BERT HOOVER WEAVED THROUGH THE panicked crowds inside Victoria Station and confronted a scene of chaos that appeared all too familiar. Fourteen years earlier, he had witnessed that same pale look of terror on the faces of his fellow Westerners during the siege of Tientsin. The trains from Portsmouth that morning were disgorging thousands of American refugees from the Continent. Most hadn’t even been given the time to collect their luggage before escaping France, and many had not eaten in two days. In the vertiginous span of a week, Austria-Hungary had declared war on Serbia for the assassination of the heir to the Austrian throne, and in retaliation, Russia, Germany, and France had mobilized their armed forces. Only a few hours ago, the wires had brought news that the Germans had invaded Belgium in a stunning flanking maneuver designed to encircle Paris. The Asquith government, he knew, would have no choice but to bring Great Britain into the war.
Like everyone else here, he had failed to foresee how swiftly the sinews of modern society in the West could be severed. Now, pitiful coveys of students, teachers, and vacationing women huddled in the main concourse of the station, destitute and frightened, not knowing when their next meal might come. He was convinced that the Kaiser had timed the onslaught at the height of the summer tourist season, when the European banks were closed for a three-day holiday. Even if the teller windows could be reopened, the cut telegraph lines and the prohibition against transporting bullion across borders had made transfers of funds between most Continental banks impossible. Traveler’s cheques, money orders, and letters of credit—all had been rendered useless.
“Bert!”
He turned to find his wife Lou rushing at him from a queue at one of the ticket windows.
“Bert, thank God I found you!”
He pressed her hand into his, trying to calm her. “You shouldn’t have come down here. Where are the boys?”
She was nearly breathless from rushing across the station. “Bertie is still at school. I left Allan with Mary Kent for an hour. I have good news.”
“You’d be the only one in London, then.”
Brushing aside his pessimism, she produced a document from her purse. “Our passage on the Vaterland is confirmed for the thirteenth. The Atlantic sailings haven’t been canceled yet.”
“The Vaterland is a German liner.”
“It could be a Chinese junk for all I care,” she said. “We’re finally going home.” When he avoided her eyes, she pressed him. “What’s wrong?”
He glanced around the station at the throngs of abandoned Americans. “These people need my help.”
Lou’s shoulders sagged. “We’ve been away from home for fifteen years. You promised the boys we’d spend Christmas in California.”
“You go on with Bertie and Allan. I’ll come over as soon as I can.”
She pinned him with a suspicious eye. “What have you got up your sleeve?”
“I’ve sent messages to Fred Kent, Ted Hetzler, and some of the other bankers. We’re meeting at the Waldorf this afternoon. I think I can convince them to honor all American letters of credit without requiring collateral. We’ll borrow on the gold reserves. Just enough to pay for the necessary passage tickets back to America.”
“And what about those who don’t have letters of credit?” When he did not answer her, but shifted his gaze, she demanded, “Bert?”
“The Lord has blessed us, Lou.”
“You can’t be serious. You’re going to loan them money from our personal funds?”
“Short term.”
“How many will need our help?”
“The British Admiralty estimates about a hundred and twenty-five thousand Americans will be stranded here.”
“What if they don’t pay us back? We’ll be bankrupted!”
“They will pay us back. And if they don’t, well … we can always earn more.”
Exasperated, she began walking fast, until she had led him out of the station and east along the Strand.
He hurried to catch up with her. “Lou, I could not live with myself if—“
She turned back on him in hot anger. “Where am I supposed to go?”
“I’ll wire ahead to New York and let Richard Jansen know that you and the boys will be staying at the apartment in—”
“No.” She matched his determination. “I mean, where am I supposed to go to help you help these people?”
He was stunned by her offer. “You don’t have to stay.”
Lou hugged him. “This is why I married you, Bert Hoover. You never pass a soul in need without offering aid. You are a good man doing God’s work. Now, tell me what role I will have in this great humanitarian endeavor, or I will embarrass you in front of all of these priggish Londoners.”
Tears came to his eyes, and he brought his lips to her ear. “I think, instead, I will be the one to make you blush.” He pressed a passionate kiss to her mouth, restraining her attempt to pull back while onlookers cheered. He would have stayed in her arms, but he felt a tapping on his shoulder.
“Are you Hoover?”
