The first of his war calls to service came just as he was preparing to return to America from London where he had brought his family from California to spend the school vacation of 1914. Their return passage was engaged for the middle of August. But the war came on, and with it his first relief undertaking. It was only the trivial matter--trivial in comparison with his later undertakings--of helping seventy thousand American travelers, stranded at the outbreak of the war, to get home. These people, rich and poor alike, found themselves penniless and helpless because of the sudden moratorium. Letters of credit, travelers' checks, drafts, all were mere printed paper. They needed real money, hotel rooms, steamer passages, and advice. And there was nobody in London, not even the benevolent and most willing but in this respect powerless American ambassador who could help them. At least there seemed none until Hoover transferred the "relief" which had automatically congested about his private offices in the "city" during the first two days to larger headquarters in the Hotel Savoy. He gathered together all his available money and that of American friends and opened a unique bank which had no depositors and took in no money, but continuously gave it out against personal checks signed by unknown but American-looking people on unknown banks in Walla Walla and Fresno and Grand Rapids and Dubuque and Emporia and New Bedford. And he found rooms in hotels and passage on steamers, first-class, second-class or steerage, as happened to be possible. Now on all these checks and promises to pay, just $250 failed to be realized by the man who took a risk on American honesty to the extent of several hundred thousand dollars. Some of the incidents of this "relief" were pathetic, and some were comic. One day the banker and his staff, which was composed of his wife and their friends, were startled by the apparition in the front office of a group of American plains Indians, Blackfeet and Sioux, all in the most Fenimore Cooperish of full Indian dress, feathers and skins, war-paint and tomahawks. They had been part of a Wild West show and menagerie caught by the war's outbreak in Austria, and had, after incredible experiences, made their way out, dropping animals and baggage as they progressed, until they had with them only what they had on, which in order to save the most valuable part of their portable furniture, was their most elaborate costumes. They had got to London, but to do it they had used up the last penny and the last thing they could sell or pawn except their clothes, which they had to wear to cover their red skins. Hoover's American bank saw these original Americans off, with joyful whoopings of gratitude, for Wyoming.