrand or Metternich.  If he were, the Belgians might not have been fed, because he might have been suspected of being too much of a diplomatist.  When an Englishman, or a German, or a Hottentot, or any other kind of a human being gets to know Whitlock, he recognizes that here is an honest man with a big heart.  When leading Belgians came to him and said that winter would find Belgium without bread, he turned from the land that has the least food to that which has the most—­his own land.

For Belgium is a great shop in the midst of a garden.  Her towns are so close together that they seem only suburbs of Brussels and Antwerp.  She has the densest population in Europe.  She produces only enough food to last her for two months of the year.  The food for the other ten months she buys with the products of her factories.  In 1914-15 Belgium could not send out her products; so we were to help feed her without pay, and England and France were to give money to buy what food we did not give.