He turned from his embrace to find a gaggle of American women waiting for him in front of the Savoy Hotel. He doffed his hat to them. “I am. This is my wife, Lou. How can I help you ladies?”
Their self-designated spokesperson, a plump, cantankerous matron with a heated face that resembled a very ripe peach, inspected him from head to toe. “The hotel manager said you’re the man to see about getting back to America.”
Lou glared at her husband, informed only now that he had set his humanitarian plan into motion days before he had told her about it.
With a guilty smile, he nodded to the American women and opened his palms in a chivalrous gesture. “How many are in your party?”
“Fifteen,” the lady spokesperson said before her companions could get a word in. “I’m traveling with my sister. We came over to do the Grand Tour.”
He looked around the group for someone who might resemble her sibling. “Your sister must be the shy one in the family.”
“Shy? Oh no, not Eleanor. She’s in the lobby on a hunger strike.”
“You mean your sister is not eating on purpose?” Lou exclaimed. “While thousands would give anything for a meal?”
“Those British bastards at Thomas Cook refuse to book us first class. The gall! These Normans expect us to return to the States in common steerage. Eleanor has vowed not to eat another bite until first-class tickets are issued.”
Hoover grasped Lou’s forearm to stifle a volcanic eruption. Before his wife could bite off a protest, he promised the demanding biddy, “I’ll see what I can do about improving your accommodations on board. Is there anything else I can do to make your journey endurable?”
“As a matter of fact, there is. You can also give us a written guarantee that our ship will not be torpedoed by those German savages. Bonded by the full faith and credit of your mining company.”
Hoover bowed, acting the part of a humble servant. “You’ll have the instrument of guaranty in your travel documents before you depart.”
Finally satisfied, the American woman turned and climbed the stairs to the hotel lobby, followed by her obedient fellow travelers.
Alone again with her husband, Lou cut loose. “You’re going to provide that battle ax with a written promise that she won’t be sent to the bottom of the ocean? Which, by the way, would be doing all of humanity a great service!”
“You must learn to think like a businessman, my dear. If the lady arrives home safely, she will tell all of her wealthy acquaintances in the States that Herbert Hoover accommodated her every need in a time of crisis.”
“And if she doesn’t arrive safely?”
He winked. “Well, then it won’t really matter, will it?”
CARRY EACH OTHER'S BURDENS, AND in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.
Bert Hoover drew solace from that promise from Galatians, but what he really needed was the biblical power to multiply the loaves and the fishes. And it wouldn’t hurt if the Almighty also requisitioned for him a dozen or so cargo ships to carry the bounty across the Channel.
As he waited in the hall outside the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s office, a servant presented him with a choice of bland crackers to take with his tea. He waved off the offer, having not recovered his appetite since returning from Belgium earlier that week. That dangerous journey through the front lines had been a surreal nightmare; twice he had been forced to strip naked and suffer humiliating searches. The Germans, understandably, were suspicious of an American coming through the blockade, even though the United States had proclaimed its neutrality. Yet the British had been just as harsh to him on his return to London, and he knew the scoundrel who was behind all of the harassment: That saber-rattling Churchill in Admiralty was lobbying to stop the food shipments from leaving Rotterdam. Quaker or no, he mulled, if left alone in a room with that royalist drunk, he would require all the restraint in his power not to throw a haymaker into the growing British Empire of his girth.
But none of that mattered now. His personal travails paled in comparison to the suffering of those starving Belgian children. He could not erase their drawn faces from his memory. Clad in rags and clutching their ration cards, the little ones had waited stoically for hours in the rain to receive a cup of weak gruel. Many were orphans, just as he had been. Around them had stood only burnt buildings and the ruins of once-proud towers, but still they would pass him, bow their heads, and whisper Merci; and then they would walk away barefooted under the threatening glowers of the German soldiers. Several times, unable to bear the sorrow, he had been forced to turn aside.
When the pressures became too much, he would sometimes dream of resigning from the Committee for the Relief of Belgium and leaving the mess to these Europeans who had created it. Had the war started a week later, he would be safe in San Francisco now, attending to his business fortune and spending time at his beloved Stanford University.
