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.