d 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.

[Sidenote: A marching army does not seem as numerous as the same in
confusion.]

Discipline is a camouflage of numbers. A thousand men marching past in
column of fours does not make upon the mind the same impression of
multitude as the sight of half that number in a disordered rabble.
Regularity and compactness reduce the appearance of mass; and you
receive a profounder suggestion of size from a comparatively small pile
of natural rocks than you do from the geometrical pyramids. In the same
way an army whose formations are suddenly relaxed seems to swell
enormously in numbers. You can drive through a region where a million
men are stationed under regular military organization and get no idea o