By Irvin S. Cobb.

[From THE NEW YORK TIMES [Transcriber:  original ’TMIES’], Dec. 2, 1914.]

[The following story of conditions in Belgium, Germany, France, Holland, and England was sent by Irvin S. Cobb of The Saturday Evening Post to the American [Transcriber:  original ‘Aerican’] Red Cross, to be used in bringing home to Americans urgent need for relief in the countries affected by the great war.  Red Cross contributions for suffering non-combatants are received at the Red Cross offices in the Russell Sage Foundation Building, 130 East Twenty-second Street.  Such contributions should be addressed to Jacob H. Schiff, Treasurer, and, if desired, the giver can designate the country to the relief of which he wishes the donation applied.]

Recently I have been in four of the countries concerned in the present war—­Belgium, France, Germany, and England.  I was also in Holland, having traversed it from end to end within a week after the fall of Antwerp, when every road coming up out of the south was filled with Belgian refugees.

In Belgium I saw this: 

Homeless men, women, and children by thousands and hundreds of thousands.  Many of them had been prosperous, a few had been wealthy, practically all had been comfortable.  Now, with scarcely an exception, they stood all upon one common plane of misery.  They had lost their homes, their farms, their work-shops, their livings, and their means of making livings.

I saw them tramping aimlessly along wind-swept, rain-washed roads, fleeing from burning and devastated villages.  I saw them sleeping in open fields upon the miry earth, with no cover and no shelter.  I saw them herded together in the towns and cities to which many of them ultimately fled, existing God alone knows how.  I saw them—­ragged, furtive scarecrows—­prowling in the shattered ruins of their homes, seeking salvage where there was no salvage to be found.  I saw them living like the beasts of the field, upon such things as the beasts of the field would reject.

I saw them standing in long lines waiting for their poor share of the dole of a charity which already was nearly exhausted.  I saw their towns when hardly one stone stood upon another.  I saw their abandoned farm lands, where the harvests rotted in the furrows and the fruit hung mildewed and ungathered upon the trees.  I saw their cities where trade was dead and credit was a thing which no longer existed.  I saw them staggering from weariness and from the weakness of hunger.  I saw all these sights repeated and multiplied infinitely—­yes, and magnified, too—­but not once did I see a man or woman or even a child that wept or cried out.

If the Belgian soldiers won the world’s admiration by the resistance which they made against tremendously overpowering numbers, the people of Belgium—­the families of their soldiers—­should have the world’s admiration and pity for the courage, the patience, and the fortitude they have displayed under the load of an affliction too dolorous for any words to describe, too terrible for any imagination to picture.