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Relief (WAR When the war broke out)

WAR. When the war broke out in Europe in 1914 very little time was allowed to pass before organizations were brought into being for the purpose of assisting the people in Europe who were the chief sufferers in the zones affected. Sympathy was particularly aroused on behalf of the Belgians who were recognized as having no part in the opening of hostilities, and who bore the chief brunt of the first German attacks. The other peoples whose lands formed the terrain over which the first battles were waged, northern France, Poland, Serbia, and other countries, likewise were included in the appeal for aid addressed to the citizens of the United States. Moreover, the desolated lands of Hungary and east Germany were the objects of much sympathy, particularly among people having kin in the countries of the Central Powers, before the United States entered the war, but relief in that direction was largely blocked, for the British navy held the seas and made communication with the Central Powers difficult. But measures for war relief were developed on a very large scale. A Commission for Relief in Belgium was one of the first organizations formed, but the Red Cross, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Allied War Charities, and similar organizations were soon active both in campaigns for subscriptions and in the distribution of war relief over wide areas. The enormous variety of suffering that followed in the train of the war called for heroic measures and as the months passed and it was borne in on the world that the war was to be a long one, the organizations devoted to the work of war relief extended their activities in every direction. Not only had the families left behind by the bread-