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Great Britain, ready to take all who could come, expected 100,000, mainly Belgians. Emergency receiving centres were established at Wembley's Empire Stadium, Alexandra Palace, ten other London points. From these centres, where refugees were card-indexed, gas-masked, and handed ration cards, they were taken to designated reception areas - Greater London, Liverpool, Northern Ireland, even the Isle of Man.
France, accustomed like her ally to giving hospitality to refugees, got ready to receive 800,000 Belgians, resettle huge numbers from her own northern departments. To Paris' huge old northern rail road stations, where Centres d'Accueil had been prepared, rode, drove, cycled, walked thousands of Belgians and Luxembour-geois. Less adept at card-indexing, but strongly persuaded of the restorative powers of hot wine, the French fed, bathed and laundered their guests first, asked questions afterwards. In that searching quiz, authorities plucked out 37 Gestapo agents in two days, sadly admitted many more must have eluded them. As fast as possible, refugees were mustered out, sent in lumbering green municipal busses to Paris' other railway stations, whence they were whisked off to the south and west. Education authorities prepared to find place for 150,000 Belgian children, hoped to tide them over for a while in Paris' evacuated schools.
All kinds of folk found their way into the Centres d'Accueil, some with morale shattered, some with it intact. There were three cyclists from Namur who still found breath to joke about the bombs and bullets spent vainly on them. There was a truckload of twelve, of whom seven without much talk lifted out the other five as corpses, machine-gunned when they had all but reached Paris. There were children dead-eyed and frightened beyond protest. There was a boxcar with machine-gun holes in its roof and a charnel house inside, for disrupting refugee movements to clog the enemy's communication lines is a practice of total war.
Only after several days did France wake up to the magnitude of her refugee problem. She did not have beds, medicines or even tents for the terrorized hordes whom German troops and planes, in order to block the roads, had deliberately driven ahead of them.
France looked hopefully to the U. S. for Red Cross ships, for in her war-torn state the problem was too big for her to handle.