y
had given their "all" for England, they should be getting still better, not
to mention wine on the table in temperance families; whilst there was
a disinclination towards self-support by means of work on the part of
certain heroes by proxy which promised a Belgian occupation of
England that would last as long as the German occupation of
Belgium. England was learning that there are Belgians and Belgians.
She had received not a few of the "and Belgians."

It was only natural. When the German cruisers bombarded
Scarborough and the Hartlepools, the first to the station were not the
finest and sturdiest. Those with good bank accounts and a
disinclination to take any bodily or gastronomic risks, the young idler
who stands on the street corner ogling girls and the girls who are
always in the street to be ogled, the flighty-minded, the irresponsible,
the tramp, the selfish, and the cowardly, are bound to be in the van of
flight from any sudden disaster and to make the most of the generous
sympathy of those who succour them.

The courageous, the responsible, those with homes and property at
stake, those with an inborn sense of real patriotism which means
loyalty to locality and to their neighbours, are more inclined to remain
with their homes and their property. Besides, a refugee hardly
appears at his best. He is in a strange country, forlorn, homesick, a
hostage of fate and personal misfortune. The Belgian nation had
taken the Allies' side and now individual Belgians expected help from
the Allies.

England did not get the worst of the refugees. They could travel no
farther than Holland, where the Dutch Government appropriated
money to care for them at the same time that it was under the
expense of keeping its army mobilized. Looking at the refugees in the
camp at Bergen-op-Zoom, an observer might share some of the
contempt of the Germans for the Belgians. Crowded in temporary
huts in the chill, misty weather of a Dutch winter, they seemed listless,
marooned human wreckage. They would not dig ditches to drain their
camp; they were given to pilfering from one another the clothes which
the world's charity supplied. The heart was out of them. They were
numbed by disaster.

"Are all these men and women who are living together married?" I
asked the Dutch officer in charge.

"It is not for us to inquire," he replied. "Most of them say that they
have lost their marriage certificates."

They were from the slums of that polyg