mud and rubbish and a disbanded army their two figures
glittered with a brilliance that would have been conspicuous in the 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;