I went into the heart of it, into the welter of blood and wreckage, and stood, expecting death, in the very process of its deadly torture.  Week after week, month after month, I walked and talked with Belgian fugitives, and drifted in that stream of exiled people, and watched them in the far places of their flight, where they were encamped in settled hopelessness, asking nothing of the fate which had dealt them such foul blows, expecting nothing.  But I still remember my first impressions of war’s cruelty to that simple people who had desired to live in peace and had no quarrel with any Power.  It was in a kind of stupor that I saw the vanguard of this nation in retreat, a legion of poor old women whose white hairs were wild in this whirl of human derelicts, whose decent black clothes were rumpled and torn and fouled in the struggle for life; with Flemish mothers clasping babies at their breasts and fierce-eyed as wild animals because of the terror in their hearts for those tiny buds of life; with small children scared out of the divine security of childhood by this abandonment of homes which had seemed the world to them, and terrorized by an unknown horror which lurked in the name of Germany; with men of all classes and all ages, intellectuals and peasants, stout bourgeois, whose overload of flesh was a burden to their flight, thin students whose book-tired eyes were filled with a dazed bewilderment, men of former wealth and dignity reduced to beggary and humiliation; with school-girls whose innocence of life’s realities was suddenly thrust face to face with things ugly and obscene, and cruel as hell.

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I think it is impossible to convey to those who did not see this exodus of the Belgian people the meaning and misery of it.  Even in the midst of it I had a strange idea at first that it was only a fantasy and that such things do not happen.  Afterwards I became so used to it all that I came to think the world must always have been like this, with people always in flight, families and crowds of families drifting about aimlessly, from town to town, getting into trains just because they started somewhere for somewhere else, sitting for hours on bundles which contained all their worldly goods saved from the wreckage of ancient homes, losing their children on the roadside, and not fretting very much, and finding other children, whom they adopted as their own; never washing on that wandering, so that delicate women who had once been perfumed with fine scents were dirty as gipsies and unashamed of draggled dresses and dirty hands; eating when they found a meal of charity, sleeping in railway sidings, coalsheds, and derelict trains shunted on to grass-covered lines; careless as pariah dogs of what the future held in store now that they had lost all things in the past.

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