EW YORK TIMES [Transcriber: original 'TMIES'], Dec. 2, 1914.]

[_The following story of conditions in Belgium, Germany, France,
Holland, and England was sent by Irvin S. Cobb of The Saturday
Evening Post to the American [Transcriber: original 'Aerican'] Red
Cross, to be used in bringing home to Americans urgent need for
relief in the countries affected by the great war. Red Cross
contributions for suffering non-combatants are received at the Red
Cross offices in the Russell Sage Foundation Building, 130 East
Twenty-second Street. Such contributions should be addressed to
Jacob H. Schiff, Treasurer, and, if desired, the giver can
designate the country to the relief of which he wishes the donation
applied._]

Recently I have been in four of the countries concerned in the present
war--Belgium, France, Germany, and England. I was also in Holland,
having traversed it from end to end within a week after the fall of
Antwerp, when every road coming up out of the south was filled with
Belgian refugees.

In Belgium I saw this:

Homeless men, women, and children by thousands and hundreds of
thousands. Many of them had been prosperous, a few had been wealthy,
practically all had been comfortable. Now, with scarcely an exception,
they stood all upon one common plane of misery. They had lost their
homes, their farms, their work-shops, their livings, and their means of
making livings.

I saw them tramping aimlessly along wind-swept, rain-washed roads,
fleeing from burning and devastated villages. I saw them sleeping in
open fields upon the miry earth, with no cover and no shelter. I saw
them herded together in the towns and cities to which many of them
ultimately fled, existing God alone knows how. I saw them--ragged,
furtive scarecrows--prowling in the shattered ruins of their homes,
seeking salvage where there was no salvage to be found. I saw them
living like the beasts of the field, upon such things as the beasts of
the field would reject.

I saw them standing in long lines waiting for their poor share of the
dole of a charity which already was nearly exhausted. I saw their towns
when hardly one stone stood upon another. I saw their abandoned farm
lands, where the harvests rotted in the furrows and the fruit hung
mildewed and ungathered upon the trees. I saw their cities where trade
was dead and credit was a thing which no longer existed. I saw them
staggering from w