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After the struggling tides of fugitive tourists, and overlapping the waves of Belgian refugees, there came new streams of panic-stricken people, and this time they were French.  They came from the northern towns—­Lille, Roubaix, Tourcoing, Armentieres, and from scores of villages further south which had seemed utterly safe and aloof from hostile armies which, with faith in official communiques issued by the French Ministry of War, we believed to be still checked beyond the French frontier in Belgium.  Lille?  Was Lille threatened by the Kaiser’s troops?  It had been evacuated?  No, that could not be true, unless treachery had been at work, Lille could hold out, surely, at least as long as Liege!  Had we not read long articles by the military experts of the French Press describing the strength of that town and the impregnable position of its forts?  Yet here were refugees from Lille who had heard the roar of German guns, and brought incredible stories of French troops in retreat, and spoke the name of a French general with bitter scorn, and the old cry of “Nous sommes trahis!”

The refugees from the north were in as pitiable a state as those who had preceded them from Belgium.  More pitiable, because when they reached such ports as Calais or Boulogne or Havre, the hotels and lodging-houses were overcrowded from attic to cellars, the buffets had been swept clear of food, and committees of relief were already distracted with the overwhelming needs of a Belgian invasion.

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I remember a day and night in Boulogne.  The narrow streets—­evil with odours brought forth by a hot sun, were filled with surging crowds which became denser as new trains arrived from Calais and Dunkirk and junctions on northern lines.  The people carried with them the salvage of their homes, wrapped up in blankets, sheets, towels and bits of ragged paper.  Parcels of grotesque shapes, containing copper pots, frying pans, clocks, crockery and all kinds of domestic utensils or treasured ornaments, bulged on the pavements and quaysides, where whole families sat encamped.  Stalwart mothers of Normandy and Picardy trudged through the streets with children clinging to their skirts, with babies in their arms and with big French loaves—­the commissariat of these journeys of despair—­ cuddled to their bosoms with the babes.  Old grandfathers and grandmothers, who looked as though they had never left their native villages before, came hand in hand, with shaking heads and watery eyes, bewildered by all this turmoil of humanity which had been thrust out, like themselves, from its familiar ways of life.  Well-to-do bourgeois, shot with frayed nerves, exhausted by an excess of emotion and fatigue, searched for lodgings, anywhere and at any price, jostled by armies of peasants, shaggy-haired, in clumping sabots, with bundles on their backs, who were wandering on the same quest for the sake of the women and children dragging wearily in their wake.  I heard a woman cry out words of surrender:  “Je n’en peux plus!” She was spent and could go no further, but halted suddenly, dumped down her bundles and her babies and, leaning against a sun-baked wall, thrust the back of a rough hand across her forehead, with a moan of spiritual pain.