could bear his boots no longer had tied them to the cleaning-rod of his rifle.  Another had strapped his boots to his cowhide knapsack and limped forward with his swollen feet in felt slippers.  Here were a group of Capuchin monks abandoning their monastery; there a little party of white-faced nuns shepherding the flock of children—­many of them fatherless—­who had been entrusted to their care.  The confusion was beyond all imagination, the clamour deafening:  the rattle of wheels, the throbbing of motors, the clatter of hoofs, the cracking of whips, the curses of the drivers, the groans of the wounded, the cries of women, the whimpering of children, threats, pleadings, oaths, screams, imprecations, and always the monotonous shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of countless weary feet.

The fields and the ditches between which these processions of disaster passed were strewn with the prostrate forms of those who, from sheer exhaustion, could go no further.  And there was no food for them, no shelter.  Within a few hours after the exodus began the country-side was as bare of food as the Sahara is of grass.  Time after time I saw famished fugitives pause at farmhouses and offer all of their pitifully few belongings for a loaf of bread; but the kind-hearted country-people, with tears streaming down their cheeks, could only shake their heads and tell them that they had long since given all their food away.  Old men and fashionably gowned women and wounded soldiers went out into the fields and pulled up turnips and devoured them raw—­for there was nothing else to eat.  During a single night, near a small town on the Dutch frontier, twenty women gave birth to children in the open fields.  No one will ever know how many people perished during that awful flight from hunger and exposure and exhaustion; many more, certainly, than lost their lives in the bombardment.

VIII.  The Fall Of Antwerp

The bombardment of Antwerp began about ten o’clock on the evening of Wednesday, October 7.  The first shell to fall within the city struck a house in the Berchem district, killing a fourteen-year-old boy and wounding his mother and little sister.  The second decapitated a street-sweeper as he was running for shelter.  Throughout the night the rain of death continued without cessation, the shells falling at the rate of four or five a minute.  The streets of the city were as deserted as those of Pompeii.  The few people who remained, either because they were willing to take their chances or because they had no means of getting away, were cowering in their cellars.  Though the gas and electric lights were out, the sky was rosy from the reflection of the petrol-tanks which the Belgians had set on fire; now and then a shell would burst with the intensity of magnesium, and the quivering beams of two searchlights on the forts across the river still further lit up the ghastly scene.  The noise was deafening.  The buildings seemed