Let us first of all consider the country districts. Even when a few houses only of a village have escaped incendiarism the inhabitants have returned thither and have resumed their customary labours. Must they not plough and sow, under penalty of preparing for themselves another year of wretchedness? Where houses exist no longer they live in a cellar, or an outhouse to which some kind of roof has been improvised; families passed the winter of 1914-15 in a potato-silo,[31] under the shelter of a few mats of straw. In the ruined villages the first anxiety of the public powers and the relief committees was therefore to provide provisional shelter. In the towns and industrial districts the most urgent necessities are of another kind. What is lacking most particularly is employment. The administrations have therefore set themselves to provide the unemployed with paid occupations which do not demand apprenticeship--the clearing of ruins, the levelling of soil, the digging of reservoirs, etc. The communal coffers being empty, communal vouchers are issued. _L'Événement Illustré_, in its fourth issue, gives reproductions of some of these vouchers, of which, it states, there are more than 500. In the communes near Louvain, where the poverty is particularly poignant, it has been necessary to create vouchers for 2 centimes (at Wilsele) and 5 centimes (at Herent). From the outset stringent measures were taken to make up for the insufficiency of provisions and to prevent speculators from obtaining possession of existing stocks. The most important of these regulations are the following:-- (_a_) Fixing of maximum prices. (_b_) Prohibition of the exportation of provisions from the commune. (_c_) It is forbidden to give animals provisions intended for human beings. (_d_) Collective exploitation. Many communes have set up in business as bakers, butchers, restaurant-keepers, coal merchants, dealers in colonial produce, etc. They prepare bread and soup daily, and these are provided gratuitously to the poorest, or sold at a low price to those who still have a few savings. In the Brussels district there had been distributed by the 31st January, 1915, to adults, 30,060,608 rations, comprising soup and bread, and to the children 932,838 rations, consisting chiefly of milk, phosphatine, and powdered milk.