The strange things that happened were not the more agreeable because of the attitude of some refugees who, when they were getting better fare than they ever had at home, thought that, as they had given their “all” for England, they should be getting still better, not to mention wine on the table in temperance families; whilst there was a disinclination towards self-support by means of work on the part of certain heroes by proxy which promised a Belgian occupation of England that would last as long as the German occupation of Belgium.  England was learning that there are Belgians and Belgians.  She had received not a few of the “and Belgians.”

It was only natural.  When the German cruisers bombarded Scarborough and the Hartlepools, the first to the station were not the finest and sturdiest.  Those with good bank accounts and a disinclination to take any bodily or gastronomic risks, the young idler who stands on the street corner ogling girls and the girls who are always in the street to be ogled, the flighty-minded, the irresponsible, the tramp, the selfish, and the cowardly, are bound to be in the van of flight from any sudden disaster and to make the most of the generous sympathy of those who succour them.

The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to remain with their homes and their property.  Besides, a refugee hardly appears at his best.  He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a hostage of fate and personal misfortune.  The Belgian nation had taken the Allies’ side and now individual Belgians expected help from the Allies.

England did not get the worst of the refugees.  They could travel no farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated money to care for them at the same time that it was under the expense of keeping its army mobilized.  Looking at the refugees in the camp at Bergen-op-Zoom, an observer might share some of the contempt of the Germans for the Belgians.  Crowded in temporary huts in the chill, misty weather of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless, marooned human wreckage.  They would not dig ditches to drain their camp; they were given to pilfering from one another the clothes which the world’s charity supplied.  The heart was out of them.  They were numbed by disaster.

“Are all these men and women who are living together married?” I asked the Dutch officer in charge.

“It is not for us to inquire,” he replied.  “Most of them say that they have lost their marriage certificates.”

They were from the slums of that polyglot seaport town Antwerp, which Belgians say is anything but real Belgium.  To judge Belgium by them is like judging an American town by the worst of its back streets, where saloons and pawnshops are numerous and red lights twinkle from dark doorways.