the city itself, people came pouring down. In wagons drawn by huge
Belgian draft-horses, in carts pulled by the captivating Belgian work
dogs, panting mightily and digging their paws into the slippery cobbles;
on foot, leading little children and carrying babies and dolls and
canaries and great bundles of clothes and household things wrapped in
sheets, they surged toward that one narrow bridge and the crowded
ferry-boats. I saw one old woman, gray-haired and tanned like an Indian
squaw with work in the fields, yet with a fine, well-made face, pushing
a groaning wheelbarrow. A strap went from the handles over her
shoulders, and, stopping now and then to ask the news, she would slip
off this harness, gossip for a time, then push on again. That afternoon
under my window there was a tall wagon, a sort of hay wagon, in which
there were twenty-two little tow-headed children, none more than eight
or ten and several almost babies in arms. By the side of the wagon a
man, evidently father of some of them, stood buttering the end of a huge
round loaf of bread and cutting off slice after slice, which the older
children broke and distributed to the little ones. Two cows were tied
to the back of the wagon and the man's wife squatted there milking them.
All along the quay and in the streets leading into it were people like
this--harmless, helpless, hard-working people, going they knew not
where. The entrance to the bridge was soon choked. One went away and
returned an hour later and found the same people waiting almost in the
same spot, and, with that wonderful calm and patience of theirs, feeding
their children or giving a little of their precious hay to the horses,
quietly waiting their turn while the cannon which had driven them from
their homes kept on thundering behind them.

That afternoon I walked up-town through the shuttered, silent streets--
silent but for that incessant rumbling in the southeast and the
occasional honking flight of some military automobile--to two of the