The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at
stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means
loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to
remain with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly
appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a
hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian nation had taken
the Allies’ side and now all individual Belgians expected the Allies to
help them.
England did not get the worst of the refugees. They could travel no
farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated money to
care for them at the same time that it was under the expense of keeping
its army mobilised. Looking at the refugees in the camp at Bergen op
Zoom, an observer might share some of the contempt of the Germans for
the Belgians. Crowded in temporary huts in the chill, misty weather
of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless, marooned human wreckage.
They would not dig ditches to drain their camp; they were given to
pilfering from one another the clothes which the world’s charity
supplied. The heart was out of them. They were numbed by disaster.
“Are all these men and women who are living together married?” I asked
the Dutch officer in charge.
“It is not for us to inquire,” he replied. “Most of them say that they
have lost their marriage certificates.”
They were from the slums of that polyglot seaport town Antwerp, which
Belgians say is anything but real Belgium. To judge Belgium by them is
like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets, where
saloons and pawnshops are numerous and the red lights twinkle from dark
doorways.
Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals, who were
organising a different kind of campaign from that which brought glory
to the generals who conquered Belgium. It was odd that Dr. Rose--
that Dr. Rose who had discovered and fought the hook worm among the
mountaineers of the Southern States--should be succouring Belgium, and
yet only natural. Where else should he and Henry James, Jr., of the
Rockefeller Foundation, and Mr. Bicknell, of the American Red Cross,
be, if not here directing the use of an endowment fund set aside for
just such purposes?
They had been all over Belgium and up into the Northern departments of
France occupied by the Germans, investigating conditions. For they were
practical men, trained for solving the problem of charity with wisdom,
who wanted to know that their money was well spent. They had nothing
for the refugees in London, but they found that the people who had
stayed at home in Belgium were worthy of help. The fund was allowing
five hundred thousand dollars a month for the American Commission for
Relief in Belgium, which was the amount that the Germans had spent in a
single day in the destruction of the town of Ypres with shells. Later
they were to go to Poland; then to Serbia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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