THE STORY OF AN ENTOMOLOGIST 



must stay in New York, since word from the United States 

 government permitting the departure of Dutch vessels was 

 hable to be received any day. They held him there, five hours 

 from Washington. They finally told him that he might go 

 to Washington for forty-eight hours and that they could 

 wire him in abundant time to return for the boat. He stayed 

 in Washington at the Club for three days. Then the Nieuw 

 Amsterdam was permitted to sail with the proviso that it should 

 take ten tons of corn for the Belgians, and that it should take 

 on board all Hollanders in this country who wished to go home. 

 In those three days DeBussy told us many interesting things 

 about the life in Sumatra and, what interested us more, many 

 things about the privations which the people in Holland were 

 suffering under war conditions. Among other things, he said 

 that what little fuel they had, consisted mainly of old news- 

 papers soaked in seawater, then dried and cut in briquettes. 

 All petroleum and gasoline had long since disappeared. The 

 head of one of the great petroleum companies in Holland, who 

 had a standing comparable to that of John D. Rockefeller as 

 the head of Standard Oil in this country, and a man who had 

 a dozen automobiles, had broken his leg recently by falling 

 from his bicycle, which was the only possible means of locomo- 

 tion in Holland. The Dutch were in momentary fear of an over- 

 whelming invasion from Germany. DeBussy said, "We are be- 

 tween the devil and the deep sea, and are having a perfect hell 

 of a time!" 



One afternoon in August, 1918, Major Plotz of the Sanitary 

 Corps of the Army called on me at the Club to talk over the 

 question of lice in the camps. He was a young man, and had 

 been in Serbia with the Red Cross Commission as a typhus 

 expert, since he had studied the so-called Brill's disease in Mt, 



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