Germany was desperately anxious to curry favour with the United
States, and it was scarcely likely, therefore, that houses would be
sacked and burnt, civilians executed and women violated under the
disapproving eyes of the American representative. This surmise
proved to be well founded. The Germans did not want Mr. Whitlock
in Brussels, and nothing would have pleased them better than to
have had him depart and leave them to their own devices, but, so
long as he blandly ignored their hints that his room was preferable to
his company and persisted in sitting tight, they submitted to his
surveillance with the best grace possible and behaved themselves
as punctiliously as a dog that has been permitted to come into a
parlour. After the civil administration had been established,
however, and Belgium had become, in theory at least, a German
province, Mr. Whitlock was told quite plainly that the kingdom to
which he was accredited had ceased to exist as an independent
nation, and that Anglo-American affairs in Belgium could
henceforward be entrusted to the American Ambassador at Berlin.
But Mr. .Whitlock, who had received his training in shirt-sleeve
diplomacy as Socialist Mayor of Toledo, Ohio, was as impervious to
German suggestions as he had been to the threats and pleadings
of party politicians, and told Baron von der Golz, the German
Governor, politely but quite firmly, that he did not take his orders
from Berlin but from Washington. "Gott in Himmel!" exclaimed the
Germans, shrugging their shoulders despairingly, "what is to be
done with such a man?"

Before the Germans had been in occupation of Brussels a fortnight
the question of food for the poorer classes became a serious and
pressing problem. The German armies, in their onset toward the
west, had swept the Belgian country-side bare; the products of the