hter. I asked
them what the joke was, but they were not telling.

We got in about seven o'clock, without incident.

Went to see von Herwarth after dinner on behalf of a poor Belgian woman
whose husband, a Major in the Grenadiers, is dangerously wounded and in
the military hospital at Antwerp. The Germans are going to send her up
to-morrow on a motor with some Belgian officers, who are being
exchanged. I saw the aide-de-camp who is going through with the car and
asked him to be nice to her. Then to her house, to shut up a lot of old
women of both sexes who were trying to dissuade her from going, on the
ground that the Germans would hold her as a hostage. I suppose she will
be off.

Mrs. Bridges,[5] wife of the former British Military Attache, was in
this evening for help. A British prisoner told of seeing Colonel Bridges
fall from his horse at Mons, mount again, ride a little way and fall.
She cannot get to Mons, so we are getting her off to France via England,
in the hope that she may find him on that side.

[Footnote 5: Colonel Bridges was badly wounded at Mons, but escaped,
recovered, was wounded again at Nieuport, but survived both, and having
received the rank of Lieutenant-General, was the military member of the
Balfour Mission to the United States in 1917.]

It is a pitiful business, and the worst of it is that they all think we
have some miraculous power to do anything we like for them. I only wish
we could.

* * * * *

_Brussels, September 1, 1914._--- The first thing this morning I had a
pow-wow with Hulse about how to handle the funds that are being gathered
to relieve the enormous amount of distress that we shall have to meet
here. There is a good deal of it even now. All the big factories are
closed. Most of the shops have their shutters up, and the streets are
filled with idle people. Importations of foodstuffs, even from the
outlying districts, have stopped dead. Conditions are bad enough in all
conscience, but they are nothing compared to what we have ahead, when
cold weather comes on.

A lot of bankers and big business men have got together to wrestle with
the financial problem. The Burgomaster has his people at work, trying to
get their hands on foodstuffs and cooerdinate their work.

I went to the Foreign Office and talked things over with von Herwarth.
He straightened out some of the tangles, and we were able to get things
moving.

I have