[Sidenote: Two Italian ladies follow the track.] In this way the whole track soon became a litter of old clothes, which the retiring soldiers trampled into the mud. Amid all this chaos one kept on meeting utterly incongruous figures, for with all the world road-worn, shabby, and dirty, to be clean and well-dressed is to be grotesque. Amid this multitude of haggard, unwashed, unshaven, dead-beat males, I noticed two Italian ladies treading delicately over the rough ballast of the railway-track. They had naturally brought with them in their flight the most valuable of their possessions, which were of a kind to be most conveniently carried on their persons. Against this gray background of mud and rubbish and a disbanded army their two figures glittered with a brilliance that would have been conspicuous in the rue de la Paix. Heavy sable furs and muffs almost bowed their shoulders; each finger had two or three rings that flashed in the light; round their necks were gold chains hung with pendants, and yet, instead of the air of self-satisfied ostentation that might well have gone with a display so lavish, there were only two pathetically little, frightened, perplexed faces, and an uncertain gait that did not promise much further progress along that ankle-wrenching railway-line. By this time I had left the train, which had taken thirty hours to cover fifteen miles, and was walking ahead along the track. There was always the chance that something might happen to the two bridges farther on over the Tagliamento, and I wanted to be on the same side of the river as the telegraph office when that occurred. [Sidenote: The Tagliamento bridges dominate the retirement.] These bridges were the feature that dominated the whole movement of retirement. In military terms, they constituted a defile upon its route. Everything had to converge upon one of those three narrow passages, and until they were crossed there was no security for the Italian Army. Rear-guard actions were, indeed, fought at intermediate places such as the line of the Torre, west of Udine, where General Petiti di Roreto made a stand with six brigades, the valley of the Judrio, the heights above Cormons. But such efforts could do no more than delay the enemy's advance; the respite that the Italian Army so urgently needed to pull itself together, to reassemble its units, redistribute its artillery, and, in short, gather into one hand again the scattered threads of control, could be found only behind the Tagliamento River, forty miles back from the old front line. [Sidenote: Rain fills the Isonzo and holds back the enemy.]