[Sidenote: Rain fills the Isonzo and holds back the enemy.]
Fortunately from Saturday night through Sunday night, the first period
of the retreat of the fighting troops as distinct from the rearward
services of the army, it poured torrentially with rain, and this, while
increasing the hardships endured by the men, contributed in two ways to
their salvation; for one thing it swelled the swift and now bridgeless
Isonzo, which the enemy had to cross, brimful, and turned the
Tagliamento, usually a trickle of water in an untidy stony bed across
which a man can wade, into a broad deep flood; 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.
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