On the other side were von Bissing and his German governing staff in Belgium, together with most of the men of the military General Staff at Great Headquarters. Von Bissing tried, in his heavy, stupid way, to placate the Belgians; that was part of his policy. So he would offer them food--always for work--with one hand, while he gave them a slap with the other. He wanted Belgium to be tranquil. He did not want to have openly to machine-gun starving mobs in the cities, however many unfortunates he allowed to be quietly carried out to the _Tir National_ at gray dawn to stand for one terrible moment before the ruthless firing squad. And the hard-headed men of the General Staff knew that starving people do not lie down quietly and die. All the northern lines of communication between the west front and Germany ran through the countries of these ten million imprisoned French and Belgians. Even without arms they could make much trouble for the guards of bridges and railways in their dying struggles. At least it would require many soldiers to kill them fast enough to prevent it. And the soldiers, all of them, were needed in the trenches. In addition the German General Staff earnestly desired and hoped up to the very last that America would keep out of the war. And these extraordinary Americans in Belgium seemed to have all of America behind them; that is what the great relief propaganda and the imposing list of diplomatic personages on the C. R. B. list were partly for. Hoover had realized from the beginning what this would mean. "No," said the higher German officials, "it will not do to interfere too much with these quixotic Americans." But the Germans, most of them at least, never really understood us. One day as Hoover was finishing a conversation with the head of the German Pass-Zentral in Brussels, trying to arrange for a less vexing and delaying method of granting passes for the movements of our men, the German officer said: "Well, now tell me, Herr Hoover, as man to man, what do you get out of all this? You are not doing all this for nothing, surely." And a little later, at a dinner at the Great Headquarters to which I had been invited by one of the chief officers of the General Staff, he said to me, as we took our seats: "Well, how's business?" I could only tell him that it was going as well as any business could that made no profits for anybody in it.