At Ossendrecht, quite close to the barrier of wood, barbed wire, and stones thrown across the country road to mark the frontier of Holland and Belgium, of peace and war, there is a little café where most of the refugees from Antwerp made their first halt in Dutch territory, and which really would have done a roaring trade since the beginning of the war but for the fact that most of the customers were not even rich enough to pay for their bun or for their glass of beer, and but for the kind-hearted proprietress who could not refuse such comforts even if she had no hope of getting paid for it.
She was a tall, solid, and healthy-looking woman, who seemed to have stepped from a Rubens canvas, with a glory of fair, curly hair and a complexion to render jealous the brightest Haarlem tulip. When she asked me in her curious dialect—which, as a compliment to me, was mixed with a few English words—if I wanted "Pilsener" or "Dunkel," she was carrying two babies of apparently the same age in her arms, one each side. I was wondering how she would manage to bring me my drink, when she put one of the babies on the counter and kept the other in her arms. The baby on the counter fell asleep, but the other one started crying desperately.
She told me that only one of the babies, the one on the counter, was her own, and that he was born in August; then her husband was called away by the mobilisation order, and the refugees began to pour into Holland like flocks of sheep chased by wolves. One day a tired, ill-looking woman came with a baby in her arms. She crossed the frontier and was almost carried into the little café, as she was too faint to walk any further. She said her husband had been killed at Liège, and asked to remain just one night. Though there was not a single bedroom to let in the little café, the kind-hearted giantess agreed. The next morning the Belgian woman was very ill, and in two days she was dead.
"The little girl was just about as old as my boy. I was strong enough to keep the two," she concluded, with a proud smile. "Why shouldn't I have kept the two?"
"And what about your husband?" I asked, admiring her great simplicity.
"I wrote him a postcard, telling everything; and he answered that for him it would just be as if we had got twins."
From Ossendrecht to Bergen-op-Zoom a curious steam tramcar, in the middle of which a group of natives and refugees dry their feet at a red-hot stove, affords me a curious place of observation. Old women, in the celebrated lace bonnets and gilded helmets of the Dutch peasants, seem great friends with Belgian girls, who try their best to convert their Flemish into a language as nearly as possible Dutch. I learn that a lot of refugees go on daily pilgrimages to the frontier, where in one way or another they manage to get some news, or at least a talk with their country-people who continuously come out of Belgium.
The refugees' most difficult task is apparently to find each other. I know of sisters from Malines with their families who have been living for two months within a few hundred yards one of the other, and each believing the other killed or gone to England. One finds everywhere, carved into trees, scribbled on walls, or written on pieces of paper nailed here and there, addresses of refugees wishing and trying to meet old friends or relations.
Sometimes the address is a sensible one, but often one cannot help laughing on learning that the present address of a refugee's family, or part of it, is a church, or a theatre, or a motor garage, or even, as I have seen, a stable or cellar.
At Bergen-op-Zoom the refugees are certainly twice as numerous as the ordinary residents, and the little town, the present look of which belies its bellicose traditions, has been given up completely to them.