h school-girls whose innocence of life's
realities was suddenly thrust face to face with things ugly and
obscene, and cruel as hell.

20

I think it is impossible to convey to those who did not see this exodus
of the Belgian people the meaning and misery of it. Even in the midst
of it I had a strange idea at first that it was only a fantasy and that
such things do not happen. Afterwards I became so used to it all that
I came to think the world must always have been like this, with people
always in flight, families and crowds of families drifting about
aimlessly, from town to town, getting into trains just because they
started somewhere for somewhere else, sitting for hours on bundles
which contained all their worldly goods saved from the wreckage of
ancient homes, losing their children on the roadside, and not fretting
very much, and finding other children, whom they adopted as their
own; never washing on that wandering, so that delicate women who
had once been perfumed with fine scents were dirty as gipsies and
unashamed of draggled dresses and dirty hands; eating when they
found a meal of charity, sleeping in railway sidings, coalsheds, and
derelict trains shunted on to grass-covered lines; careless as pariah
dogs of what the future held in store now that they had lost all things
in the past.

21

On the railway sidings near Calais there was one sight that revealed
the defeat of a nation more even than these crowds of refugees.
Hundreds of Belgian engines had been rushed over the frontier to
France to escape from being used in the enemy's service. These
derelict things stood there in long rows with a dismal look of
lifelessness and abandonment, and as I looked at them I knew that
though the remnants of the Belgian army might be fighting in its last
ditch and holding out at Antwerp against the siege guns of the
Germans, there could be no hope of prolonged resistance against
overwhelming armies. These engines, which should have been used
for Belgian transport, for men and food and guns, were out of action,
and dead symbols of a nation's ruin.

22

For the first time I saw Belgian soldiers in France, and although they
were in small number compared with the great army of retreat which,
after the fall of Antwerp, I saw marching into Dunkirk, their weariness
and listlessness told a tale of woe. At first sight there was something
comical in the aspect of these top-hatted soldiers. They reminded me
of ba