[Sidenote:  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.

[Sidenote:  British guns wait to cross.]

[Sidenote:  An Italian colonel attempts to keep order on the bridge.]

[Sidenote:  A panic is started.]

[Sidenote:  Austrian aeroplanes are overhead.]

[Sidenote:  Italian officers check panic.]

[Sidenote:  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