Their faces
are unmistakable and unforgettable. No one who has ever caught that
stare of dumb bewilderment--or that other look of concentrated
horror, full of the reflection of flames and ruins--can shake off
the obsession of the Refugees. The look in their eyes is part of the
look of Paris. It is the dark shadow on the brightness of the face
she turns to the enemy. These poor people cannot look across the
borders to eventual triumph. They belong mostly to a class whose
knowledge of the world's affairs is measured by the shadow of their
village steeple. They are no more curious of the laws of causation
than the thousands overwhelmed at Avezzano. They were ploughing and
sowing, spinning and weaving and minding their business, when
suddenly a great darkness full of fire and blood came down on them.
And now they are here, in a strange country, among unfamiliar faces
and new ways, with nothing left to them in the world but the memory
of burning homes and massacred children and young men dragged to
slavery, of infants torn from their mothers, old men trampled by
drunken heels and priests slain while they prayed beside the dying.
These are the people who stand in hundreds every day outside the
doors of the shelters improvised to rescue them, and who receive, in
return for the loss of everything that makes life sweet, or
intelligible, or at least endurable, a cot in a dormitory, a
meal-ticket--and perhaps, on lucky days, a pair of shoes.
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