it, furthermore, kept the
Austrian and German aeroplanes from following up to sweep with bomb and
machine-gun the tightly packed road where they could have massacred
victims by the hundred and might have turned the retreat into a hopeless
rout.

Though the men exposed in open trucks or sludging along the muddy roads
and swampy fields had cursed the rain bitterly, its value to our side
became conspicuously plain when Monday morning broke bright with autumn
sunshine.

[Sidenote: Troops fill the village of Latisana.]

It was about ten o'clock on that morning when I reached the village of
Latisana, where was the southernmost bridge across the Tagliamento. The
streets of the little town were simply chock-a-block with troops which
were pouring into it from converging roads. Two or three Italian
officers, splashed to the eyes with mud and hoarse with shouting, had
organized some control at this point, or otherwise nothing would have
moved at all. Pushing soldiers this way and that, seizing horses' heads,
straining their voices against the din of clattering motors, they held
up each stream of traffic in turn for a few minutes and passed the
other through.

[Sidenote: An English soldier keeps his air of efficiency.]

[Sidenote: Men in great need of food.]

Conspicuous in his khaki among this spate of Italian gray, stood an
English soldier contentedly munching dry brown bread. The motor-bicycle
at his side indicated him as a despatch-rider belonging to one of the
batteries. It would have been hard to say whether machine or man was the
more travel-stained. The cycle's front wheel was badly bent, evidently
by some collision; the soldier's hand was bound with a dirty rag, and
his face clotted with the blood of a congealed scratch, the result of
having been pushed off the road by a motor-lorry in the dark and falling
head-long down a stone embankment. Yet about both mount and man there
was still an air of efficiency and unimpaired fundamental soundness that
was encouraging, and the mud-plastered figure saluted the English
officer at my side with a flick of the wrist that would have passed on
the parade-ground at Wellington Barracks. Two guns of his battery, he
reported, were three or four miles back down the road; the men were
dead-beat, but the worst was that they had had nothing to eat for
thirty-six hours, owing to the tractor that had their rations on board
catching fire and burning them; they had picked up scraps of brea