Second paragraph of third chapter:
According to historian Branden Little, approximately 120 American relief committees were operating in 1914, including organizations such as “Father De Ville’s Milk Fund for Belgian Babies; the Children of Flanders Rescue Committee… King Albert’s Civilian Hospital Fund… the Belgian Relief Fund; the Belgian Relief Committee; and the Commission for Relief in Belgium.”
A few months ago I was showing off the delights of Leuven a friend who has recently moved to Brussels, and challenged her to guess which American president has a square named after him in the city. If you don’t already know, I confidently predicted, you won’t get it in your first ten guesses. I was right. The story of how future president Herbert Hoover co-ordinated the delivery of food to occupied Belgium during the First World War is not well known outside this country, and indeed is a fading memory even here.
This book is a brief but detailed history of the effort an amazing triumph of non-governmental diplomacy and organisation, with food bought in the UK and distributed to the Belgians (and northern French) living under occupation. Hoover had to fight turf wars with other American do-gooders, and establish clear demarcation with the Belgian relief committee about how the distribution was to managed; but those issues pale into insignificance in comparison with the need to get the British and Germans to allow the effort to proceed in the first place despite being locked in vicious war.
The Germans come out as the bad guys, no matter how you look at it. When the Commission for Relief in Belgium complained to the military governor that German soldiers were mistreating their staff, he refused to believe them and sent one of his own men to observe the situation on the ground. The undercover German soldier was beaten up, arrested and jailed by his own comrades who refused to believe his story.
A small team of young Americans, mostly young men, supervised the relief operation on the ground. The recruitment process was basically any Rhodes scholar, or other upper-class white male American student in western Europe, who spoke decent French (as most well-educated Westerners did in those days). That obviously meant that the ‘delegates’, as they were known, were mostly from the northeastern white elite, especially since they were paid a very meagre stipend on top of expenses so that those from a less wealthy background could not afford to do it.
But it reminded me of the OSCE and other international staff who I knew in Bosnia when I was working there immediately after the war of the 1990s, people who were recruited as much for availability as for expertise, whose main role was really to demonstrate the continuing commitment of the international community to the country. It’s not such an awful thing. Going back to the First World War, my grandmother’s elder brother, Lyman C. Hibbard, volunteered not in Belgium but with the ambulances of the American Field Service in France, and was awarded the Croix du Guerre for it.
The author himself is the grandson of one of the American delegates and the Belgian industrialist‘s daughter who he fell in love with, but he doesn’t let that colour the story, which relies on the copious documentation in English. He has laudably put a lot of his source material online for wider use. However, I see only two books in French and two in Dutch out of eighty in the bibliography.
One other point that is not mentioned: the captains of Belgian industry who were able to marshal local resources as part of the effort had made most of their money from exploiting the Congo.
Anyway, it’s a short and digestible book about a quietly heroic moment of history, which is not well enough known. You can get it here.
