on the job to protect the people from German exactions and from
their own rashness. There were also any number of volunteers. The
thing was to get the food to them and let them organize local
distribution.

The small force of Americans required to oversee the transit must
watch that the Germans did not take any of the food and retain both
British and German confidence in the absolute good faith of their
intentions. The volunteers were paid their expenses; the rest of their
reward was experience, and it was "soom expeerience," as a Belgian
said who was learning a little American slang. They talked about
canal-boat cargoes as if they had been from Buffalo to Albany on the
Erie Canal for years; they spoke of "my province" and compared
bread-lines and the efficiency of local officials. And the Germans took
none of the food; orders from Berlin were obeyed. Berlin knew that
any requisitioning of relief supplies meant that the Relief Commission
would cease work and announce to the world the reason.

However many times Americans were arrested they must be patient.
That exception who said, when he was put in a cell overnight
because he entered the military zone by mistake, that he would not
have been treated that way in England, needed a little more coaching
in preserving his mask of neutrality. For I must say that nine out of ten
of these young men, leaning over backward to be neutral, were pro-
Ally, including some with German names. But publicly you could
hardly get an admission out of them that there was any war. As for
Harvard, 1914, hang a passport carrier around the Sphinx's neck and
you have him done in stone.

Fancy any Belgian trying to get him to carry a contraband letter or a