lobbies.  One passed directly from the street into the parlour.  Apparently the parlours were completely furnished.  They were in an amazing disorder, but the furniture was there.  And the furnishings of all of them were alike, as the furnishings of all the small houses of a street in the Five Towns or in a cheap London suburb.  The ambition of these homes had been to resemble one another.  What one had all must have.  Under ordinary circumstances the powerful common instinct to resemble is pitiable.  But here it was absolutely touching.

Everything was in these parlours.  The miserable, ugly ornaments, bought and cherished and admired by the simple, were on the mantelpieces.  The drawers of the mahogany and oak furniture had been dragged open, but not emptied.  The tiled floors were littered with clothes, with a miscellany of odd possessions, with pots and pans out of the kitchen and the scullery, with bags and boxes.  The accumulations of lifetimes were displayed before me, and it was almost possible to trace the slow transforming of young girls into brides, and brides into mothers of broods.

Within the darkness of the interiors I could discern the stairs.  But I was held back from the stairs.  I could get no further than the parlours, though the interest of the upper floors must have been surpassing.

So from house to house.  I handled nothing.  Were not the military laws against looting of the most drastic character!  And at last I came to the end of the little street.  There are many such streets in Ypres.  In fact, the majority of the streets were like that street.  I did not visit them, but I have no doubt that they were in the same condition.  I do not say that the inhabitants fled taking naught with them.  They must obviously have taken what they could, and what was at once most precious and most portable.  But they could have taken very little.  They departed breathless without vehicles, and probably most of the adults had children to carry or to lead.  At one moment the houses were homes, functioning as such.  An alarm, infectious like the cholera, and at the next moment the deserted houses became spiritless, degenerated into intolerable museums for the amazement of a representative of the American and the British Press!  Where the scurrying families went to I never even inquired.  Useless to inquire.  They just lost themselves on the face of the earth, and were henceforth known to mankind by the generic name of “refugees”—­such of them as managed to get away alive.

After this the solitude of the suburbs, with their maimed and rusting factories, their stagnant canals, their empty lots, their high, lusty weeds, their abolished railway and tram stations, was a secondary matter leaving practically no impression on the exhausted sensibility.