Part 3

Outside these questions the problem with which since Christmas we have been most acutely preoccupied is the problem of giving suitable help to the urgent needs of the propertied and professional classes. This is a class with which I have myself been thrown into close and constant touch, and the sorrows and difficulties of their position are very vivid to me. They have suffered, of course, horribly in regard to their material possessions, and the numbers increase daily of persons accustomed to live in the comfort of comparative affluence who are reduced to absolute penury. Such cases call for the sincerest sympathy and for practical help. Where only material possessions are concerned they do not, it must be recognized, make quite the same poignant appeal to elemental emotions that was made by the earlier refugees. But there is seldom a day in which some special case does not present itself. A day or two ago it was a case of a man of good position and once ample means who had seen his wife and daughter shot by the Germans, and who came in search of some educational facilities for his little boy, the only member of the family now left to him. He was entirely penniless. The next day it was a manufacturer from Louvain who had shared in all the horrors attending the destruction of that town. His town house and his country house, with all that they contained, had been destroyed. He himself had been taken as a hostage by the Germans. He was three times blindfolded and ordered to be shot, and three times at the last moment the order was countermanded. He was beaten and spat upon. He was forced to march with other Belgians as a covering rank in front of the German advance. As he said in very quietly relating these experiences: “It is doubted whether the Germans really used Belgian civilians as a covering-shield for their soldiers. I _know_, because they have used me. They put us in the front of their attack, and bullets whistled between us as we advanced.” But these things were all as nothing to the anguish of knowing that the soldiery which had marched him away in one direction had taken his wife away in another. It was impossible for him to know anything of her fate. After some days of marching in front of the German troops they came in touch with Belgian outposts. He was able to effect his escape, and he reached Antwerp through the Belgian lines. Still unable to obtain any news of his wife, he advertised in the hope that the news he gave of himself might reach her eyes. It did. After long delay the news was brought to him that she was alive, that she had escaped without serious injury from the Germans, and that she was in hiding in the neighbourhood of Louvain. To reach her he went on foot from Antwerp to Louvain, passing as he could through the German lines, hiding at times in ditches and swamps, wading through rivers to avoid the guarded roads. He told me the whole story with absolute calm, and only when he came to the climax of their meeting he suddenly broke down—“My wife!” he said, “she had been living in the woods and fields with practically nothing to eat. She was a black skeleton, mere skin drawn over her bones.” He could say no more. I didn’t wish that he should. My business was merely to find him some means of living now that he and his wife were together in a place of safety. You can understand that after hearing such a story one’s only feeling is that peace and security must somehow be assured.

In the early part of the movement such cases as these were provided for by private hospitality, and I come now to the greatest change of all which the movement has undergone. The movement of private hospitality, which has provided from first to last for a figure approaching to something like a quarter of a million refugees, has, as was to a certain extent inevitable, exhausted its first impulse. About Christmas time we began to realize that the offers of hospitality had ceased. No fresh offers came, and hosts who had previously had Belgians in their houses wrote that they would shortly be needing this accommodation for other purposes. Our Allocation Department became a Department of Re-Allocation. Gifts of clothing also sensibly diminished.

The funds of the War Refugees Committee, which have been devoted to the relief of Belgians in England, have never been very great. Public contributions in money have been more usually given to the Belgian Relief Fund, which is entirely devoted to the relief of Belgians in Belgium. We have sometimes thought that the public did not clearly understand the distinction between the two Funds. Our wealth has consisted mainly in offers of hospitality and gifts in kind. When these began to cease we saw ourselves in danger of being unable to continue our work for want of means, and this situation introduced the present and latest chapter upon which we have entered.

I am sorry that I am not able at present to enter into a full explanation of schemes which are as yet imperfectly developed. A time will come when all necessary information will be freely given. For our present purpose I will ask you only to take from me that we have under certain conditions a command of funds which enable us to give relief in cases of strict necessity. The money so available is not to be regarded as a substitute for, but as a supplement to, private generosity. It is in certain cases sufficient for the necessities of a working man. The part of private generosity for better-class refugees still remains to bring the bare necessities of life up to the standard which the nation would wish to offer in such cases as those I have just now cited.

There are many obvious ways in which this can be done. Among the most generally successful so far has been the organization of large houses on the basis of gratuitous hotels. I have myself organized two or three such houses, notably, one at Harrington House in Kensington Palace Gardens, lent to me for the purpose by Lord Harrington, another at Hambro House in Prince’s Gate, lent by Mr. and Mrs. Eric Hambro, and a third in the King’s Weigh House Parsonage, furnished and lent by the congregation of the King’s Weigh House Church in Duke Street. In these three houses I have been able to receive about 120 refugees, who make with regard to them very charming expressions of content. What I have done has also been done by many others. Houses of this description are springing up like mushrooms through the country, and it has been thought that many people who are no longer able to entertain Belgian refugees in their own homes may be willing to contribute towards a system of organized hospitality under which suitable homes can be provided.

