CHILDREN

It was a great day for the children of Warsaw. It was a great day for their parents, too, and for all the people and for the Polish Government. But it was especially the great day of the children. The man whose name they all knew as well as their own, but whose face they had never seen, and whose voice they had never heard, had come to Warsaw. And they were all to see him and he was to see them.

He had not announced his coming, which was a strange and upsetting thing for the government and military and city officials whose business it is to arrange all the grand receptions and the brilliant parades for visiting guests to whom the Government and all the people wish to do honor. And there was no man in the world to whom the Poles could wish to do more honor than to this uncrowned simple American citizen whose name was for them the synonym of savior.

For what was their new freedom worth if they could not be alive to enjoy it? And their being alive was to them all so plainly due to the heart and brain and energy and achievement of this extraordinary American, who sat always somewhere far away in Paris, and pulled the strings that moved the diplomats and the money and the ships and the men who helped him manage the details, and converted all of the activities of these men and all of these things into food for Warsaw and for all Poland. It was food that the people of Warsaw and all Poland simply had to have to keep alive, and it was food that they simply could not get for themselves. They all knew that. The name of another great American spelled freedom for them; the name Herbert Hoover spelled life to them.

So it was no wonder that the high officials of the Polish Government and capital city were in a state of great excitement when the news suddenly came that the man whom they had so often urged to come to Poland was really moving swiftly on from Prague to Warsaw.

Ever since soon after Armistice Day he had sat in Paris, directing with unremitting effort and absolute devotion the task of getting food to the mouths of the hungry people of all the newly liberated but helpless countries of Eastern Europe, and above all, to the children of these countries, so that the coming generation, on whom the future of these struggling peoples depended, should be kept alive and strong. And now he was preparing to return to his own country and his own children to take up again the course of his life as a simple American citizen at home.

But before going he wanted to see for himself, if only by the most fleeting of glimpses, that the people of Poland and Bohemia and Servia and all the rest were really being fed. And especially did he want to see that the children were alive and strong.

When he came to Paris in November, 1918, at the request of the President of the United States, to organize the relief of the newly liberated peoples of Eastern Europe, terrible tales were brought to him of the suffering and wholesale deaths of the children of these ravaged lands. And when those of us who went to Poland for him in January, 1919, to find out the exact condition and the actual food needs of the twenty-five million freed people there, made our report to him, a single unpremeditated sentence in this report seemed most to catch his eyes and hold his attention. It did more: it wetted his eyes and led to a special concentration of his efforts on behalf of the suffering children. This sentence was: “We see very few children playing in the streets of Warsaw.” Why were they not playing? The answer was simple and sufficient: The children of Warsaw were not strong enough to play in the streets. They could not run; many could not walk; some could not even stand up. Their weak little bodies were bones clothed with skin, but not muscles. They simply could not play.

So in all the excitement of the few hours possible to the citizens of Warsaw and the Government officials of Poland to make hurried preparation to honor their guest and show him their gratitude, one thing they decided to do, which was the best thing for the happiness of their guest they could possibly have done. They decided to show him that the children of Warsaw could now walk!

So seventy thousand boys and girls were summoned hastily from the schools. They came with the very tin cups and pannikins from which they had just had their special meal of the day, served at noon in all the schools and special children’s canteens, thanks to the charity of America, as organized and directed by Hoover, and they carried their little paper napkins, stamped with the flag of the United States, which they could wave over their heads. And on an old race-track of Warsaw, these thousands of restored children marched from mid-afternoon till dark in happy, never-ending files past the grand stand where sat the man who had saved them, surrounded by the heads of Government and the notables of Warsaw.

They marched and marched and cheered and cheered, and waved their little pans and cups and napkins. And all went by as decorously and in as orderly a fashion as many thousands of happy cheering children could be expected to, until suddenly from the grass an astonished rabbit leaped out and started down the track. And then five thousand of these children broke from the ranks and dashed madly after him, shouting and laughing. And they caught him and brought him in triumph as a gift to their guest. But they were astonished to see as they gave him their gift, that this great strong man did just what you or I or any other human sort of human being could not have helped doing under like circumstances. They saw him cry. And they would not have understood, if he had tried to explain to them that he cried because they had proved to him that they could run and play. So he did not try. But the children of Warsaw had no need to be sorry for him. For he cried because he was glad.

But the children of Warsaw were not the only children of Poland that Hoover was interested in and wanted to see. His Polish family was a large and scattered one; there were nearly a million children in it altogether, and some of them were in Lodz and some in Cracow and others in Brest-Litovsk and Bielostok and even in towns far out on the Eastern frontier near the Polish-Bolshevist fighting lines. But of course he could not visit all of them, and much less could he hope to visit all the rest of his whole family in Eastern Europe. For while an especially large part of it was in Poland, other parts were in Finland, Esthonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and some of it was in Czecho-Slovakia and Austria, and other parts were in Hungary, Roumania, and Jugo-Slavia. Altogether this large and diverse family of Mr. Hoover’s in Eastern Europe numbered at least two and a half million hungry children. And it only asked for his permission to be still larger. For at least a million more babies and boys and girls thought they were unfairly excluded from it, because they were sure that they were poor and weak and hungry enough to be admitted, and being very hungry, and not being able to get enough food any other way, was the test of admission to Mr. Hoover’s family.

When the American Relief Administration, which was the organization called into being under Hoover’s direction in response to President Wilson’s appeal to Congress soon after the armistice, saw that its general assistance to the new nations could probably be dispensed with by the end of the summer of 1919, the director realized that some special help for the children would still be needed. The task of seeing that the underfed and weak children in all these countries of Eastern Europe, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, received their supplementary daily meals of specially fit and specially prepared food, could not be suddenly dropped by the American workers. There could be no confidence that the still unstable and struggling governments would be able to carry it on successfully. But with the abolition of the blockade and the incoming of the year’s harvest, and with the growing possibility of adequate financial help through government and bank loans, the various new nations of Eastern Europe could be expected to arrange for an adequate general supply of food for themselves without further assistance from the American Relief Administration.

Just what the nature and methods of this assistance were, and how the one hundred million dollars put into the hands of the Relief Administration by Congress were made to serve as the basis for the purchase and distribution to the hungry countries of over seven hundred million dollars’ worth of food, with the final return of almost all of the original hundred million to the United States Government (if not in actual cash, at least in the form of government obligations), will be told in a later chapter. Also how it was arranged, without calling on the United States Government for further advances, that the feeding of the millions of hungry children of Eastern Europe could go on as it is now actually going on every day under Hoover’s direction, until the time arrives, some time this summer, when it can be wholly taken over by the new governments.

But just now I want to tell another story.