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.

[Sidenote:  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.

[Sidenote:  Rain fills the Isonzo and holds back the enemy.]

Fortunately from Saturday night through Sunday night, the first period of the retreat of the fighting troops as distinct from the rearward services of the army, it poured torrentially with rain, and this, while increasing the hardships endured by the men, contributed in two ways to their salvation; for one thing it swelled the swift and now bridgeless Isonzo, which the enemy had to cross, brimful, and turned the Tagliamento, usually a trickle of water in an untidy stony bed across which a man can wade, into a broad deep flood; it, furthermore, kept the Austrian and German aeroplanes from following up to sweep with bomb and machine-gun the tightly packed road where they could have massacred victims by the hundred and might have turned the retreat into a hopeless rout.

Though the men exposed in open trucks or sludging along the muddy roads and swampy fields had cursed the rain bitterly, its value to our side became conspicuously plain when Monday morning broke bright with autumn sunshine.

[Sidenote:  Troops fill the village of Latisana.]