A large empty German steamer, the Gneisenau, marooned here since the war, came swinging slowly out into the river, pushed by two or three nervous little tugs—­to be sunk there, apparently, in midstream.  From the pontoon bridge, which stubbornly refused to yield, came explosion after explosion, and up and down the river fires sprang up, and there were other explosions, as the crushed Belgians, in a sort of rage of devastation, became their own destroyers.

By following the adventures of one individual I have endeavored to suggest what the bombardment of a modern city was like—­what you might expect if an invading army came to-morrow to New York or Chicago or San Francisco.  I have only coasted along the edges of Belgium’s tragedy, and the rest of the story, of which we were a part for the next two days—­the flight of those hundreds of thousands of homeless people—­is something that can scarcely be told—­you must follow it out in imagination into its countless uprooted, disorganized lives.  You must imagine old people struggling along over miles and miles of country roads; young girls, under burdens a man might not care to bear, tramping until they had to carry their shoes in their hands and go barefoot to rest their unaccustomed feet.  You must imagine the pathetic efforts of hundreds of people to keep clean by washing in wayside streams or ditches; imagine babies going without milk because there was no milk to be had; families shivering in damp hedgerows or against haystacks where darkness overtook them; and you must imagine this not on one road, but on every road, for mile after mile over a whole countryside.  What was to become of these people when their little supply of food was exhausted?  Where could they go?  Even if back to their homes, it would be but to lift their hats to their conquerors, never knowing but that the next week or month would sweep the tide of war back over them again.

Never in modern times, not in our generation at least, had Europe seen anything like that flight—­nothing so strange, so overwhelming, so pitiful.  And when I say pitiful, you must not think of hysterical women, desperate, trampling men, tears and screams.  In all those miles one saw neither complaining nor protestation—­at times one might almost have thought it some vast, eccentric picnic.  No, it was their orderliness, their thrift and kindness, their unmistakable usefulness, which made the waste and irony of it all so colossal and hideous.  Each family had its big, round loaves of bread and its pile of hay for the horses, the bags of pears and potatoes; the children had their little dolls, and you would see some tired mother with her big bundle under one arm and some fluffy little puppy in the other.  You could not associate them with forty-centimetre shells or burned churches and libraries or anything but quiet homes and peaceable, helpful lives.  You could not be swept along by that endless stream of exiles and retain at the end of the day any particular