and the manner of their flight. It is not flight, it is the vast,
unhasting and unending movement of a people crushed down by grief and
weariness, pushed on by its own weight, by the ceaseless impact of its
ruin.

This stream is the main stream from Antwerp, swollen by its tributaries.
It doesn't seem to matter where it comes from, its strength and volume
always seem the same. After the siege of Antwerp it will thicken and
flow from some other direction, that is all. And all the streams seem to
flow into Ghent and to meet in the Palais des Fetes.[10]

I forget whether it was near Lokeren or Saint Nicolas that we saw the
first sign of fighting, in houses levelled to the ground to make way for
the artillery fire; levelled, and raked into neat plots without the
semblance of a site.

After the refugees, the troops. Village streets crowded with military
automobiles and trains of baggage wagons and regiments of infantry.
Little villas with desolate, surprised and innocent faces, standing back
in their gardens; soldiers sitting in their porches and verandahs,
soldiers' faces looking out of their windows; soldiers are quartered in
every room, and the grass grows high in their gardens. Soldiers run down
the garden paths to look at our ambulance as it goes by.

There is excitement in the village streets.

At Saint Nicolas we overtake Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson walking into
Antwerp. They tell us the news.

The British troops have come. At last. They have been through before us
on their way to Antwerp. Dr. Wilson and Mr. Davidson have seen the
British troops. They have talked to them.

Mr. Davidson cannot conceal his glee at getting in before the War
Correspondents. Pure luck has given into his hands _the_ great
journalistic scoop of the War in Belgium. And he is not a journalist. He
is a sculptor out for the busts of warriors, and for actuality in those
tragic and splendid figures that are grouped round memorial columns, for
the living attitude and gesture.

We take up Mr. Davidson and Dr. Wilson, and leave one of our professors
(if he is a professor) at Saint Nicolas, for the poor man has come
without his passport. He will have to hang about at Saint Nicolas, doing
nothing, until such time as it pleases Heaven to send us back from
Antwerp. He resigns himself, and we abandon him, a piteous figure
wrapped in a brown shawl.

After Saint Nicolas more troops, a few batteries of artillery, some
infantry, long, long regiment