A Belgian woman whose father was one of Belgium’s leading lawyers-- her husband was at the front--was the busy head of this organisation, because, as she said, the busier she was the more it “keeps my mind off--” and she did not finish the sentence. How many times I heard that “keeps my mind off--” a sentence that was the more telling for not being finished. She and some other women began sewing and patching and collecting garments; “but our business grew so fast”--the business of relief is the one kind in Belgium that does grow these days--“that now we have hundreds of helpers. I begin to feel that I am what you would call in America a captainess of industry.”
Some of the good mothers in America were a little too thoughtful in their kindness. An odour in a box that had evidently travelled across the Atlantic close to the ship’s boilers was traced to the pocket of a boy’s suit, which contained the hardly distinguishable remains of a ham sandwich, meant to be ready to hand for the hungry Belgian boy who got that suit. Broken pots of jam were quite frequent. But no matter. Soap and water and Belgian industry saved the suit, if not the sandwich. Sweaters and underclothes and overcoats almost new and shiny, old frock coats and trousers with holes in seat and knees might represent equal sacrifice on the part of some American three thousand miles away, and all were welcome. Needle-women were given work cutting up the worn-outs of grown-ups and making them over into astonishingly good suits or dresses for youngsters.
“We’ve really turned the rink into a kind of department store,” said the lady. “Come into our boot department. We had some leather left in Belgium that the Germans did not requisition, so we bought it and that gave more Belgians work in the shoe factories. Work, you see, is what we want to keep our minds off--”
Blue and yellow tickets here, too! Boots for children and thick-set working women and watery-eyed old men! And each was required to leave behind the pair he was wearing.
“Sometimes we can patch up the cast-offs, which means work for the cobblers,” said the captainess of industry. “And who are our clerks? Why, the people who put on the skates for the patrons of the rink, of course!”