The Food Situation Overseas

MR. PRESIDENT, GENTLEMEN AND NEIGHBORS,-It was but a very few weeks ago that I stood on the battlefield of Vimy Ridge, a soil hallowed and made sacred to every lover of justice by Canadians, your countrymen, whose courage has made their names immortal. I stood on that battlefield by that cross with the thousands of Canadian names engraved on it, and I thought of the sacrifices those men had made.

I stopped in the Cathedral on my way to this luncheon and I heard a very wonderful and beautiful prayer, which said that we were fighting for the precious blood that was shed on Calvary. As I heard those words I saw the picture of that cross in my mind by which I stood at Vimy, and I thought of the Calvary of your men; and then I came home and I found many of my own countrymen forgetful, thoughtless-so thoughtless that they were eating just exactly as they pleased, and doing exactly as they pleased.

Now, as I speak on the food situation, I would like to have you shoot your minds across the sea to that battlefield and think of what your men have done for you and for us. Across the border in our country we shall not

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Mr. Colby is a prominent lawyer in New Jersey. He has been in public life for over fifteen years as a member of the State Board of Education, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. He was chosen by the United States Food Administration as a member of a Commission to proceed overseas and study the food situation at first hand, with the purpose of undertaking active propaganda work throughout the United States.

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forget it; they have not only been defenders of their race, but they have kept the Hun from their neighbors' gate. We know that, and we shall never forget it. When I came home from the front I could not believe that people, especially the people of my own country, could be passing through this great period in the world's history and be blind to the issue; and yet I have no doubt you have some people in Canada who are still asleep. You have not as many as we have. No, I have not come up here to make excuses for my country. I have not come up, on the other hand, to apologize. You know the situation just as' well as I do. You know that 25% of our people have come into our country during the last twenty years. You know what that means; you know how difficult it is to form public opinion rightly when that is the case. I do not offer that as an excuse; there was no excuse, and people of our country do not attempt to make one now. We are late; we have been slow; we have been heavy; we have been selfish; we have beenfat; we have been slothful; and now that the die is cast, every live drop of blood, every stick of timber, is pledged eternally to the winning of this war. I wish I could take you all back to the battlefield of Vimy Ridge-the most wonderful day I think I ever experienced. It was the first time we had ever seen any action; it was the second day after we had got to France. We were first taken up to General Haig's headquarters and the following morning, to Vimy. The artillery was in very lively action, and as I was walking across that field I felt a cringing under my left foot and on looking down I found a poor fellow who had died on that field. They showed me that great crater. Just think; your men had worked for nine months drilling and tunnelling under your own trenches and the German trenches, and they got within 50 feet of the point where they wanted to place the mine, and they discovered that they had run into a German trench. in which they had buried their dead three, four and five months before. Your engineers had to put on their gas masks and build their tunnel through 50 feet of solid putrefaction. They did it, and then they blew up the mine. I could hardly believe that I was actually standing there-at the very heart of the greatest conflict the world has ever seen. I thought I must be at some show. I saw the artillery fire, and I sat on the edge of a dug-out, and all of a sudden-Whirr! I looked, and right over my head there was a young fellow of 18, heading straight for the German lines. I asked, "Where is that boy going?" The reply was, "Oh, he is going over to take a photograph of the German trenches." Well, I suppose that is an old story to you, but it was a very new story to me to see it. I thought, is it possible that pretty soon I will see that beautiful bird just fold its wings and come crashing down to earth? I was petrified. In just a few seconds there came six shots from the Germans; and there was that boy right in the centre. He dropped the nose of his plane, dropped down 300 or 400 feet, and came back. I said "He has had enough; he is coming home." But not a bit of it; he turned right around and went over the same spot, and I counted twenty-one shells right around him. I thought that was one of the most magnificent pieces of work I ever saw in my life; I had never seen such pluck. There were some British officers present, and I said "Isn't it wonderful?" What do you think their reply was?-"Oh, I say, a jolly piece of work!" That was the only response. Of course, they see it so much; they are all doing it; they are doing it every day, every hour, and it meant nothing to them but a "jolly piece of work." Now, we Americans have a great fashion of making the Englishman talk; I enjoy it so much that I get them to talk. We had an air raid the first evening in London, and as we were guests of the British Government, of course members of the Foreign Office called immediately to see if anything had happened to us. I said "No, the only thing is that we have lost our wash"--the bomb had come right at the roof and hurt that; and the English officer said "Oh, I say, extraordinary casualty! Extraordinary!" They killed 28 people that night in London. We went off to see what damage was done and behind one tenement house, the home of poor people, a bomb had taken a great tree right out by the roots, shot it right up into the air, and the branches had caught on the fire escape at the second story of that tenement house, and there they were swinging the next morning. Out in the street was a little boy of six with his head all bandaged up and the blood streaming down his face. I tell you, my friends, if I had got my fingers on a German that morning he would not have had the ghost of a show. That was the first time we had that terrible war feeling that comes over you when you see the methods of the Bosche.

