Allied troops enter Belgium, May 1940

Beneath the signs of a French customs post men raise the barrier, and soldiers in flat British steel helmets ride through on motorcycles; a long column marches along a straight road, a small tracked carrier passes a cart piled with bedding, and men in a beet field throw flowers towards a passing armoured car. Going the other way, families with bicycles and handcarts pass soldiers in French helmets, farm carts roll along tree-lined roads, and in a town people run across a square as a house burns.

On 10 May 1940, under the Dyle Plan, the British Expeditionary Force and French armies moved into Belgium to meet the German attack on the line of the river Dyle. At the same time hundreds of thousands of Belgians took to the roads heading west, and the two streams met on the same roads.