Moreover, the enemy always seems to be advancing much faster than he really is.  Under the discouragement that every army feels in falling back, it is easy to credit the pursuer with exaggerated powers of rapid motion; the defeated soldier forgets that the miles are just as long and weary for his adversary trudging painfully after him as they are for himself.  Rumor, too, spreads wildly among tired and disheartened men.  Enemy cavalry, enemy armored motor-cars, hurrying ahead to cut him off—­that idea haunts the mind of each man in an enforced retirement.  A further complication is caused when, as was the case in the Italian withdrawal, the civilian population is also desperately anxious to be gone before the arrival of the enemy.  The news of the forthcoming evacuation of territory spreads backward with rapidity, and the roads along the route of the retreating army fill at once with unregulated, disorderly swarms of frightened civilians and their household baggage, hastily stowed on slow-moving dilapidated carts that are likely to break down at narrow points of the way and block whole miles of military traffic for hours at a time.  The Italian Army had to endure a great deal of that kind of complication.  Theoretically, of course, a general could throw back cavalry and mounted police along the line of his retreat and forbid any civilian traffic whatever under pain of military penalties; but it is very difficult to use such measures against your own countrymen threatened with invasion, specially when the whole aim and object of your war is to free men of your own race from foreign domination.  And not only does the sentimental reason of saving fellow-citizens from the yoke of an invader forbid this course, but also considerations of common humanity.  In the old wars, when the danger-area of fighting was restricted to the places where opposing troops actually came into contact, there was no particular danger for the civilian inhabitants remaining in invaded territory; though their property might suffer from the enemy’s requisitions, their lives were likely to be safe.  But wars of this modern character spread destruction broadcast over a whole region.  A rear-guard action will involve a rain of shells that may smash to pieces any village on the line of retreat; gas may be used, creeping into the refuges where the non-combatant population has taken shelter, and choking them there like vermin in a hole.  War is no longer a civilly organized affair of pitched battles; it is a wild fury of destruction, raging across the whole country-side like a typhoon.

If the English batteries on the Italian front had brought with them to Italy their full organization of transport, they could have saved all their ammunition and stores, their ordnance workshops and supplies.  As it was, they had been incorporated in the Italian Army as corps artillery on the Italian basis; they had to take their chance of getting transport along with every one else, and consequently of all their equipment they could save only the guns themselves, which after all was what chiefly mattered.