When we went over to General Haig's headquarters, we had a rather interesting time with one Canadian battery of eight Howitzers. I had never seen any of the big guns at work, and I wanted to see them, and they said I might go out because it was slightly foggy-the road is entirely under the muzzles of the German guns on a clear day. We got out of 40 feet under the ground in the dug-out of the Canadian commander of this battery, and he remarked that it was too bad it was so quiet that day. We were sitting around talking and smoking in his comfortable quarters, where he had two or three rocking chairs, his books and a comfortable bed, when all. of a sudden the telephone rang, and you should have seen that fellow's face change. There was a command to open fire, 15 rounds at will, with each gun, at the German battery that had just been marked. I knew nothing about this artillery business at all, and I was perfectly amazed. The officer took me over to a map which was divided into thousands of little squares, and he held a lot of numbers in his left hand; that was the location on the map. He finally put a pin in the middle of the little square, and he said, "Mr. Colby, there is the battery we are after." Then he called for the atmospheric pressure gauge, and he got it, and he got the wind gauge--and he even found out how rapidly the wind was blowing, and then-bless my soul,-he found out how rapidly the earth was revolving; and when he had this all figured out, he called upon his other guns and gave the command and location. Then he said, "We will go out and see them work." I climbed out of the dug-out, but could not see anything but trenches. We walked about 300 yards and came to a lot of green boughs on the ground, that was camouflage; underneath the boughs was a whale of a gun, the biggest thing you ever saw in your life-as big as a house. We got down there, and as they started to load, a shall as big as any one of you men was brought and the Colonel asked me if I did not want to fire it there was only one thing I could say, and that was that I did not want to do anything else but fire that gun. It is a funny thing, the foolish thoughts that will run through a man's head when he is about to do something to which he is not accustomed; but at that moment I had just one fear in my mind, and that was that I would wink! I didn't want those Canadian officers to see me make a face, so I offered up a little prayer, "I don't want to wink, I don't want to wink," and I took hold of that string, and maybe I didn't give it a yank. Well, I made the most awful face you ever saw; I couldn't hear anything for two hours; I nearly lost my teeth; everything shook. I believe the Germans have some sort of instrument to detect the location of a battery, so they hurried us into motors as fast as they could and got us back to headquarters, so I never found out whether my shell hit or not.

But this is not getting down to the food business. I wonder if you appreciate how very serious it is over there? I wonder if you will be shocked to hear me say that if the United States conducted themselves as they were conducting themselves three weeks ago we would lose the war? Now, I don't bring you these messages on my own authority; I bring them to you from Lord Rhonda, from the French Food Controller, from the Premier of France. They cannot win without food, and they have not got it. I do not know what you know about the situation up here, but in the United States they do not understand; they think that the slogan, "Food will win the War," was simply got up as a slogan to attract attention, and that it does not mean anything. Do you know, that it is an actual statement of fact that if we keep on being 48,000,000 of bushels behind our pledge, as we were three weeks ago, they are going to have famine in Europe?

