[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