f
congestion, but if those men are suddenly dissolved from a closely knit
body into a crowd of individual persons, the same country-side seems
hardly large enough to hold them all.

[Sidenote: Discomforts of the retreat.]

So, as with that little party of Englishmen I started on the retreat in
the early morning hours of October 28, we seemed to be engulfed in a
constantly broadening flood of human beings. We were in a train, the men
in open trucks, miserable enough under the cold, streaming rain, the
officers crowded into a closed van with the baggage. When we started in
the dark we had the train to ourselves, but as I awoke three hours later
from an uneasy sleep and looked out of the van, the rest of the train
already swarmed with Italian soldiers who had clambered upon it as it
crept along at a snail's pace. And when dawn came we saw ahead of us a
long vista of trains stretching out of sight, while behind stood
another queue of them, whistling impatiently like human beings at a
ticket office; sometimes one of them would back a little and make the
others behind it back too, all screeching furiously with their whistles
exactly as if they were trying to shout, "Where are you coming to?"

[Sidenote: The one idea is to keep on moving.]

Along the railway, and on the roads at both sides of it, and across the
fields beyond the roads, moved at the same time a crawling mass of
people, all going in the same direction, all at about the same pace,
without stopping, without talking to one another, every one of them just
plodding slowly, wearily, persistently rearward. As you watched them you
knew that each man had in his mind just one idea, to keep on moving like
that until he knew that he was safe. There was no panic or fighting
during the retreat except at isolated times and places; the situation
was just this, that for the unique and imposed will that sways an army
there had been substituted a multitude of individual wills all striving
independently for the same end of self-preservation.

[Sidenote: People seem unaware of the others.]

These dark, sluggish streams of men and vehicles and beasts crept
tortuously over the country-side like the channels of a delta trickling
to the sea. Here and there little eddies of stragglers had been thrown
out to each side. It is a curious thing, which I have noticed under
similar conditions before, that each person or little group of persons
in this mass of human beings seemed almost un