It was after the second red night that the refugees appeared in their thousands—a horde of human rats driven out of their holes by terror, by fire and by gas. Whatever their status and possessions in the life of peace, they came with few exceptions on foot; as roads, like railways, were a target for the airman, the highway was avoided for the by-path or the open field, and the flight from every panic-stricken centre could be traced by long wastes of trampled crops. There were those who, terrified beyond bearing by the crash of masonry and long trembling underground, saw safety only in the roofless open, refused to enter houses and persisted in huddling in fields—unafraid, as yet, of the so-called poison-fire which had licked up the crops in Holderness and the corn-growing district round Pontefract.... Leeds, for a day or two, was hardly touched; but with the outpouring of fugitives from Dewsbury, Wakefield, Halifax and Bradford, Leeds also began to vomit her terrified multitudes. A wave of vagrant destitution rushed suddenly and blindly northward—anywhere away from the ruin of explosive, the flames and death by suffocation; while authority strove vainly to control and direct the torrent of overpowering misery. It was in the early morning that the torrent reached York and rolled through it; overwhelming the charity, private and public, that at first made efforts to cope with the rush of misery. Theodore’s room for a time was given up to a man with bandaged eyes and puffed face whom his wife had led blindfold from Castleford. The man himself sat dumb and suffering, breathing heavily through blistered lips; the woman raged vulgarly against the Government which had neglected to supply them with gas-masks, to have the place properly defended, to warn people! “The bloody fools ought to have known what was coming and if her man was blinded for the rest of his life it was all the fault of this ’ere Government that never troubled its blasted ’ead as long as it drew its money.” ... That was in the beginning, before the flood of misery had swollen so high that even the kindliest shrank from its squalid menace; and Theodore, because it was the first he heard, remembered her story when he had forgotten others more piteous.