“I’d rather walk here out of sight,” Bonello said.
“All right. We’ll walk along the tracks.”
“Do you think we can get through?” Aymo asked.
“Sure. There aren’t very many of them yet. We’ll go through in the dark.”
“What was that staff car doing?”
“Christ knows,” I said. We kept on up the tracks. Bonello tired of walking in the mud of the embankment and came up with the rest of us. The railway moved south away from the highway now and we could not see what passed along the road. A short bridge over a canal was blown up but we climbed across on what was left of the span. We heard firing ahead of us.
We came up on the railway beyond the canal. It went on straight toward the town across the low fields. We could see the line of the other railway ahead of us. To the north was the main road where we had seen the cyclists; to the south there was a small branch-road across the fields with thick trees on each side. I thought we had better cut to the south and work around the town that way and across country toward Campoformio and the main road to the Tagliamento. We could avoid the main line of the retreat by keeping to the secondary roads beyond Udine. I knew there were plenty of side-roads across the plain. I started down the embankment.
“Come on,” I said. We would make for the sideroad and work to the south of the town. We all started down the embankment. A shot was fired at us from the side-road. The bullet went into the mud of the embankment.
“Go on back,” I shouted. I started up the embankment, slipping in the mud. The drivers were ahead of
