My Year of the War: Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete FormPalmer, Frederick
History
My Year of the War: Including an Account of Experiences with the Troops in France and the Record of a Visit to the Grand Fleet Which is Here Given for the First Time in its Complete Form
Palmer, Frederick
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
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 individual Belgians expected help from
the Allies.
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 mobilized. 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 red lights twinkle
from dark doorways.
Around a table in a Rotterdam hotel one met some generals who
were organizing 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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