The Dutch responded, slowly at first, but with increasing enthusiasm, and decided that they should hold a national demonstration. The only problem was that Buchman insisted that the demonstration should take place in Utrecht. The Dutch maintained that it was the wrong town: for one thing, there was no large hall there. 'There is something in or near Utrecht which will hold thousands,' Buchman persisted. An indomitable woman, Mrs Charlotte van Beuningen, scoured the city, and eventually came upon the vast vegetable market. There was an absolute rule against hiring it out; but after interviewing each of the board of thirteen in charge of it, she got permission. Four thousand chairs were imported, and thousands of packing cases laid out in rows behind them.

Over Whitsun, audiences totalling 100,000 attended meetings there. 'At ten o'clock at night, with 10,000 present, people were still swooping on any vacant chair they could find,' Buchman wrote to Bill Pickle. 'Hundreds of people were changed, and we arranged interviews just as we did in the old days at Penn State.'45

'The greatest surprise in these two Whitsun days was certainly the appearance of Dr J. Patijn, our Ambassador in Brussels,' reported the Socialist paper Het Volk.46 'Only those who know him as Burgomaster of The Hague, a sound but unapproachable man and averse to any public show, will be able to appreciate fully what it must have cost this curt Zeelander to speak about his inmost self before many thousands in this Vegetable Market. It was no long speech ... "It is not for everyone," he said, "to speak in public about his faith, and it is not easy for me to do so. Every man, however, must have the courage of his convictions, and it would be ungrateful of me not to acknowledge that through what I have experienced in the Oxford Group I have learnt to see my fellow men, the world and my whole life in a new perspective."'

Not all newspapers were as positive. The Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant said the vast meeting was 'un-Dutch'. 'The question is not whether it is non-Dutch or American,' Buchman wrote to the head of the News Agency of the Dutch Indies, Herman Salomonson. 'The question is, "Is it Christian?" It seems so absurd. You see 65,000 men at a football match. Surely the outstretched arms of Christ are for everyone?' He added that he 'wished to heaven it were American, but unfortunately it is not'.47

The other voice of complaint was from the Dutch Nazi leader Mussert. He had planned a major rally at Utrecht for these same days. It was a complete failure, with very few people attending. It was four years later, after the German occupation, that he banned Buchman's work in the Netherlands.

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