World's War Events $v Volume 3 / Beginning with the departure of the first American destroyers for service abroad in April, 1917, and closing with the treaties of peace in 1919.

by Unknown

Finding the way to reach Padua.

Walking single file through the mud.

This news of the existence of a sosistenza was good hearing. I myself had not the least idea of how to get to Padua, the nearest place from which I could hope to send a telegram, except by walking there; and Padua was sixty miles along the railway-line. Two days' walking, two brown loaves the gift of the Italian officer in charge of the bread-depot, and a stick of chocolate; it was a prospect of no allurement. I stepped into place in the long trail of refugees and started, however. It needed no more than two hours of stumbling over sleepers and crunching on the rough stone ballast of the track to make of me as tired and dull-witted a hobo as the rest. We all walked in single file, keeping as far as possible to a strip of soft mud at the side of the line where the going was easier, and one's whole mind had become before long entirely concentrated on nothing more than the increasing soreness of two tired feet and the gradual development of a blister on a big toe. From Portogruaro onward, however, my own personal luck changed, and by getting one lift after another I reached Padua the same night.

British guns wait to cross.

An Italian colonel attempts to keep order on the bridge.

A panic is started.

Austrian aeroplanes are overhead.

Italian officers check panic.

Airplane opens fire on the road.

Gradually the throng at the Latisana bridge increased, and eventually no less than eleven of the British guns attached to the Italian army were drawn up at the side of the road waiting their turn to cross. The English colonel who commanded the group to which they belonged had arrived and was using the funnel of the bridge to collect his scattered units. The men refreshed with the bread that they had received from the Italian food-depot, were resting by the side of the road; an Italian artillery colonel, under whose command the guns had been when on the Third Army front as corps artillery, was on the bridge trying to hold up the onpressing, unbroken string of heterogeneous traffic long enough for the English guns to be edged into the procession. Then suddenly one of these things happened to which an army in retreat is peculiarly liable. How it started no one seems to know. One theory is that Austrian soldiers dressed in Italian uniforms had been hurried on ahead by the enemy to mingle with the retreat and spread such panics. What actually happened was that several men galloped up all at once on horseback shouting, "The Austrians are here." Immediately the crowd, hitherto patiently waiting its turn to cross the bridge, made one simultaneous push toward its opening. Beyond the river there was the whole country-side to scatter over; on this side they could expect no other fate than to be caught helplessly in a trap. It was like a stampede in a burning theater; the desperate eagerness of every person in the crowd to get on the bridge stopped almost any one from getting there. Carts and people at the edge of the road were shoved down the embankment by the weight of the dense mass surging along its center. And then to add to the terror of the moment there was heard above the shouts and oaths of the struggling mob a low, foreboding hum, the characteristic drone of Austrian aeroplanes. It is hard to see what could have come of the situation but complete and bloody disaster if it had not been for the decided action of some Italian officers. By main force they thrust into the middle of the entrance to the bridge and checked the panic with sheer personal determination. The sound of their authoritative voices brought back the sense of discipline that had momentarily gone. Under their orders the pushing throng sorted itself into some order. A jibing mule was summarily shot to clear the road, and so in a few minutes, despite the constant approach of the low-flying enemy aircraft, a way was cleared for the English guns to cross the bridge. They were scarcely over when the first Austrian machine, swooping down, dropped bombs and opened fire with its machine-gun on the tight-packed road. The attack did not do much damage, though one British Red Cross car was filled as full of holes as a pepper-pot; but the experience showed how much worse the retreat would have been had not the heavy rain of the week-end kept the Austrian airmen in their hangars.