The difficulty that complicated the Italian evacuation of their war-zone was the fact that every hour the need for speed became more urgent, if utter disaster was to be averted.  A unit would be given twelve hours to get to the point on the railway where it was to entrain and then an hour later its time-limit would be reduced to two hours.  A headquarters might be told that a sufficient supply of motor-lorries would be available to evacuate all its material and that it had better begin getting rid of chairs and tables and its superfluous stuff at once, but no sooner had these less important stores gone than word would come that no more transport was available and that all the immensely valuable stores and reserves of ammunition that still remained, must be abandoned, as no lorries could be found for them.

[Sidenote:  Difficulties in a sudden retreat.]

[Sidenote:  Every officer tries to save his supplies.]

Moving a great army is an affair of time-tables.  There is room for only a certain amount of men and material on the roads and railways at one time, and every man and every wagon above that maximum becomes a factor of confusion and retards the movement of the whole mass to a dangerous degree.  The sudden retreat of an army is often reduced to chaos, first, because a thoroughly worked-out plan of general retirement exists but rarely in the strong-boxes of any general staff, and secondly, because in the absence of a time-table drawn up in detail and strictly enforced, the elementary principle of self-preservation leads every unit of the army to put itself on the road as quickly as it can get transportation.  This is not to say that confusion is an invariable indication of personal panic; but it is very natural, and even very proper, that every battery commander, the director of every military store and depot, and the leader of every body of troops which is not definitely ordered to remain, should have the individual determination that his particular command shall not fall into the hands of the enemy.  The artillery officer firmly resolves that he will save his guns at all costs; the heads of supply departments are in charge of valuable stores which their army needs for its very existence and which would be of great aid to the enemy if captured, and the troop-leader naturally argues that it would be futile to allow his men to be cut off when a general retreat has already been ordered.  So if the organization of withdrawal is left to the discretion of the people involved in it, as it has to be when the whole thing has not been deliberately arranged beforehand, confusion is almost inevitable.

[Sidenote:  Fear of being cut off by the enemy.]

[Sidenote:  Only severest means can stop civilian traffic.]

[Sidenote:  Modern war is a wild fury of destruction.]