aware of the presence of
the rest. You would see a family party of peasants gathered round their
ox cart and making a meal of bread and raw red wine without so much as a
glance at the motley thousands streaming by at their elbows; a soldier
would strip off his wet clothes on the road's edge to change them for
some that he had looted from a wayside store with no apparent
perception of the women trudging past; nor did they seem to notice him.
The niceties of convention are quickly dulled by fatigue, and it is only
the easefulness of modern life that makes the coarser little realities
of human nature seem shocking.

[Sidenote: The crowds get clothes from stacked trucks.]

Among the trains that stretched out of sight along the line there were
some trucks stacked with bundles of military mackintoshes, woolen
helmets, shirts, thick socks. Some inquisitive soldier discovered these
and disinterred a complete outfit for himself. A few minutes later he
was a changed figure, with clean clothing in place of his own muddy,
rain-soaked things, and a stiff blue mackintosh and sou'wester hat over
all. The transfiguration attracted envious attention, and he was
besieged with questions. Soon those trucks with their piles of white
packages looked like giant sugar-basins swarming with wasps, and all
around were throngs jostling one another for the next place on the heap.
It was all quite good-humored; they were all laughing, waving their
arms, calling to friends on the trucks to throw them a shirt or a
waterproof, and when these things came flying down to them they turned
away with the satisfied smile of children. Nothing puts human beings in
such thoroughly good temper as to get something for nothing.

[Sidenote: A litter of old clothes on the road.]

[Sidenote: Two Italian ladies follow the track.]

In this way the whole track soon became a litter of old clothes, which
the retiring soldiers trampled into the mud. Amid all this chaos one
kept on meeting utterly incongruous figures, for with all the world
road-worn, shabby, and dirty, to be clean and well-dressed is to be
grotesque. Amid this multitude of haggard, unwashed, unshaven, dead-beat
males, I noticed two Italian ladies treading delicately over the rough
ballast of the railway-track. They had naturally brought with them in
their flight the most valuable of their possessions, which were of a
kind to be most conveniently carried on their persons. Against this gray
background of