nd were sent into Germany.

No Work, but Taxes Continue.

There is no work. The factories are closed because they have not raw
material, coal, or petrol, because they have no markets.

And yet war taxes are falling with hideous pressure upon a people whose
hands are empty, whose workshops are closed, whose fields are idle,
whose cattle have been taken, or compulsorily purchased without value
received.

In Belgium itself the misery of the populace is greater than the misery
of the Belgian fugitives in other countries, such as Holland, where
there have come since the fall of Liege one and a half million of
fugitives. To gauge what that misery in Belgium is, think of what even
the fugitives suffer. I have seen in a room without fire, the walls
damp, the floor without covering, not even straw, a family of nine women
and eight children, one on an improvised bunk seriously ill. Their home
in Belgium was leveled with the ground, the father killed in battle.

Their food is coffee and bread for breakfast, potatoes for dinner, with
salt--and in having the salt they were lucky--bread and coffee for
supper. Insufficiently clothed, there by the North Sea, they watched the
bleak hours pass, with nothing to do except cling together in a vain
attempt to keep warm.

Multiply this case by hundreds of thousands and you will have some hint
of the people's sufferings.

In a lighter on the River Maas at Rotterdam, without windows, without
doors, with only an open hatchway from which a ladder descends, several
hundred fugitives spend their nights and the best parts of their days in
the iron hold, forever covered with moisture, leaky when rain comes,
with the floor never dry, and pervasive with a perpetual smell like the
smell of a cave which never gets the light of day. Here men, women, and
children were huddled together in a promiscuous communion of misery,
made infinitely more pathetic and heartrending because none complained.

At Rosendaal, at Scheveningen, Eysden, and Flushing, at a dozen other
places, these ghastly things are repeated in one form or another.
Holland has sheltered hundreds of thousands, but she could not in a
moment organize even adequate shelter, much less comforts.

In Bergen-op-Zoom, where I write these words, there have come since the
fall of Antwerp 300,000 hungry marchers, with no resources except what
they carry with them. This little town of 15,000 people did its best to
meet the terrible pressure, and