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 of
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.
Pages:
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109