When we started in
the dark we had the train to ourselves, but as I awoke three hours later
from an uneasy sleep and looked out of the van, the rest of the train
already swarmed with Italian soldiers who had clambered upon it as it
crept along at a snail's pace. And when dawn came we saw ahead of us a
long vista of trains stretching out of sight, while behind stood
another queue of them, whistling impatiently like human beings at a
ticket office; sometimes one of them would back a little and make the
others behind it back too, all screeching furiously with their whistles
exactly as if they were trying to shout, "Where are you coming to?"
[Sidenote: The one idea is to keep on moving.]
Along the railway, and on the roads at both sides of it, and across the
fields beyond the roads, moved at the same time a crawling mass of
people, all going in the same direction, all at about the same pace,
without stopping, without talking to one another, every one of them just
plodding slowly, wearily, persistently rearward. As you watched them you
knew that each man had in his mind just one idea, to keep on moving like
that until he knew that he was safe. There was no panic or fighting
during the retreat except at isolated times and places; the situation
was just this, that for the unique and imposed will that sways an army
there had been substituted a multitude of individual wills all striving
independently for the same end of self-preservation.
[Sidenote: People seem unaware of the others.
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