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The trench lights rising over The Wood, three miles away, made the wet road glow with a tarnished glimmer, and burnished the muddy pools into mirrors of pale light. The ravitaillement creaked along in the darkness. Suddenly a shell fell about a hundred yards away, and the wagons brought up jerkily, the harnesses rattling.
The train not being able to continue into the shell zone, the supplies are carried to the distributing station at the trenches in a convoy of wagons, called the ravitaillement. Every single night, somewhere along the road, each side tries to smash up the other's ravitaillement. To avoid this, the ravitaillement wagons start at different hours after dark, now at dusk, now at midnight.
There was the phase of ravitaillement, the constant provisioning of the whole land; and the phase of secours, the special care of the destitute and the ill and the children. The ring of steel did not immediately make beggars of all the Belgians enclosed within it. Many of them still had money. But, as I have already said, the Germans would not allow any of this money to go out.
Hoover realized from the beginning that no income from charity alone could provide it. His first great problem was to assure the Commission of means for the general ravitaillement. He solved the problem but it took time. In the meanwhile the pressure for immediate relief was strong.
There had to be, in other words, a constant bringing in of enough wheat and flour to supply three fourths of the bread-needs of the whole country, and another large fraction of the necessary fats and milk and rice and beans and other staples. This was the ravitaillement.
They never were here before, these types of men with eyes looking for quick money, for instantaneous riches, for some "affaires du ravitaillement militaire." Yesterday's poor chaps, that would not know the difference between a côtelette and a jigôt are ordering and easily eating things that it would take me some time to think of.
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