by Richard van Pelt, WWI Correspondent

In an editorial, “What Cobb Saw In Belgium,” the Oregon Statesman appeals to the better nature of Americans, asking them to look beyond their selfish concerns and respond to a humanitarian crisis over which those suffering had no control:

Why help the Belgians? Why send relief money abroad when there is so much need at home? Why take up a burden that properly rests on those who made the war? Why do anything to mitigate the suffering and therefore prolong the conflict?

Well, let’s not argue about it. Logic gets us nowhere. Perhaps if we had all seen what Irvin Cobb saw, we should feel as humanly as he does about the same matter.

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“In Belgium,” says Cobb, “I saw homeless men, women and children by thousands and hundreds of thousands. Many of them had been prosperous. A few had wealth and practically all had been comfortable. Now with scarcely an exception they all stood upon one common plane of misery. They had lost their homes, their livings and their means of making livings.

“I saw them tramping aimlessly along wind-swept, rain-washed roads, fleeing from burning and devastated villages. I saw them sleeping in open fields, upon the miry earth, with no cover and no shelter. I saw them herded together in the towns and cities to which many of them ultimately fled – existing God knows how. I saw them ragged, furtive scarecrows, prowling in the shattered ruins of their houses, seeking salvage where threw was no salvage to be found.

“I saw them living like the beasts of the field upon such things as the beast of the field would reject. I saw them standing in long lines waiting for their poor share of the dole of a charity which already was nearly exhausted. I saw their towns where hardly one stone stood upon another. I saw their abandoned farm lands where the harvests rotted in the furrows and the fruit hung mildewed and ungathered upon the trees. I saw them staggering from weariness and from the weakness of hunger. I saw all these sights repeated and multiplied infinitely – yes, and magnified, too – but not once did I see a man or woman, or even a child, that wept or cried out.

“If the Belgian soldiers won the world’s admiration by the resistance which they made against tremendously overpowering numbers, the people of Belgium – the families of their soldiers – should have the world’s admiration and pity for the courage, the patience and the fortitude they have dispelled under the load of an affliction too dolorous for any words to describe, too terrible for any imagination to picture.”