across the borders and engulf them.

Its agents were working continuously among their peoples; there were
everywhere the sinister signs of the possibility of a swift removal of
the frontiers of Bolshevism from their Eastern to their Western borders.
In Paris the eminent statesmen and famous generals of the Peace
Conference and the Supreme Council sat and debated. They sent out
occasional ultimata ordering the cessation of fighting, the retirement
from a far advanced frontier, and what not else. Inter-Allied Economic
and Military Missions came and looked on and conferred and returned.
But nobody stopped fighting, and the conferences settled nothing. The
Allies were not in a position--this need be no secret now--to send
adequate forces to enforce their ultimata. An Inter-Allied Military
Mission of four generals of America, Great Britain, France and Italy
started by special train from Cracow to Lemberg to convey personally an
ultimatum to the Ruthenians and Poles ordering them to stop fighting.
The train was shelled by the Ruthenians east of Przemsyl, and the
generals came back. Eastern Europe expected the great powers to do
something about this, but nothing happened, and the discount on ultimata
became still more marked.

Somebody had to do something that counted. So Hoover did it. It was not
only lives that had to be saved; it was nations. It was not only
starvation that had to be fought; it was approaching anarchy, it was
Bolshevism.

As already stated, Hoover's food ships had left America for Southern and
Northern European ports before Hoover's men had even got into the
countries to be fed. As a consequence, food deliveries closely followed
food investigations. That counted with the people. One of Hoover's rules
was that food could only go into regions where it could be safeguarded
and controlled. That counted against Bolshevism. Shrewd Bela Kun was
able to play a winning game in Hungary against the Peace Conference and
Supreme Councils at Paris, but he was out-played by soft-voiced,
square-jawed Captain "Tommy" Gregory, Hoover's general director for
Southeast Europe, and it was this same California lawyer in khaki,
turned food man, who, when the communist Kun had passed and the pendulum
had swung as dangerously far in the other direction, allowing the
audacious Hapsburg, Archduke Joseph, to slip into power, had done most
to unseat him.

Gregory had been able to commandeer all the former military wires in the
Aust