The Flight from Belgium

Rupert Brooke served with the Royal Naval Division in the retreat from Antwerp. He wrote in a letter to the American poet Leonard Bacon on November 11, 1914 (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library):
"I marched through Antwerp, deserted, shelled & burning, one night & saw ruined houses; dead men and horses. . . . And the whole heaven and earth was lit up by the glare from the great lakes and rivers of burning petrol, hills & spires of flame. That was like Hell, a Dantesque Hell, terrible. But later I saw what was a truer Hell. Hundreds of thousands of refugees, their goods on barrows & hand carts & perambulators & waggons, moving with infinite slowness out into the night. Two unending lines of them, the old men mostly weeping, the women with hard white drawn faces, the children playing or crying or sleeping."