To the Belgian bread is not only the staff of life; it is the legs.  At home we think of bread as something that goes with the rest of the meal; to the poorer classes of Belgians the rest of the meal is something that goes with bread.  To you and me food has meant the payment of money to the baker and the butcher and the grocer, or the hotel-keeper.  You get your money by work or from investments.  What if there were no bread to be had for work or money?  Sitting on a mountain of gold in the desert of Sahara would not quench thirst.  Three hundred grammes, a minimum calculation—­about half what the British soldier gets—­was the ration.  That small boy sent by his mother got five loaves; his ticket called for an allowance for a family of five.  An old woman got one loaf, for she was alone in the world.

Each one as he hurried by had a personal story of what war had meant to him.  They answered your questions frankly, gladly, with the Belgian cheerfulness which was amazing considering the circumstances.  A tall, distinguished-looking man was an artist.

“No work for artists these days,” he said.

No work in a community of workers where every link of the chain of economic life had been broken.  No work for the next man, a chauffeur, or the next, a brass worker; the next, a teamster; the next, a bank clerk; the next, a doorkeeper of a Government office; whilst the wives of those who still had work were buying in the only market they had.  But the husbands of some were not at home.  Each answer about the absent one had an appeal that nothing can picture better than the simple words or the looks that accompanied the words.

“The last I heard of my husband he was fighting at Dixmude—­two months ago.”

“Mine is wounded, somewhere in France.”

“Mine was with the army, too.  I don’t know whether he is alive or dead.  I have not heard since Brussels was taken.  He cannot get my letters and I cannot get his.”

“Mine was killed at Liege, but we have a son.”

So you out in Nebraska who gave a handful of wheat might know that said handful of wheat reached its destination in an empty stomach.  If you sent a suit of clothes, or a cap, or a pair of socks, come along to the skating-rink, where ice-polo was played and matches and carnivals were held in better days, and look on at the boxes, packed tight with gifts of every manner of thing that men and women and children wear except silk hats, which are being opened and sorted and distributed into hastily-constructed cribs and compartments.

A Belgian woman whose father was one of Belgium’s leading lawyers—­her husband was at the front-was the busy head of this organization, because, as she said, the busier she was the more it “keeps my mind off------” and she did not finish the sentence.  How many times I heard that “keeps my mind off------” a sentence that was the more telling for not being finished.  She and some other women began sewing and patching and collecting garments; “but our business grew so fast”—­the business of relief is the one kind in Belgium that does grow these days—­“that now we have hundreds of helpers.  I begin to feel that I am what you would call in America a captainess of industry.”