Some of the good mothers in America were a little too thoughtful in their kindness.  An odour in a box that had evidently travelled across the Atlantic close to the ship’s boilers was traced to the pocket of a boy’s suit, which contained the hardly-distinguishable remains of a ham sandwich, meant to be ready to hand for the hungry Belgian boy who got that suit.  Broken pots of jam were quite frequent.  But no matter.  Soap and water and Belgian industry saved the suit, if not the sandwich.  Sweaters and underclothes and overcoats almost new, and shiny old morning coats and trousers with holes in seat and knees might represent equal sacrifice on the part of some American three thousand miles away, and all were welcome.  Needlewomen were given work cutting up the worn-outs of grown-ups and making them over into astonishingly good suits or dresses for youngsters.

“We’ve really turned the rink into a kind of department store,” said the lady.  “Come into our boot department.  We had some leather left in Belgium that the Germans did not requisition, so we bought it and that gave more Belgians work in the shoe factories.  Work, you see, is what we want to keep our minds off------”

Blue and yellow tickets here, too!  Boots for children and thick-set working-women and watery-eyed old men!

And each was required to leave behind the pair he was wearing.

“Sometimes we can patch up the cast-offs, which means work for the cobblers,” said the captainess of industry.  “And who are our clerks?  Why, the people who put on the skates for the patrons of the rink, of course!”

One could write volumes on this systematic relief work, the businesslike industry of succouring Belgium by the businesslike Belgians, with American help.  Certainly one cannot leave out those old men stragglers from Louvain and Bruges and Ghent—­venerable children with no offspring to give them paternal care—­who took their turn in getting bread, which they soaked thoroughly in their soup for reasons that would be no military secret, not even in the military zone.  On Christmas Day an American, himself a smoker, thinking what class of children he could make happiest on a limited purse, remembered the ring around the stove and bought a basket of cheap brier pipes and tobacco.  By Christmas night some toothless gums were sore, but a beatific smile of satiation played in white beards.

Nor can one leave out the very young babies at home, who get their milk if grown people do not, and the older babies beyond milk but not yet old enough for bread and meat, whose mothers return from the bread-line to bring their children to another line, where they got portions of a syrupy mixture which those who know say is the right provender.  On such occasions men are quite helpless.  They can only look on with a frog in the throat at pale, improperly nourished mothers with bundles of potential manhood and womanhood in their arms.  For this was woman’s work for woman.  Belgian women of every class joined in it:  the competent wife of a workman, or the wife of a millionaire who had to walk like everybody else now that her motor-car was requisitioned by the army.