But the Almighty, it seemed, permitted no good deed to go unpunished. At the start of the war, he and Lou had been so successful in assisting the thousands of stranded Americans to get back home that an old Belgian business rival, Emile Francqui, had begged him to head up the effort to save his invaded country. Before the war, Belgium had produced only thirty percent of its own food, and now the tiny nation was caught in a vise, its fields left fallow and its harbors closed. He had called on every American and British business friend to trickle in enough grain to prevent bodies from piling high on the streets of Brussels, but he was fighting a losing battle. When an American newspaperman had asked him how the relief operation was progressing, he had described it as trying to feed a hungry kitten by means of a forty-foot bamboo pole, with the kitten confined in a barred cage occupied by two hungry lions.
The truth was, he had exhausted every stopgap measure at his disposal. And so, he had been forced to come here, hat in hand, to Downing Street. This meeting would determine if Belgium was to be thrown to the wolves.
A functionary opened the door. “The Chancellor will see you now.”
He was escorted into a conference room where several Cabinet members sat around a long table. David Lloyd George, that Welsh stick of dynamite, chaired the meeting. Flanking him was Lord Kitchener, the lugubrious military hero, now Secretary of State for War, whose long hound’s face and beckoning finger accosted everyone from recruiting posters all over Britain. The old warhorse looked deathly ill; his skin was the hue of slate and his usually meticulous mustache had grown wild.
From the far side of the table, Winston Churchill sat snorting contempt.
Hoover saw that the First Lord of the Admiralty had perched himself near Kitchener, no doubt hoping that the rays of respect and awe for the British ancient sun god would flatter his own liverish aura. The dozen or so other ministers in the room he did not recognize, but all stared at him with pinched, contemptuous eyes, evidently disgusted at being forced to waste war-planning time on an American with a ragged-shorn haircut whose family pedigree was no more elevated than that of the servant just dismissed from the chamber.
“That man is a son of a bitch,” Churchill muttered to Lord Kitchener, who was so hard of hearing that he did not pick up on the aside.
Hoover considered ignoring the slight, but kowtowing wasn’t in his nature, particularly on a day that would decide the fate of so many innocent civilians. “I wasn’t aware that genealogy was one of your avocations, Lord Churchill. I suppose I owe my circumstance to our independence. In America, even a son of the lowest class of woman can rise up to help Europeans in need.”
“In need?” Churchill cried in his infamous high-pitched lisp. “In this country, sir, we call what you are doing aiding and abetting the enemy.”
Lloyd George glared Churchill to silence, and with one eye still on his irascible naval chief, told Hoover, “Mr. Churchill has an apology to offer.”
The color took its time returning to Churchill’s piggy face, but finally the shameless monarchist grumbled, “The charges were … premature.”
Lloyd George rolled his crinkly eyes like a frustrated father. “I shall be more explicit than my colleague here. Mr. Hoover, the British Government expresses its deepest regrets that a warrant for corruption and espionage was issued against you in retaliation for your recent humanitarian endeavors. We were heartened to hear that the King’s Bench dismissed the charges as groundless, and we can assure you that no such other infringements upon your duties will be countenanced in the future.”
“Water under the bridge,” Hoover said. “No time can be wasted arguing over past wounds. Every hour counts if we are to save Belgium from a catastrophe. I trust, after these many weeks, you have finally come round to my petition.”
The British lowered their aristocratic glares, astonished by the bluntness and unwilling to accept a warning delivered by a man of such inferior station. Lloyd George cleared his throat and told Hoover, “Sir, we have indeed considered your request for financing of future food shipments to the Belgians. Given the exigencies of our war effort, however, I am afraid that we must decline to participate in your missionary work.”
Seeing how much Churchill was enjoying the delivery of the rejection, Hoover took a moment to calm before locking onto Lloyd George. “May I be heard on this?”
Lloyd George glanced impatiently at the wall clock. “Do be brief, sir.”
“Why is Britain fighting this war?”
Affronted by the curt question, the British officials straightened in their chairs, and even Kitchener lifted an inch from his slumbering hibernation. Churchill gave his Cabinet superior no time to respond. “We fight to save democracy and to preserve the sovereignty of smaller nations who cannot defend themselves.”
Hoover scanned the table, looking into each set of haughty eyes. “What good does it do to send your boys off to die if the people in those democracies are all starved by the time you prevail?”
