thirty-five or forty at a time;
the Germans tried to limit us to twenty-five. We were always, in their
eyes, potential spies. But we did no spying. We were too busy doing what
Herbert Hoover had us there to do. Also we had promised not to spy. But
it was a hard struggle to maintain the correctly neutral behavior which
we were under obligation to do. And when the end of this strain came,
which was when America entered the War, and the inside Americans had to
go out, they all, almost to a man, rushed to the trenches to make their
protest, with gun in hand, against German Kultur as it had been
exemplified under their eyes in Belgium.

Altogether about two hundred Americans represented the C. R. B. at
various times inside of Belgium. They were mostly young university men,
representing forty different American colleges and universities in their
allegiance. A group of twenty Rhodes Scholars whom Hoover hurriedly
recruited from Oxford at the beginning of the work was the pioneer lot.
All of these two hundred were selected for intelligence, honor,
discretion, and idealism. They had to be able, or quickly learn, to
speak French. They had to be adaptable and capable of carrying delicate
and large responsibility. They were a wonderful lot and they helped
prove the fact that either the American kind of university education, or
the American inheritance of mental and moral qualities, or the two
combined, can justly be a source of American self-congratulation.

They were patient and long-suffering under difficulties and provocation.
Ted Curtis, whose grandfather was George William, did, on the occasion
of his seventeenth unnecessary arrest by German guards, express his
opinion of his last captor in what he thought was such pure Americanese
as to be safely beyond German understanding. But when his captor dryly
responded in an equally pure argot: "Thanks, old man, the same to
youse," he resolved to take all the rest in silence. And it was only
after the third stripping to the skin in a cold sentry post that Robert
W., a college instructor, made a mild request to the C. R. B. director
in Brussels to ask von Bissing's staff to have their rough-handed
sleuths conduct their examinations in a warmer room.

The relation of the few Americans in Belgium to the many Belgian relief
workers was that of advisors, inspectors and final authorities as to the
control and distribution of the food. The Americans were all too few to
hand the food out p