In the stillness, as they drift by, you catch bits of their talk:

"It was two o'clock in the morning when we left Antwerp."

"And imagine--it was not three metres from our doorstep that the shell
burst."

"We walked forty kilometres that night and in the morning-------"

On the balcony of some one's summer-house, now turned into a hospital,
four Belgian soldiers, one with his head bandaged, are playing cards--
jolly, blond youngsters, caps rakishly tipped over one ear, slamming the
cards down as if that were the only thing in the world. In the garden
others taking the sunshine, some with their wheel-chairs pushed through
the shrubbery close to the high iron fence, to be petted by nurse-maids
and children as if they were animals in a sort of zoo.

The Belgians strolling by on the cliff walk smile at this quaint
picture, for sun and space and quiet seem to have wiped out their
terror--that passed through is as far away as that now hidden in the
east. Is it merely quiet and sun? Perhaps it is the look of a "nice
little people" who know that now they have a history. "Refugees," to be
sure, yet one can fancy them looking back some day from their tight
little villages, canals, and beet-fields, on afternoons like this, as on
the days of their great adventure--when they could sit in the sun above
the sea at Folkestone and look across the Channel to the haze under
which their sons and husbands and brothers and King were fighting for
the last corner of their country.

Calais, Saturday.