Feeding the Hungry, P. C. Hiebert, 1929

os- cow for the American Mennonites, with an appendix for the Holland Mennonites, the terms of which were cabled to the Mennonite Central Committee; and two in Khar- kow, one for Holland and one for America, with a food remittance appendix. One original of each remained with the signatory Government, and one of each was in my possession. Two men had been appointed to gather data from their districts and supervise the preliminary surveys. Now that the contracts were completed, it was even more galling to wait. Although our Committee in Amer- ica had cabled a reply to my message, it did not reach me. Our relationship with the American Relief Administration had not yet been determined because Col. Haskell had apparently not received the necessary instructions. Kame- ney’s secretary, with whom I had drawn up our contract, was impatient and made unpleasant insinuations. When we were making the contracts, I insisted on the need for haste and spoke of the supplies ready for shipment at 180 FEEDING THE HUNGRY Constantinople. Now he was asking why we did not ship these supplies! He must have known of the plan then being formed to make all large relief shipments through the northern ports. That was to avoid scattering the freight cars. I was then wholly ignorant of that plan, which was practical from one angle, but on the whole too theoretical, breaking down completely before the middle of winter because of the unexpected severity of the weather. That possibility should, however, have been taken into account. In the Volga districts, food was often trans- ported several hundred miles on wagons or sleds. The same could have been done from a number of southern ports, taking the food direct from the ships and requiring in extreme emergency conditions no freight cars at all for transportation to our counties. ‘The curse of too much theory brought death to thousands of starving families: the theory of shipment only from the north, which tied up ship after ship in the Baltic ice when the food was so desperately needed; the theory of no American convoyers for food trains, which left those trains to accumulate in vast jams and blockades, stalling as high as forty-six trains of food at one time at one congested yard, when a train convoyed by an American required only two to four days instead of so many weeks or months to reach its destina- tion; the theory of distribution through a semi-official or- ganization to be built up of local people forming a vast machine, but not employed or appointed by the relief or- ganization, though attempting to cooperate with it. Such a fanciful dream could be taken seriously only by ignoring the psychology of revolutions and mass upheavals. Yet the theories were not only advanced but tenaciously held to for a time. As there seemed to be nothing I could accomplish further at the time in Russia, I made preparations to leave as soon as possible for Riga and Berlin, where faci