Even more terrible were the scenes along the highways, where soldiers and civilians were mixed together in frightful confusion. An American correspondent says:-- "By mid-afternoon on Wednesday the road from Antwerp to Ghent, a distance of forty miles, was a solid mass of refugees, and the same was true of every road, every lane, every footpath leading in a westerly or a northerly direction. The people fled in motor cars and in carriages, in delivery wagons, in furniture vans, in farm carts, in omnibuses, in vehicles drawn by oxen, by donkeys, even by cows; on horseback, on bicycles; and there were thousands upon thousands afoot. I saw men trundling wheel-barrows piled high with bedding, and with their children perched upon the bedding. I saw sturdy young peasants carrying their aged parents in their arms. I saw women of fashion in fur coats and high-heeled shoes staggering along clinging to the ends of wagons. I saw white-haired men and women grasping the harness of the gun teams or the stirrup leathers of the troopers, who, themselves exhausted from many days of fighting, slept in their saddles as they rode. I saw springless farm wagons literally heaped with wounded soldiers with piteous white faces; the bottoms of the wagons leaked, and left a trail of blood behind. . . . 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 groans of the wounded, the cries of women, the whimpering of children, and always the monotonous shuffle, shuffle, shuffle of countless weary feet."[168] [Illustration: British Naval Brigade in the Trenches outside Antwerp. _Photo, Newspaper Illustrations, Ltd._] At least 200,000 of the refugees crossed into Holland, where they were kindly received, and were provided with food and shelter. Some sought refuge in England; but thousands of others fell by the wayside, where they perished of exposure and starvation.