History is full of human journeys that begin in hope and end in despair

LIKE MANY people, I have been watching on television two landscapes with figures. Both of them show a sea of human beings, hundreds of thousands or a million, covering a plain to the horizon. One is in the past, a gathering of enormous joy and hope. The other is today, an assembly of despair. One is about the young, about exultation in life. The other is about death. One is Woodstock, 1969. The other is Goma, now.

We, the human race, do not often see ourselves in numbers like that. When we do, the sight seems at first abstract, as if the old saying that the whole world could find standing room on the Isle of Wight had been illustrated (it is old, because now there are too many people to fit in). It takes a great evil or a great hope to draw so many together. Once, I was lucky enough to see such a gathering of hope. That was in June 1979, when this Pope said farewell to his people in the meadows outside Krakow and two million came from all over Poland to hear him and to pray for their country. They did not lack food; they - like the beautiful, bare-chested children of Woodstock - had homes to go back to. When they sang, it was not loud but the earth quivered, as if a wind were blowing through a forest.

I have never seen anything like Goma. Nobody has. But once my job took me to the borders of Zimbabwe, where several thousand refugees from the civil war in Mozambique were lying among thorn- bushes. They and their children were dying, from thirst and hunger and exhaustion. Many were saved; many could not be saved. It seemed to me that they were dying with a terrible humility, very quietly, as if sinking back into the dry earth which had given them birth.

Like the million people at Goma, they were in flight. This is a condition which we seldom think about by itself. But flight is the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse. War, pestilence and famine slay in monstrous numbers, and one or other of them is usually the occasion for a flight; that is why we often forget that flight itself can be the worst slaughterer of them all. It was in the last century that a French army doctor discovered that almost all soldiers killed in battle had wounds in the back. It was only when they scrambled out of their trenches and ran that the enemy caught them with bullet, bayonet or cavalry sabre.

Something of the kind is true about civilians too. At the end of the Second World War, the Germans living in East Prussia and what is now western Poland fled before the advancing Red Army. About six million of them reached safety, but another million, most of them women and children, did not make it. No modern pestilence, and only the worst famine, has a kill rate like that. They perished in many different ways: killed by the enemy, drowned in refugee ships torpedoed in the Baltic, frozen on the roads in the bitter frosts of 1945, infected by typhus and dysentry as they sheltered in abandoned concentration camps. But if they had stayed at home, most of them would probably have survived. They would have been expelled from their homes later, by the Russians and Poles, and deported westwards in horrible conditions. But the decision to flee brought about their deaths.

Very few British natives know what a flight is like. But there are plenty of immigrants, most of them elderly, who do: Poles, Ukrainians or those who remember the flights after the partition of India. A whole population becomes gripped, sometimes within a few days, by a collective resolve to flee. In some cases, like Germany in 1944-45, there is official encouragement: flight is called 'evacuation' to make it seem less chaotic. In others, like France in 1940, the authorities beg the population to hold firm but are ignored. The decision is less rational than it seems. At one level, there are usually good grounds to leave: the Rwandan Hutus feared reprisals after the genocidal massacres of Tutsis, and 'Radio Mille Collines', whipping up their terror of vengeance, urged them to flee the country. In 1945, the Germans fled because they had heard of the atrocities committed by Soviet troops when they entered East Prussia. But in practice most fugitives are swept up in a collective panic. If most of the community is going, who wants to await an unknown fate alone?

In the same way, decisions about where to go and what to take are often strange. In ancient times, a peasantry would scatter outwards into forests and hills but modern highways make flight linear - along 'roads which lead somewhere'. It is hardly ever true that people take to the roads simply 'to get away'; the idea of a journey without a destination is intolerable. So most people set a destination for themselves, however impractical.

They will go to their sister's farm 200 miles away, or to some mythical UN refuge where food and shelter are supposed to be waiting in abundance. They will reach the capital, which is sure to be defended, or a port where ships are certain to be gathering to rescue them. I remember my mother in 1940, who had prepared an 'invasion larder' of tinned food; the idea was to walk the length of Britain pushing prams containing supplies and children until we reached relations in the north of Scotland.

Fifty years ago, when my friend Zosia was a little girl, the Warsaw Rising surrendered after 63 days of fighting. The insurgents went to prison camps; the civilian survivors were driven out of the city so that it could be razed to the ground. Zosia had time to choose one doll to take with her, 'the one which seemed the saddest', before her family joined the burdened mass trudging out towards the countryside.

Her choice says something important about fugitives. They are often not just leaving but moving home. They are abandoning the site of disaster but taking with them symbolic things around which a home exists - in her case, not only a doll, but the envelope of love and compassion in which she had lived.

This is why fleeing people take such odd objects with them. Some - a minority - are strictly practical, marching along with a rucksack containing what might be needed for a hiking holiday in the mountains. But in most refugee streams there are families struggling forward with clocks, photograph albums, wedding dresses, grandfather's medals, tea-sets. They usually end in the ditch, or in the back of an enemy's lorry. Their meaning, though, is that flight is perceived by the fugitive not just as a running-away but as a sort of migration, as if the essential home were as mobile as a snail's shell.

Goya did a painting of flight. A raging giant towers above mountain peaks; below him, a torrent of wagons and human beings foams over wreckage and corpses. But fugitives are not really a mindless stampede. They are individuals, who in spite of everything are fleeing in hope. It is only when their journey stops, in dead-end places like the rocky plains of Goma, that hope and home are finally lost.