experts highly trained in the business of arms.
That night I went for a journey in a train of tragedy I was glad to get
into the train. Here, travelling through the clean air of a quiet night, I
might forget for a little while the senseless cruelties of this war, and
turn my eyes away from the suffering of individuals smashed by its
monstrous injustice.
But the long train was packed tight with refugees. There was only
room for me in the corridor if I kept my elbows close, tightly wedged
against the door. Others tried to clamber in, implored piteously for a
little space, when there was no space. The train jerked forward on
uneasy brakes, leaving a crowd behind.
Turning my head and half my body round, I could see into two of the
lighted carriages behind me, as I stood in the corridor. They were
overfilled with various types of these Belgian people whom I had
been watching all day--the fugitives of a ravaged country. For a little
while in this French train they were out of the hurly-burly of their
flight. For the first time since the shells burst over Antwerp they
had a little quietude and rest.
I glanced at their faces, as they sat back with their eyes closed. There
was a young Belgian priest there, with a fair, clean-shaven face. He
wore top boots splashed with mud, and only a silver cross at his
breast showed his office. He had fallen asleep with a smile about his
lips. But presently he awakened with a start, and suddenly there
came into his eyes a look of indescribable horror... He had
remembered.
There was an old lady next to him. The light from the carriage lamp
glinted upon her silver hair, and gave a Rembrandt touch to a fair old
Flemish face. She was looking at the priest, and her lips moved as
though in pity. Once or twice she glanced at her dirty hands, at her
draggled dress, and then sighed, before bending her head, and
dozing into forgetfulness.
A young Flemish mother cuddled close to a small boy with flaxen hair,
whose blue eyes stared solemnly in front of him with an old man's
gravity of vision. She touched the child's hair with her lips, pressed
him closer, seemed eager to feel his living form, as though nothing
mattered now that she had him safe.
On the opposite seat were two Belgian officers--an elderly man with a
white moustache and grizzled eyebrows under his high képi and a
young man in a tasselled forage cap, like a boy-student. They both
sat in a limp, dejected way. There was defeat and despair in their
attitude It was only when the younger man shifted his right leg with a
sudden grimace of pain that I saw he was wounded.
Here in these two carriages through which I could glimpse were a few
souls holding in their memory all the sorrow and suffering of poor,
stricken Belgium. Upon this long train were a thousand other men
and women in the same plight and with the same grief.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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