like a stampede in a burning theater; the desperate eagerness of every person in the crowd to get on the bridge stopped almost any one from getting there.  Carts and people at the edge of the road were shoved down the embankment by the weight of the dense mass surging along its center.  And then to add to the terror of the moment there was heard above the shouts and oaths of the struggling mob a low, foreboding hum, the characteristic drone of Austrian aeroplanes.  It is hard to see what could have come of the situation but complete and bloody disaster if it had not been for the decided action of some Italian officers.  By main force they thrust into the middle of the entrance to the bridge and checked the panic with sheer personal determination.  The sound of their authoritative voices brought back the sense of discipline that had momentarily gone.  Under their orders the pushing throng sorted itself into some order.  A jibing mule was summarily shot to clear the road, and so in a few minutes, despite the constant approach of the low-flying enemy aircraft, a way was cleared for the English guns to cross the bridge.  They were scarcely over when the first Austrian machine, swooping down, dropped bombs and opened fire with its machine-gun on the tight-packed road.  The attack did not do much damage, though one British Red Cross car was filled as full of holes as a pepper-pot; but the experience showed how much worse the retreat would have been had not the heavy rain of the week-end kept the Austrian airmen in their hangars.

[Sidenote:  The army reaches Tagliamento.]

So the retiring army reached the Tagliamento, and completed the first stage of its retreat.  Once behind that barrier the Italians could be sure of a certain breathing space, but to secure its protection was the most difficult part of their rearward movement.  To the constant convergence which the lack of more than three bridges rendered necessary must be attributed much of the confusion of the retirement and the abandonment of the military equipment that was still to the east of the Tagliamento when the pressure of the enemy finally compelled their destruction.

[Sidenote:  Germans try to cross the upper course of Tagliamento.]

[Sidenote:  Enemies who cross are killed or captured.]

The Germans fully realized the formidable obstacle to the retreat of the Italians which this rain-swollen river constituted, and they made a determined effort to secure for themselves a passage across its upper course while the Second and Third Armies to the south were not yet behind the stream.  There is a bridge a few miles west of the town of Gemona which was not being used by the retreating army because of its comparatively flimsy construction.  The Tagliamento, then very high, was, like many mountain streams, subject to very rapid rises and falls.  Therefore, part of the enemy advance-guard, which was following up the Italian retirement was pushed on ahead to try to obtain