"You said you could cook," she had written. "Well, we need cooks, and
something to cook. Sometime they'll have it all fixed, no doubt, but
just now it's awful, Sara Lee. The British have money and food, plenty
of it. But here--yesterday I cut the clothes off a wounded Belgian boy.
He had been forty-eight hours on a railway siding, without even soup or
coffee."

It was early in the war then, and between Ypres and the sea stretched a
long thin line of Belgian trenches. A frantic Belgian Government, thrust
out of its own land, was facing the problem, with scant funds and with no
_matériel_ of any sort, for feeding that desolate little army. France had
her own problems--her army, non-productive industrially, and the great
and constantly growing British forces quartered there, paying for what
they got, but requiring much. The world knows now of the starvation of
German-occupied Belgium. What it does not know and may never know is of
the struggle during those early days to feed the heroic Belgian Army in
their wet and almost untenable trenches.

Hospital trains they could improvise out of what rolling stock remained
to them. Money could be borrowed, and was. But food? Clothing?
Ammunition? In his little villa on the seacoast the Belgian King knew
that his soldiers were hungry, and paced the floor of his tiny
living-room; and over in an American city whose skyline was as pointed
with furnace turrets as Constantinople's is with mosques, over there
Sara Lee heard that call of hunger, and--put on her engagement ring.

Later on that evening, with Harvey's wide cheerful face turned adoringly
to her, Sara Lee formulated a question: