Swing around the circle in Brussels of a winter’s morning and look at the only crowds that the Germans allow to gather, and any doubt that Belgium would have gone hungry if she had not received provisions from the outside was dispelled.  Whenever I think of a bread-line again I shall see the faces of a Belgian bread-line.  They blot out the memory of those at home, where men are free to go and come; where war has not robbed the thrifty of food.

It was fitting that the great central soup kitchen should be established in the central express office of the city.  For in Belgium these days there is no express business except in German troops to the front and wounded to the rear.  The dispatch of parcels is stopped, no less than the other channels of trade, in a country where trade was so rife, a country that lived by trade.  On the stone floor, where once packages were arranged for forwarding to the towns whose names are on the walls, were many great cauldrons in clusters of three, to economize space and fuel.

“We don’t lack cooks,” said a chef-who had been in a leading hotel.  “So many of us are out of work.  Our society of hotel and restaurant keepers took charge.  We know the practical side of the business.  I suppose you have the same kind of a society in New York and would turn to it for help if the Germans occupied New York?”

He gave me a printed report in which I read, for example, that “M.  Arndt, professor of the Ecole Normale, had been good enough to take charge of accounts,” and “M.  Catteau had been specially appointed to look after the distribution of bread.”  Most appetizing that soup prepared under direction of the best chefs in the city!  The meat and green vegetables in it were Belgian and the peas American.  Steaming hot in big cans it was sent to the communal centres, where lines of people with pots, pitchers, and pails waited to receive their daily allowance.  A democracy was in that bread-line such as I have never seen anywhere except at San Francisco after the earthquake.  Each person had a blue or a yellow ticket, with numbers to be punched, like a commuter.  The blue tickets were for those who had proved to the communal authorities that they could not pay; the yellow for those who paid five centimes for each person served.  A flutter of blue and yellow tickets all over Belgium, and in return life I With each serving of soup went a loaf of the American brown bread.  The faces in the line were not those of people starving—­they had been saved from starvation.  There was none of the emaciation which pictures of famine in the Orient have made familiar; but they were pinched faces, bloodless faces, the faces of people on short rations.