Another way of meeting the necessities of the class of refugees of whom we are now speaking is by paying the rent of furnished flats, in which a very small grant is sometimes enough to render domestic life a possibility. Among the propertied and professional classes there are some who have still some small resources. For these the active brain of Mrs. Lyttelton has devised, in consultation with Lord Gladstone, a scheme which she is administering as a branch of the War Refugees Committee, of flats furnished by the Committee, and placed at the lowest possible prices at the service of the refugees. The scheme deserves a fuller description than I am able to give it. In all schemes of hospitable relief the National Food Supply, the Belgian Refugee Food Supply, and other charitable organizations, of which the gratuitous food is in great part contributed as a free gift by our Colonies, play an important part.

I would like to have been able to do justice to other institutions for the assistance of refugees which have from the beginning of the movement developed as branches of the various Departments at Aldwych. I can only permit myself just to name the Education Department, under Lady Gladstone, Mr. Englehart (of Leper Island fame), Father Christie and the Abbé Michiele, where, by a movement of Educational hospitality offered by the public schools, the Catholic institutions, and the universities of the country, free education has been provided for nearly 2,000 Belgian young people. In this movement I am glad to be able to say that Eton, Oxford, and Cambridge have handsomely done their part.

Another branch of activity which has been of the greatest value throughout the whole movement has been the Health Department, which, under Mrs. George Montagu, assisted by Miss Page, the daughter of the American Ambassador, has given help and relief to hundreds of cases of the sick and otherwise disabled. In connection with this department there is also a dispensary, where gratuitous medicine and medical advice from Belgian doctors can be obtained. Nor is it only in the Allocation and Health Departments that secondary branches of utility have blossomed forth. The Rink is full of useful minor institutions, brought into being by the necessities of the situation. The Transport Department has many subsidiary activities. Work done for _réformé_ soldiers who have served their country to the limits of their strength, and work done for “undesirables” who can serve no country, are at different ends of the scale, alike branches of benevolent utility.

A Department which is probably doing in its way as much humane work as any other is what we call the “Missing Relatives” Department. It is divided into two sections—the Poste Restante section and the section which deals with Lost Relatives. We receive a great number of letters addressed to refugees, care of our Committee. For a time they lay unclaimed. Then our Correspondence Department conceived the idea of endeavouring to trace their owners, in order that they might be forwarded. We have, of course, now registered the addresses of many thousands of refugees. By the courtesy of the Registrar-General we are allowed to search also daily the files of Somerset House, and in the last three weeks alone over 500 letters have been traced and forwarded to their owners. In the “Lost Relatives” section all urgent cases, such, for instance, as a father or mother searching for their lost children, or a husband his wife, etc., are handled immediately by our Correspondence Department, who make every effort to trace the missing person. The machinery which is used for tracing the letters is put in operation, and I am glad to say that we frequently succeed in finding and uniting the members of families who have lost each other in the flight.

In the Belgian Consulate room Monsieur Grumbar and the two Misses Baschewitz, with their helpers, continue to earn the gratitude of their compatriots by their constant and willing service. Of the Consulate as such I do not, of course, venture to speak. From the beginning of the movement it has had offices under the same roof as the War Refugees Committee, and has been closely associated with our work. Its own work is outside the scope of the present paper.

I cannot leave this branch of my subject without mentioning collectively, as I only wish I could mention individually, the admirable quality of the voluntary work which has been freely given in every department. The few developments I have enumerated only serve to indicate the activity that exists, and they have nearly all been carried out by volunteer effort. Those of us who happen to be at the head of Departments are spoken of, and our work obtains recognition and gratitude often far beyond its deserts. I would like to say that our work would have been absolutely impossible had it not been for the devoted, generous, and regular support of hundreds of volunteers who have given every bit as much as we have given, and who have been content to do it—to come early, to stay late, to work day after day unflinchingly at the least interesting tasks, to spend their strength, their emotions, their money, and their time in the background, so to speak, of our organization, without a thought of anything but the help that they could give. These volunteers have come from every rank. I have mentioned 500. Had we wanted 5,000 we could have had them. I am almost ashamed even to speak of thanks or recognition where it has been so little sought. I would only say of many of our unmentioned helpers that their names should be written in letters of gold, were it possible that any true record could be kept of the service which this movement has called forth.

All the Departments I have mentioned and many others are still active at Aldwych. Lord Gladstone, Lord Lytton, Mr. Dickinson, and Mr. Allen, who have been associated in the Management Committee since the opening or our latest chapter, have their time fully occupied. There is no sign of any diminution of work. Neither is there on our part any diminution of energy or of interest in the work which still remains to be done.

You may be inclined to think from some of the particulars which I have given you of the latest chapter of the work that the heroic moment of the movement has passed—for England as well as for our guests. I would only venture to say that in heroic moments resolutions are conceived—it is for subsequent acts to give them shape. In the details which I have given you we are simply working out the national resolution that the exiles now in our midst shall be cared for, helped, and protected to the limits of our ability until the day dawns for them, when they may return to the homes they love. We see no end, and we desire to see no end, to our exertions but the day of repatriation. Be that day near or far, it is our hope to continue our work till it is reached, and we look with quiet confidence and absolute assurance to the public we know to give us the full support of its sympathy and its help.

CHISWICK PRESS: PRINTED BY CHARLES WHITTINGHAM AND CO. TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE, LONDON.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

● Typos fixed; non-standard spelling and dialect retained. ● Enclosed italics font in _underscores_.