country formed for
the very expression of peace. In the vivid gold and green of its autumn
it has become a stage dressed with ironic splendour for the spectacle of
a people in flight. Half the population of Antwerp and the country round
it is pouring into Ghent.[8] First the automobiles, Belgian officers in
uniform packed tight between women and children and their bundles,
convoying the train. Then the carriages secured by the _bourgeois_ (they
are very few); then men and boys on bicycles; then the carts, and with
the coming on of the carts the spectacle grows incredible, fantastic.
You see a thing advancing like a house on wheels. It is a tall
hay-wagon--the tallest wagon you have ever seen in your life--piled with
household furniture and mattresses on the top of the furniture, and on
top of the mattresses, on the roof, as it were, a family of women and
children and young girls. Some of them seem conscious of the stupendous
absurdity of this appearance; they smile at you or laugh as the
structure goes towering and toppling by.

Next, low on the ground, enormous and grotesque bundles, endowed with
movement and with legs. Only when you come up to them do you see that
they are borne on the bowed backs of men and women and children. The
children--when there are no bundles to be borne these carry a bird in a
cage, or a dog, a dog that sits in their arms like a baby and is pressed
tight to their breasts. Here and there men and women driving their
cattle before them, driving them gently, without haste, with a great
dignity and patience.

These, for all the panic and ruin in their bearing, might be pilgrims or
suppliants, or the servants of some religious rite, bringing the votive
offerings and the sacrificial beasts. The infinite land and the avenues
of slender trees persuade you that it is so.

And wherever the ambulance cars go they meet endless processions of
refugees; endless, for the straight, flat Flemish roads are endless, and
as far as your eye can see the stream of people is unbroken; endless,
because the misery of Belgium is endless; the mind cannot grasp it or
take it in. You cannot meet it with grief, hardly with conscious pity;
you have no tears for it; it is a sorrow that transcends everything you
have known of sorrow. These people have been left "only their eyes to
weep with." But they do not weep any more than you do. They have no
tears for themselves or for each other.[9] This is the terrible thing,
this