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.]

[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.