These dark, sluggish streams of men and vehicles and beasts crept tortuously over the country-side like the channels of a delta trickling to the sea. Here and there little eddies of stragglers had been thrown out to each side. It is a curious thing, which I have noticed under similar conditions before, that each person or little group of persons in this mass of human beings seemed almost unaware of the presence of the rest. You would see a family party of peasants gathered round their ox cart and making a meal of bread and raw red wine without so much as a glance at the motley thousands streaming by at their elbows; a soldier would strip off his wet clothes on the road's edge to change them for some that he had looted from a wayside store with no apparent perception of the women trudging past; nor did they seem to notice him. The niceties of convention are quickly dulled by fatigue, and it is only the easefulness of modern life that makes the coarser little realities of human nature seem shocking.
The crowds get clothes from stacked trucks.
Among the trains that stretched out of sight along the line there were some trucks stacked with bundles of military mackintoshes, woolen helmets, shirts, thick socks. Some inquisitive soldier discovered these and disinterred a complete outfit for himself. A few minutes later he was a changed figure, with clean clothing in place of his own muddy, rain-soaked things, and a stiff blue mackintosh and sou'wester hat over all. The transfiguration attracted envious attention, and he was besieged with questions. Soon those trucks with their piles of white packages looked like giant sugar-basins swarming with wasps, and all around were throngs jostling one another for the next place on the heap. It was all quite good-humored; they were all laughing, waving their arms, calling to friends on the trucks to throw them a shirt or a waterproof, and when these things came flying down to them they turned away with the satisfied smile of children. Nothing puts human beings in such thoroughly good temper as to get something for nothing.
A litter of old clothes on the road.
Two Italian ladies follow the track.
In this way the whole track soon became a litter of old clothes, which the retiring soldiers trampled into the mud. Amid all this chaos one kept on meeting utterly incongruous figures, for with all the world road-worn, shabby, and dirty, to be clean and well-dressed is to be grotesque. Amid this multitude of haggard, unwashed, unshaven, dead-beat males, I noticed two Italian ladies treading delicately over the rough ballast of the railway-track. They had naturally brought with them in their flight the most valuable of their possessions, which were of a kind to be most conveniently carried on their persons. Against this gray background of mud and rubbish and a disbanded army their two figures glittered with a brilliance that would have been conspicuous in the rue de la Paix. Heavy sable furs and muffs almost bowed their shoulders; each finger had two or three rings that flashed in the light; round their necks were gold chains hung with pendants, and yet, instead of the air of self-satisfied ostentation that might well have gone with a display so lavish, there were only two pathetically little, frightened, perplexed faces, and an uncertain gait that did not promise much further progress along that ankle-wrenching railway-line.
By this time I had left the train, which had taken thirty hours to cover fifteen miles, and was walking ahead along the track. There was always the chance that something might happen to the two bridges farther on over the Tagliamento, and I wanted to be on the same side of the river as the telegraph office when that occurred.
The Tagliamento bridges dominate the retirement.
These bridges were the feature that dominated the whole movement of retirement. In military terms, they constituted a defile upon its route. Everything had to converge upon one of those three narrow passages, and until they were crossed there was no security for the Italian Army.
Rear-guard actions were, indeed, fought at intermediate places such as the line of the Torre, west of Udine, where General Petiti di Roreto made a stand with six brigades, the valley of the Judrio, the heights above Cormons. But such efforts could do no more than delay the enemy's advance; the respite that the Italian Army so urgently needed to pull itself together, to reassemble its units, redistribute its artillery, and, in short, gather into one hand again the scattered threads of control, could be found only behind the Tagliamento River, forty miles back from the old front line.