Tuesday.

   Patrick Kingsley in Horgoš

   Tuesday 15 September 2015 20.28 BST Last modified on Wednesday 16
   September 2015 15.22 BST
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--
   At the fence’s weakest point, where refugees had for weeks walked into
   Hungary along a set of disused railway tracks, police had blocked the
   way with the carriage of a freight train.

   Yet even after the clock struck 12, Hungary seemed to soften, letting a
   few hundred stragglers enter its territory via a legal foot-crossing
   that lies in Horgoš, a mile to the west of those train tracks. At 10
   minutes past midnight, there were still families running, limping and
   panting up the road that leads to the border gate. More than 160,000
   people had crossed this line so far this year and no one wanted to be
   the first to be turned away.

   “I’m hoping, hoping, hoping,” said Badr, a 47-year-old Syrian engineer,
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   crutches – 22-year-old Mostafa from Baghdad, one of the very last few
   to heave his way across the border. Asked how he felt to have got there
   in the nick of time, a breathless Mostafa said: “Happy.”

   And then the gates clanged shut. At around 12.20am on Tuesday, Hungary
   finally blocked the main route used by refugees to reach the safety of
   the European Union, leaving about 100 people stranded in the dark.
   Later in the night, Hungarian police erected a flimsy second fence
   behind the main barrier of the crossing, just in case anyone hadn’t
   cottoned on.
   Hungary closes border with Serbia
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   routes through the Hungarian border. “We have other ways,” the smuggler
   said, vaguely. “This was the easiest, but we have other ones.”
   Khaled and Fahed Kashkool, a pair of Syrian twins
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   Khaled and Fahed Kashkool, 12-year-old twins, try to explain the
   situation to other Syrians on the Hungarian border. Photograph: Patrick
   Kingsley/Guardian

   But with the fence now fully fortified, it is a tough barrier to cross
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   So, too, were two representatives from the International Organisation
   for Migration. What is going on, a journalist asked them. “Can you tell
   us?” one of them replied.

   It took a pair of 12-year-old twins, Khalid and Fahed Kashkool, wearing
   matching checked shirts and turquoise trainers, to try to make sense of
   the madness. Having procured a document written in incomprehensible
   Hungarian jargon, the young Syrians told a crowd of compatriots that
   anyone who signed it, and then claimed asylum in the cubicles, would
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   from Budapest. “Also minors travelling without adults.”

   But the vast majority of people who reach Hungary from Serbia will
   probably have their application rejected. Indeed, by mid-afternoon on
   Tuesday, at least 16 had already had their requests for asylum turned
   down. One, Zahir Habbal, an electrician from Damascus, told the
   Guardian that interrogators made no attempt to find out about his
   circumstances in the few minutes they took to reject his application.
   “They didn’t ask anything about my life,” Habbal said. “It wasn’t
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