se like this except run from hell as fast as
you can and take the first open road?

The station platforms were crowded with folks in motley garments showing
signs of wear and tear. Their possessions were done up in bags and
shapeless bundles, rolled in pieces of sacking, old shawls,
red-and-white-checkered table-cloths. The men, with drawn and heavy
faces, waited patiently. The women collected and watched their restless
flocks. The baby tugged at its mother's breast. The little sister
carried the next-to-baby in her arms. The boys, as usual, wandered
everywhere undismayed and peered curiously into everything.

The crowds were not disorderly or turbulent; there was no shrieking or
groaning. There were, of course, some of the baser sort in the vast
multitude that fled to Holland--street rowdies and other sons of Belial
from the big towns, women of the pavements, and other wretched
by-products of our social system. How could it be otherwise in a throng
of about a million, scooped up and cast out by an evil chance? But the
great bulk of the people were decent and industrious--no more angels
than the rest of us can show per thousand.

I remember a very respectable old couple, cleanly though plainly clad,
waiting at the station of a small village, looking in vain for a chance
to board the train. Everything was full except the compartment reserved
for us. We opened the door and asked them to get in. The old gentleman
explained that he was a landscape-gardener, living in a small villa with
a small garden, in a suburb of Antwerp.

"It was a beautiful garden, monsieur," he said with glistening eyes. "It
was arranged with much skill and care. We loved every bush, every
flower. But one evening three German shells fell in it and burst. The
good wife and I" (here a wan smile) "thought the climate no longer
sanitary. We ran away that night on foot. Much misery for old people.
Last night we slept in a barn with hundreds of others. But some day we
go back to restore that garden. N' est-ce pas vrai, cherie?"

Rosendaal, the Dutch custom-house town on the way to Antwerp, claims
15,000 inhabitants. In two nights at least 40,000 refugees poured into
that place. Every house from the richest to the poorest opened its doors
in hospitality. The beds and the floors were all filled with sleepers. A
big vacant factory building was fitted with improvised bunks and straw
bedding. Two thousand five hundred people were lodged there. Open-air
kitc