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Women of Belgium: Turning Tragedy to Triumph

Chapter 29: XXVI
By Charlotte Kellogg
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About This Book

The narrative documents how women in occupied Belgium mobilize communal relief during wartime, organizing soup kitchens, crèches, feeding rooms for vulnerable children, milk and layette distribution, and converted public spaces used for clothing, toy-making, and rehabilitation. It profiles volunteer leadership and daily operations—canteens, schools, factories, and hospitals—showing practical measures to feed, clothe, employ, and comfort civilians and mutilated veterans. Interwoven are descriptions of coordination with relief administrations and the incremental revival of morale as ordinary institutions are repurposed into systems of charity and self-help that sustain families through prolonged hardship.

XXVI

FAREWELL

I can think of no more beautiful, final tribute to the women of Belgium than that carried in their own words—words of tragedy, but words of widest vision and understanding and generosity, sent in farewell to us:

“Oh, you who are going back in that free country of the United States, tell to all our sufferings, our distress; tell them again and again our cries of alarm, which come from our opprest and agonized hearts! You have lived and felt what we are living and feeling; we have understood that, higher than charity which gives, you brought us charity which understands and consoles! Your souls have bowed down over ours, our eyes with anxiety are looking in your friendly eyes. Over the big ocean our wishes follow you. Oh, might you there remember the little Belgium! The life which palpitates in her grateful heart—she owes it to you! You are our hope, our anchor! Help us! Do not abandon the work of charity you have undertaken!

“Our endless gratitude goes to you, and from father to children, in the hovel and in the palace, we shall repeat your great heart, your high idealism, your touching charity!”

NOTE BY THE AUTHOR

The increase in dependency in less than a year, as shown by a comparison of the following figures with those in this book, suggests more poignantly than any written account could, the daily deepening tragedy of Belgium:

Present total on “Soupes” in whole of Belgium 3,032,089
Present total on “Soupes” in Greater Brussels 401,600
Present total children in Belgium receiving eleven o’clock meal 985,617
Present total nursing or expectant mothers receiving canteen meal 14,809
Present total debilitated children receiving supplementary meal 53,311

C. K.

December, 1917.