A BRUSH WITH REFUGEES

frontier. Not even the Major had anticipated things
would be quite so bad. Brussels had been evacuated
by the Government and a great exodus from the city
was in progress. The entire width of the road was
packed with a confused mass of refugees, all pressing
on like a slow flood in the same direction. Thousands
and thousands of them, as far as the eye could see.
Compared with this the by-road was a desert. There
it had principally been pedestrians. But on this
main road the pedestrians were inextricably mixed up
with every conceivable type of wheeled vehicle—
motor-cars, ranging from luxurious limousines to old
crocks that hadn't been outside a garage for years,
taxicabs, push-cycles, motor-cycles, farm wagons,
stacked high with household furniture, and with the
clods from the fields still sticking to their wheels,
contractors' lorries shared by four or five families, and
covered vans with the addresses of Brussels trades-
men on them. In addition innumerable hand-carts,
barrows, and perambulators piled with personal
belongings being pushed along by men, women and
children.

Rich and poor, old and young, peasants and town-
dwellers alike, went to compose this monstrous,
seething throng of fugitives in which individual
identities seemed to be swamped, and only the herd
remained. All were being driven forward by the
same impulse. In each the same blind instinct pre-
dominated, the powerful instinct of self-preservation.
There was something fearful, as well as pitiable, about
this relentless eruption of human souls united into one
desperate, unreasoning horde by a common terror.

Ordinary courtesies of life, little acts of kindness
to strangers had disappeared. No one had time for
them. All that mattered was to push, shove, force
oneself to the best of one's powers in front of other

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