I was in France in January. Some departments had no white bread at all. Every butcher shop in London on the Sunday I was there was closed up-no meat. In Paris they were driving all their cattle to market, and in the Food Bureau they told me that if they did not get grain and meal in three months they were going to have a meat famine.

Do you know what a famine is? You are so prosperous at home here,-you up here and we in the States; I suppose, not a man in this room has ever heard a starving child cry. But I have: I was in India at the time of the famine; I have looked into the eyes of starving children, dying just for the want of a little corn. Their skin was drawn over their ribs as tight as the top of a drum. They proved to me with a pencil and paper in France that if we do not save food over here we are going to hear that cry of starving children in a mighty few months. Think what that is going to mean. It is true. I am not here to make any excuses, but I never felt so humiliated with my own country as when I was there; so much so that I did not know what to do. I am no Victor Hugo, but a man over there said to me, "Mr. Colby, when the men of my regiment heard what you were doing in the United States, they actually mutinied; they said, "We will die in the trenches with the Sammies; we will go down in the ships with the Sammies, but, by God, we won't starve when they have the food that could save us!" Think of how I felt when I got a telegram from Mr. Hoover saying we had sent every bushel of surplus wheat we had in the country! I am telling you these things, my friends, because you are not doing any better in the food line than we are, not a bit.

Now, I am not here to criticize, but we are here to help each other. We are slackers in the food line, which is our job. They won't let me fight or you fight, but the one job we have is to save food.

I tell you frankly, I can't see a man eat a piece of white bread. I simply leave the table, because, after seeing the things I have seen, I can't keep my mouth shut. All I would have to do is to take you over into your hospitals and let you see your own men; see a boy carried around in a sack because he has no arms and no legs; and then you come back and find somebody eating white bread! Every time you touch one speck of white bread you are stretching your ugly fingers across the sea and taking it from the plate of your own men or from the lips of the starving Belgian children; that is what you are doing--just by so much indirection, because there is just so much wheat in the world, and they won't get it if you eat it. You ought not to touch one piece of white bread until this war is over.

So many people ask me, "Well, what can I do? I want to work; I didn't know how serious this war situation was; I know that we undertook to send 6,000,000 barrels of flour overseas every month for six months, to win this war." They say, "I read the Canadian literature and Mr. Hoover's literature, and it all gets into the waste basket because it comes in chunks; but what can I do?" This is what you can do:-don't let any one in your household have more than a pound and a half of wheat flour in a week; two and a half pounds of meat; seven ounces of butter; seven ounces of flour for cooking purposes; seven ounces of fat per person per week; twelve ounces of sugar. You live up to that ration and you are playing the game; you are doing your share to win this war.

I tell you, the situation over there is critical. After having seen your men right in the trenches, on the battle line, and around with the French at the front, I don't believe for one minute that the Germans are ever going to break that line; they will never do it, never in this world. I shall never forget the last visit we paid to Mr. Clemenceau. He was very tired. I wonder how many of you have ever seen him-his wonderful head, wonderful black eyes, very small hands, and very small feet? He was sitting at his desk and I said, "Mr. Clemenceau, have you no message for my people?" At first I could hardly hear him; his head was bowed over his bands; then he said, "Yes, tell them that we will wait for them; tell them that we have confidence in them, because we have seen their men; while we are waiting, though, they will never know what France is suffering before they come; we will fight one more battle, possibly two, but we will hold the line! France has made the supreme sacrifice. On August 1st, 1914, she had 6,000,000 men. Now, 1,300,000 of those men lie dead. 1,700,000 of those men are disabled for life, but we still have 3,000,000 men that will hold that line until the end."

During the last two months I have been through the states of Indiana, Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. In every meeting we have held, the people have been kind enough to stand up and pledge themselves to observe strictly, and to the end of the war, the rules of the United States Food Administration. I wonder if we cannot today unite our efforts, and I wonder if you would not be willing, before you leave this room, to stand up and pledge yourselves to abide by the rules of your Canadian Food Commission until the end of the war?

(The entire audience rose and responded to the pledge, and remained standing while they drank to the toast of the President of the United States, and sang, "My Country, 'tis of Thee.")