Kitchener’s unkempt mustache fluttered with indignation. The old warhorse reached into a canvas campaigning bag at his feet and pulled out a rusted tin can, cut open at the top. He placed the can on the table and slid it down toward Hoover. “Do you know what that is?”
Hoover removed a handkerchief from his breast pocket and picked up the can to examine. “This is one of our milk containers.”
“It was one of your milk containers,” Kitchener said. “Our sappers retrieved it at Ypres. The Germans are converting them into grenades. The one you now hold was responsible for the death of four Yorkshire infantrymen.”
Had the can still been a live explosive, Hoover might have given a second’s thought to pulling the pin and taking out this entire cabal of puffering grayheads. “I am told that both armies are melting down the crosses worn by the wounded and extracting the gold and iron.”
“War necessitates salvage,” Churchill insisted.
Hoover bored in on the bilious naval chief. “Why not then ban your soldiers from wearing crosses if the icons can be converted to bullets?”
Kitchener set his gold-capped teeth in anger. He summoned his waning strength and, as he was notorious for doing during staff meetings, stood up to deliver a condescending lecture on military strategy. “If the Germans are forced to feed the Belgians, sir, that will leave them less food to supply their own troops and people.”
“The Germans will not feed the Belgians,” Hoover warned. “They will save their own people first. And we will be responsible for a calamity of desolation against civilians—women and children and old men—the likes of which have never been witnessed.”
Kitchener was unaccustomed to having his pronouncements challenged, and he shared a gape-jawed look at Churchill, his companion in indignation. The elderly general hovered unsteadily over the table for a few moments, fumbling for words, but finally he crumbled back into his seat and returned to the comfort of his briefing papers, which could not talk back to him.
Churchill came to his hero’s assistance. “There are rumors that this relief boondoggle of yours is rife with profiteering and corruption.”
Hoover did not flinch. He had expected from the start of his relief operation to eventually confront such charges. “Every penny from the transport of the food has been confirmed by an independent accounting firm. If you wish, Lord Churchill, I can arrange for you to inspect the Committee’s books.”
Checkmated, Churchill groused a curse into his glass of spirits.
Lloyd George finally broke the tense silence. “Even if these shipments were allowed, nothing would prevent the Germans from stealing the foodstuffs from the Belgians.”
“The Germans have not seized any of the donations delivered during these past months,” Hoover reminded them. “And the German ambassador has given me his word that his country will not violate the relief effort, provided Britain abides by the same rules.”
Lloyd George seemed troubled by that news.
Knowing this would be his last chance to change their minds, Hoover leaned closer and dropped his voice, forcing the others in the room to cup their ears. “Sir, you have a reputation for caring about the less fortunate. Like Wales, Belgium is a small but proud nation. Through the centuries, your homeland has been no stranger to privation. Consider if it were Wales on the brink of disaster, and Belgium stood able to come to your aid, but chose to let you die.”
Churchill slammed a fist to the table. “How dare you address us in such a churlish manner, sir! This is not one of your American barn disputations!”
Ignoring Churchill, Hoover remained fixed on Lloyd George, who was taking in the debate with owlish detachment. “I implore you to forgo whatever dubious military advantage might be seen in casting Belgium to the rocks. Think of the magnanimity that will outlast the bitterness of this war. To do otherwise would be to reach for an empty victory.”
“War is a game that must be played with a smile,” Churchill said with a snarl. “If you cannot smile, Mr. Hoover, then grin. If you cannot grin, keep out of our way until you can.”
Hoover turned a judgmental gaze upon Churchill’s vest, which had a bottom button undone to accommodate a small paunch. “Have you ever tried grinning on an empty stomach?”
Before Churchill could lob back one of his famous venomous retorts, Lloyd George banged his knuckles on the table. “I am convinced.”
The British officials nodded and began shuffling papers, relieved that the crass American businessman would finally be sent on his way and they could get on with other business.
Lloyd George stood, walked to the far end of the table, and shook hands with Hoover. “You have my permission. The grain shipments will proceed.”
Blindsided, the British officials fell silent, stunned by the policy change.
Hoover shook the Chancellor’s hand in admiration for his courageous decision. Before walking out of the room, he reached for the decanter, poured two jiggers into a glass, and handed it to Churchill. “I promise not to deplete the Empire’s supply of brandy.”