Hoover and the C. R. B. were in Belgium and France for but one purpose, to feed the people, to save a whole nation from starvation. To them the political aspects of the work were wholly incidental, but they could not be overlooked. So with the Germans disagreeing among themselves, it was the impossibility of France's letting the two and a half million people of her own shut up in the occupied territory starve under any circumstances possible to prevent, and the humanitarian feeling of Great Britain and America, which Hoover, by vivid propaganda, never allowed to cool, and the strength of which he never let the diplomats and army and navy officials lose sight of, that turned the scale and enabled the Commission for Relief in Belgium to continue its work despite all assault and interference. Over and over again it looked like the end, and none of us, even the sanguine Chief, was sure that the next day would not be the last. But the last day did not come until the last day of need had passed, and never from beginning to end did a single commune of all the five thousand of Occupied Belgium and France fail of its daily bread. It was poor bread sometimes, even for war bread, and there were many tomorrows that promised to be breadless, but no one of those tomorrows ever came. CHAPTER IX THE RELIEF OF BELGIUM; SCOPE AND METHODS I have dropped the thread of my tale. Our narrative of the organization of the Commission for Relief in Belgium had brought us only to the time when the Commission was actually ready to work, and we have leaped to the very end of those bitter hard four years. We must make a fresh start. First, then, as to money. And to understand about the money it is necessary to understand the two-phased character of the relief of Belgium. There was the phase of _ravitaillement_, the constant provisioning of the whole land; and the phase of _secours_, the special care of the destitute and the ill and the children. The ring of steel did not immediately make beggars of all the Belgians enclosed within it. Many of them still had money. But, as I have already said, the Germans would not allow any of this money to go out. It could buy only what was in Belgium. And as Belgium could produce only about half the food it needed to keep its people alive, and only one fourth of the particular kind of foodstuffs that were necessary for bread, and as it was arranged, by control of the mills and bakeries, that these bread-grains should be evenly distributed among all the people, it meant that even though banker this or baron that might have money to buy much more, he could really buy, with all his money, only one fourth as much bread as he needed. There had to be, in other words, a constant bringing in of enough wheat and flour to supply three fourths of the bread-needs of the whole country, and another large fraction of the necessary fats and milk and rice and beans and other staples. This was the _ravitaillement_.