TALES FROM A FAMISHED LAND INCLUDING The White Island—A Story of the Dardanelles BY EDWARD EYRE HUNT Author of “War Bread,” Etc. GARDEN CITY        NEW YORK DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & COMPANY 1918 Copyright, 1918, by Doubleday, Page & Company All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages, including the Scandinavian COPYRIGHT, 1916, 1917, BY THE REPUBLIC PUBLISHING COMPANY, INC. COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY COMPANY COPYRIGHT, 1917, BY THE AMERICAN RE

Herbert Clark Hoover, chairman of the Commission for Relief in Belgium, once called that amazing organization, “the door in the wall of steel.” Between November, 1914, and March, 1917, when America entered the world war, there had passed through that door millions of dollars in money, thousands of tons of foodstuffs and clothing, and four or five dozen young Americans, most of them just out of their ’teens, who played a part in Belgian history which they are still trying to explain in words of o

Pierre, the chauffeur, launched a savage kick at the newly punctured tire and swore into the night. “Three quarters of an hour, monsieur, to repair it,” he said reluctantly, switching off the motor. “Do you wish——” Into the sudden silence stole the slow, incessant roar of the Yser cannon. The level stretches of the Campine, alternating black vistas of scrub evergreens with little fields, peat bogs, and kitchen gardens, lay fragrant and silent in the moonlight. Heather was in bloom, nightingales

A little Spitz ran back and forth on the deck of the lighter Cornelis de Vriendt , barking defiance at all the world and especially at me for my efforts to come aboard. Two fat Flemish babies clad only in shirts and no underclothes sat in the bow watching him. “Hay, skipper,” I shouted, “where are you? Call off your dog!” A gigantic shock of red hair appeared from the cabin, followed by a long face, prodigiously wrinkled, and a thin body in blue shirt and nondescript trousers, from which protrud

“You-all are in charge of the Relief Commission, suh? I am Mistah Solslog, of Alabama. I’m lookin’ for my sistah.” The tense blue eyes of my fellow-countryman stared at me searchingly, and I at him. He wore a rubber collar and a false shirt front of a style which afforded popular subjects for caricature twenty-five years ago. His salt-and-pepper suit was cheap, horribly cheap, thin, cotton, summer weight, but immaculate. His hat—an old, well-brushed Stetson—was in his hand. He had no luggage. In

The poet finished his recitation and resumed his cigarette, waiting for our applause. “It is a man absolutely extraordinary,” murmured the dancing-master across the table at my left, under cover of the hand-clapping. “He is the greatest poet of Belgium, monsieur. Verhaeren, Cammaerts, Maeterlinck—they are nothing. If you bring him an album—presto! he writes you an ode in it.” In the tight little supper-room over the Café de la Toison d’Or we were sweltering and dining at the expense of McTeague.

Rain fell softly, as it frequently falls in Belgium, drenching the ripening fields of Brabant and the ghosts of ruined towns. By six o’clock in the evening we had reached Louvain. My motor-car rolled through the porte de Bruxelles and down the narrow, slippery Flemish streets into the heart of the city. From a sentry box marked with barber-pole stripes in the German colours—black, white, red; black, white, red again—a bearded Landsturm man leaped out, wearing a helmet like a Yohoghany miner’s ca

Belgian peasants say that on the Eve of All Souls unquiet spirits are loosed from their graves for an hour after sunset. Those who died by violence, or those who died unshriven, rise from the dark and speak to passersby; they rise with the load of their sins upon them, with the hatred, or fear, or agony, or longing which they felt while dying, still in their tortured hearts, and they beg the passersby to take vengeance on their enemies, or to give them news of those they loved or hated. And afte

It was five o’clock in the morning. A riotous sunrise deluged the Campine as I slipped into my clothes and ran down the narrow, twisting tower-stair to keep a secret tryst with the Baas , or overseer. Little slits in the tower wall, cut for mediæval archers, let in the arrows of the sun; and as I ran through the gloomy armoury and the high-roofed Flemish dining hall—stripped of their treasure of old pikes, swords, crossbows, and blunderbusses by the diligent Germans—out to the causeway, and over

A second time we seated ourselves at our little round table in the restaurant on the boulevard Anspach—the director of the art museum and I. A mug of light Belgian beer was before each of us, and a copy of La Belgique telling of the Somme battles. The director’s hands shook as he reached for the newspaper and his half-finished beer. His breath came in short, apoplectic gasps. He was wildly angry. A couple of minutes before a Flemish newsboy had rushed into the restaurant and shouted, “Aeroplane!

“The instant Father Guido died his naked soul leaped from his body and ran up the air as on a stair.” Odile stopped her story. “Hoo-oo,” she sighed reproachfully, crossing her gaunt old hands over her middle and staring at my sleepy head. “Mynheer is not listening!” Odile always came into my bedroom before I was up in the morning. It was her function to waken me, and then to gossip with me while she opened the green Venetian blinds, tightly closed the windows against the noxious air of morning,

My automobile broke down on the outskirts of Diest, and I was obliged to spend the night in the Gouden Kat —a typical Flemish inn. A dozen little round tables stood outside on the flagstones bordering the Grand’ Place, the supper room within was divided about equally among food, drink, and billiards, and madame sat in state behind a showcase of cigarettes. There were no Germans lodged in the Gouden Kat so I was given the best room, and as I came down the tiny, twisted stair after a good night’s

Wilson belonged emphatically to the genus Homo sapiens ; species, Texicana ; habitat, southwestern parts of the United States and Antwerp, Belgium. He was tall and lithe and handsome, and also sentimental. He was the only member of the American Commission for Relief in Belgium who flatly refused to fly the American flag from his automobile; he was the only member who publicly declared that he said his prayers every night, but, as he confided to me once in a moment of great emotion, he had never

Her parents had always regarded her as a sort of stepchild. There was Elaine, her elder sister, docile, petite, with fair looks and a proper dot, married at eighteen and mother of two babies; but Virginie was twenty and unwed. Although I did not know her until 1914, I can fancy the picture in the ancient moated castle of Drie Toren two years before when Virginie faced the old Baron, her father, and declared her independence of parental restraints of all sorts. The old Baron, bearded like a Numid

The Commissaire of the Arrondissement of Metseys beat on the glass front of the limousine and arrested the mad career of the Government automobile in which we were riding. The soldier-chauffeur (a Belgian in the near-British uniform which the Belgian army now wears, with a small round button in his cap marked with the Belgian colours in concentric circles—black, white, red) turned and looked back into the car inquiringly. “We stop here,” the Commissaire announced in pantomime. Just five minutes

The aviation launch rolled slowly in the grip of the grounds well behind one of the desolate islands off Tenedos, southwest of the entrance to the Dardanelles. The afternoon was windless and humid. Warm, dripping fog covered the launch and hid from her the outlines of the rocky, treeless island in the lee of which she lay. Fog had sprinkled the deck as if with baptismal water, and the day was noiseless except for the lazy slapping of waves against the launch’s side. A hydro-aeroplane alongside d