from the outside was dispelled. Whenever I think of a bread-line
again I shall see the faces of a Belgian bread-line. They blot out the
memory of those at home, where men are free to go and come;
where war has not robbed the thrifty of food.

It was fitting that the great central soup kitchen should be established
in the central express office of the city. For in Belgium these days
there is no express business except in German troops to the front
and wounded to the rear. The dispatch of parcels is stopped, no less
than the other channels of trade, in a country where trade was so rife,
a country that lived by trade. On the stone floor, where once
packages were arranged for forwarding to the towns whose names are
on the walls, were many great cauldrons in clusters of three, to economize
space and fuel.

"We don't lack cooks," said a chef-who had been in a leading hotel.
"So many of us are out of work. Our society of hotel and restaurant
keepers took charge. We know the practical side of the business. I
suppose you have the same kind of a society in New York and would
turn to it for help if the Germans occupied New York?"

He gave me a printed report in which I read, for example, that "M.
Arndt, professor of the École Normale, had been good enough to
take charge of accounts," and "M. Catteau had been specially
appointed to look after the distribution of bread." Most appetizing that
soup prepared under direction of the best chefs in the city! The meat
and green vegetables in it were Belgian and the peas American.
Steaming hot in big cans it was sent to the communal centres, where
lines of people with pots, pitchers, and pails waited to receive their
daily allowance. A democracy was in that bread-line such as I have