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.] These dark, sluggish streams of men and vehicles and beasts crept tortuously over the country-side like the channels of a delta trickling to the sea. Here and there little eddies of stragglers had been thrown out to each side. It is a curious thing, which I have noticed under similar conditions before, that each person or little group of persons in this mass of human beings seemed almost unaware 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.]