"Quite all right, sir, thank you," he answered, and slinging the bulging
sack across his shoulders, the despatch-rider straddled his battered
bicycle and set off on a sinuous path through the wedged traffic, with
his bent front-wheel writhing like a tortured snake.

[Sidenote: Finding the way to reach Padua.]

[Sidenote: Walking single file through the mud.]

This news of the existence of a _sosistenza_ was good hearing. I myself
had not the least idea of how to get to Padua, the nearest place from
which I could hope to send a telegram, except by walking there; and
Padua was sixty miles along the railway-line. Two days' walking, two
brown loaves the gift of the Italian officer in charge of the
bread-depot, and a stick of chocolate; it was a prospect of no
allurement. I stepped into place in the long trail of refugees and
started, however. It needed no more than two hours of stumbling over
sleepers and crunching on the rough stone ballast of the track to make
of me as tired and dull-witted a hobo as the rest. We all walked in
single file, keeping as far as possible to a strip of soft mud at the
side of the line where the going was easier, and one's whole mind had
become before long entirely concentrated on nothing more than the
increasing soreness of two tired feet and the gradual development of a
blister on a big toe. From Portogruaro onward, however, my own personal
luck changed, and by getting one lift after another I reached Padua the
same night.

[Sidenote: British guns wait to cross.]

[Sidenote: An Italian colonel attempts to keep order on the bridge.]