Many cities and towns have been completely destroyed; others, reduced or shattered, struggle in vain to feed their poor and broken populations. Stones and ashes mark the places where small communities lived their peaceful lives before the invasion. The Belgian people live now in the abyss of want and woe. All this I knew in England, but knew it from the reports of others. I did not, could not, know what the destitution, the desolation of Belgium was, what were the imperative needs of this people, until I got to Holland and to the borders of Belgian territory. Inside that territory I could not pass because I was a Britisher, but there I could see German soldiers, the Landwehr, keeping guard over what they call their new German province. Belgium a German province! There at Maastricht I saw fugitives crossing the frontier into Holland with all their worldly goods on their shoulders or in their hands, or with nothing at all, seeking hospitality of a little land which itself feels, though it is neutral, the painful stress and cost of the war. There, on the frontier, I was standing between Dutch soldiers and German soldiers, so near the Germans that I could almost have touched them, so near three German officers that their conversation as they saluted me reached my ears. I begin to understand what the sufferings and needs of Belgium are. They are such that the horror of it almost paralyzes expression. I met at Maastricht Belgians, representatives of municipalities, who said that they had food for only a fortnight longer. And what was the food they had? No meat, no vegetables, but only one-third of a soldier’s rations of bread for each person per day. At Liège, as I write, there is food for only three days. What is it the people of Belgium ask for? They ask for bread and salt, no more, and it is not forthcoming. They do not ask for meat; they cannot get it. They have no fires for cooking, and they do not beg for petrol. Money is of little use to them, because there is no food to be bought with money. Belgium under ordinary circumstances imports five-sixths of the food she eats. The ordinary channels of sale and purchase are closed. They cannot buy and sell if they would. Representatives of Belgian communities told me at Maastricht that the crops were taken from their fields--the wheat and potatoes--and were sent into Germany. NO WORK, AND HEAVY WAR TAXES There is no work. The factories are closed because they have not raw material, coal, or petrol, because they have no markets. And yet war taxes are falling with hideous pressure upon a people whose hands are empty, whose workshops are closed, whose fields are idle, whose cattle have been taken, or compulsorily purchased without value received.