erman officials, "it will not do
to interfere too much with these quixotic Americans."

But the Germans, most of them at least, never really understood us. One
day as Hoover was finishing a conversation with the head of the German
Pass-Zentral in Brussels, trying to arrange for a less vexing and
delaying method of granting passes for the movements of our men, the
German officer said: "Well, now tell me, Herr Hoover, as man to man,
what do you get out of all this? You are not doing all this for
nothing, surely." And a little later, at a dinner at the Great
Headquarters to which I had been invited by one of the chief officers of
the General Staff, he said to me, as we took our seats: "Well, how's
business?" I could only tell him that it was going as well as any
business could that made no profits for anybody in it.

It was impressive to see Hoover in the crises. We expected a major
crisis once a month and a minor one every week. We were rarely
disappointed in our expectations. I may describe, for illustration, such
a major crisis, a very major one, which came in August, 1916. The
Commission had been making a hard fight all summer for two imperatively
needed concessions from the Germans. We wanted the General Staff to turn
over to us for the civil population a larger proportion of the 1916
native crop of Occupied France than we had had from the 1915 crop. And
we wanted some special food for the 600,000 French children in addition
to the regular program imported from overseas. We sorely needed fresh
meat, butter, milk and eggs for them and we had discovered that Holland
would sell us certain quantities of these foods. But we had to have the
special permission of both the Allies and Germany to bring them in.

Hoover, working in London, obtained the Allied consent. But the Germans
were holding back. I was pressing the General Staff at Great
Headquarters at Charleville and von Bissing's government at Brussels.
Their reasons for holding back finally appeared. Germany looked on
Holland as a storehouse of food which might some time, in some way,
despite Allied pressure on the Dutch Government, become available to
Germany. Although the French children were suffering terribly, and
ceasing all growth and development for lack of the tissue-building
foods, the Germans preferred not to let us help them with the Dutch food
but to cling to their long chance of sometime getting it for themselves.

Hoover came over to Brussels and, toge