Oh, the innumerable beginnings of negotiations, and oh, the interminable enduring of negotiations, the struggling against form and "system," against obstinate and cruel delay--for delay in food matters in Belgium was always cruel--and sometimes against sheer brutality! How often did we long to say: Here, take these ten million people and feed them or starve them as you will! We quit. We can't go on fighting your floating mines and too eager submarines, your brutal soldiers and more brutal bureaucrats. Live up to your agreements to help us, or at least do not obstruct us; or, if you won't, then formally and officially and publicly before the world kick us out as your arch-jingo, Reventlow, demands. But we could not say it; we could not risk it; it was too certain to be starving rather than feeding. So we did not say it, but went on with the negotiations. In this particular case of the canal boats we finally compromised by putting up the value of five boats. If one did not come back the Germans were to take out its value and we were to replace the money so as to keep the pot full. Of course all the boats did come back, and now the Belgians and not the Germans have them. Thus, guarded by guarantees and recognition marks, there came regularly, and mostly safely, across wide oceans and through the dangerous mine-strewn Channel or around the Faroe Islands, the rice from Rangoon, corn from Argentina, beans from Manchuria, and wheat and meat and fats from America at the rate of a hundred thousand tons a month through all the fifty months of the relief. At Rotterdam these precious cargoes were swiftly transhipped into sealed canal boats--a fleet of 500 of them with 35 tugs for towing was in service--and hurried on through the canals of Holland and across the guarded border, and then on to the great central depots in Belgium, and from there again by smaller canal boats and railway cars and horse-drawn carts under all the difficulties of carrying things anywhere in a land where anything and everything available for transport was subject to requisition at any time by an all-controlling military organization, to the local warehouses and soup-kitchens of every one of the 5,000 Belgian and French communes in the occupied territory. And always and ever through all the months and despite all difficulties on water or land the food had to come _in time_. This was the transportation undertaking of Hoover's C. R. B.