fore we
saw the effects of war, in blood, anguish, and tears.

The French newspapers, telling little of the truth, giving barely one
single fact to a page full of heroic sentiment, had not let us guess
that, beyond the frontiers of France, the enemy was doing frightful
damage, with a rapidity and ruthlessness which, after the check at
Liege, was a tremendous menace to the Allied armies. I understood
these things better, in a stark nakedness of truth, when I found myself
caught in the tumult of a nation in flight.

I have already touched upon one tide of panic--the stampede of the
pleasure-seekers. That was a mere jest lacking all but the touch of
cruelty which gives a spice to so many of life's witticisms; but the
second tide, overflowing in wave after wave of human misery,
reached great heights of tragedy which submerged all common
griefs. From that day in August until many months of war had passed
I was seldom out of sight of this ruin of Belgium.

I went into the heart of it, into the welter of blood and wreckage, and
stood, expecting death, in the very process of its deadly torture.
Week after week, month after month, I walked and talked with
Belgian fugitives, and drifted in that stream of exiled people, and
watched them in the far places of their flight, where they were
encamped in settled hopelessness, asking nothing of the fate which
had dealt them such foul blows, expecting nothing. But I still
remember my first impressions of war's cruelty to that simple people
who had desired to live in peace and had no quarrel with any Power.
It was in a kind of stupor that I saw the vanguard of this nation in
retreat, a legion of poor old women whose white hairs were wild in this
whirl of human derelicts, whose decent black clothes were rumpled
and torn and fouled in the struggle for life; with Flemish mothers
clasping babies at their breasts and fierce-eyed as wild animals
because of the terror in their hearts for those tiny buds of life; with
small children scared out of the divine security of childhood by this
abandonment of homes which had seemed the world to them, and
terrorized by an unknown horror which lurked in the name of
Germany; with men of all classes and all ages, intellectuals and
peasants, stout bourgeois, whose overload of flesh was a burden to
their flight, thin students whose book-tired eyes were filled with a
dazed bewilderment, men of former wealth and dignity reduced to
beggary and humiliation; wit