I begin to understand what the sufferings and needs of Belgium are.  They are such that the horror of it almost paralyzes expression.  I met at Maastricht Belgians, representatives of municipalities, who said that they had food for only a fortnight longer.  And what was the food they had?  No meat, no vegetables, but only one-third of a soldier’s rations of bread for each person per day.  At Liege, as I write, there is food for only three days.

What is it the people of Belgium ask for?  They ask for bread and salt, no more, and it is not forthcoming.  They do not ask for meat; they cannot get it.  They have no fires for cooking, and they do not beg for petrol.  Money is of little use to them, because there is no food to be bought with money.

Belgium under ordinary circumstances imports five-sixths of the food she eats.  The ordinary channels of sale and purchase are closed.  They cannot buy and sell if they would.  Representatives of Belgian communities told me at Maastricht yesterday that the crops were taken from their fields—­the wheat and potatoes—­and were sent into Germany.

No Work, but Taxes Continue.

There is no work.  The factories are closed because they have not raw material, coal, or petrol, because they have no markets.

And yet war taxes are falling with hideous pressure upon a people whose hands are empty, whose workshops are closed, whose fields are idle, whose cattle have been taken, or compulsorily purchased without value received.

In Belgium itself the misery of the populace is greater than the misery of the Belgian fugitives in other countries, such as Holland, where there have come since the fall of Liege one and a half million of fugitives.  To gauge what that misery in Belgium is, think of what even the fugitives suffer.  I have seen in a room without fire, the walls damp, the floor without covering, not even straw, a family of nine women and eight children, one on an improvised bunk seriously ill.  Their home in Belgium was leveled with the ground, the father killed in battle.

Their food is coffee and bread for breakfast, potatoes for dinner, with salt—­and in having the salt they were lucky—­bread and coffee for supper.  Insufficiently clothed, there by the North Sea, they watched the bleak hours pass, with nothing to do except cling together in a vain attempt to keep warm.

Multiply this case by hundreds of thousands and you will have some hint of the people’s sufferings.

In a lighter on the River Maas at Rotterdam, without windows, without doors, with only an open hatchway from which a ladder descends, several hundred fugitives spend their nights and the best parts of their days in the iron hold, forever covered with moisture, leaky when rain comes, with the floor never dry, and pervasive with a perpetual smell like the smell of a cave which never gets the light of day.  Here men, women, and children were huddled together in a promiscuous communion of misery, made infinitely more pathetic and heartrending because none complained.