letters when our cart stopped on the Belgian side of a barricade at
Maastricht, with Dutch soldiers on the other side. His examination
was a little perfunctory, almost apologetic, and he did want to be
friendly. You guessed that he was thinking he would like to go around
the corner and have "ein Glas Bier" rather than search me. What a
hearty "Auf wiedersehen!" he gave me when he saw that I was
inclined to be friendly, too!

I was glad to be across that frontier, with a last stamp on my
Passierschein; glad to be out of the land of those ghostly Belgian
millions in their living death; glad not to have to answer again their
ravenously whispered "When?" When would the Allies come?

The next time that I was in Belgium it was in the British lines of the
Ypres salient, two months later. When should I be next in Brussels?
With a victorious British army, I hoped. A long wait it was to be for a
conquered people, listening each day and trying to think that the
sound of gun-fire was nearer.

The stubborn, passive resistance and self-sacrifice that I have
pictured was that of a moral leadership of a majority shaming the
minority; of an ostracism of all who had relations with the enemy. Of
course, it was not the spirit of the whole. The American Commission,
as charity usually must, had to overcome obstacles set in its path by
those whom it would aid. Belgian politicians, in keeping with the
weakness of their craft, could no more forego playing politics in time
of distress than some that we had in San Francisco and some we
have heard of only across the British Channel from Belgium.

Zealous leaders exaggerated the famine of their districts in order to