used, creeping into the refuges where the non-combatant population has
taken shelter, and choking them there like vermin in a hole. War is no
longer a civilly organized affair of pitched battles; it is a wild fury
of destruction, raging across the whole country-side like a typhoon.

If the English batteries on the Italian front had brought with them to
Italy their full organization of transport, they could have saved all
their ammunition and stores, their ordnance workshops and supplies. As
it was, they had been incorporated in the Italian Army as corps
artillery on the Italian basis; they had to take their chance of getting
transport along with every one else, and consequently of all their
equipment they could save only the guns themselves, which after all was
what chiefly mattered.

[Sidenote: A marching army does not seem as numerous as the same in
confusion.]

Discipline is a camouflage of numbers. A thousand men marching past in
column of fours does not make upon the mind the same impression of
multitude as the sight of half that number in a disordered rabble.
Regularity and compactness reduce the appearance of mass; and you
receive a profounder suggestion of size from a comparatively small pile
of natural rocks than you do from the geometrical pyramids. In the same
way an army whose formations are suddenly relaxed seems to swell
enormously in numbers. You can drive through a region where a million
men are stationed under regular military organization and get no idea of
congestion, but if those men are suddenly dissolved from a closely knit
body into a crowd of individual persons, the same country-side seems
hardly large enough to hold them all.