With the French in France and Salonika Part 7

A man in a fez whispers to you impressively: "La livre turque est encore d'un usage fort courant. La valeur au pair est de francs vingt-deux." But at this the Armenian shrieks violently. He scorns Turkish money and advises Italian lire. At the idea of lire the crowd howl. They hurl at you instead francs, piastres, paras, drachmas, lepta, metalliks, mejidis, centimes, and English s.h.i.+llings. The money-changer argues with them gravely. He does not send for the police to drive them away. He does not tell them: "This is none of your business." He knows better. In Salonika, it is their business.

In Salonika, after money, the thing of most consequence is conversation.

Men who are talking always have the right of way. When two men of Salonika are seized with a craving for conversation, they feel, until that craving is satisfied, that nothing else is important. So, when the ruling pa.s.sion grips them, no matter where they may meet, they stop dead in their tracks and talk. If possible they select the spot, where by standing still they can cause the greatest amount of inconvenience to the largest number of people. They do not withdraw from the sidewalk. On the contrary, as best suited for conversation, they prefer the middle of it, the doorway of a cafe, or the centre aisle of a restaurant. Of the people who wish to pa.s.s they are as unconscious as a Chinaman smoking opium is unconscious of the sightseers from up-town. That they are talking is all that counts. They feel every one else should appreciate that. Because the Allies failed to appreciate it, they gained a reputation for rudeness. A French car, flying the flag of the general, a squad of Tommies under arms, a motor-cyclist carrying despatches could not understand that a conversation on a street crossing was a sacred ceremony. So they shouldered the conversationalists aside or splashed them with mud. It was intolerable. Had they stamped into a mosque in their hobnailed boots, on account of their faulty religious training, the Salonikans might have excused them. But that a man driving an ambulance full of wounded should think he had the right to disturb a conversation that was blocking the traffic of only the entire water-front was a discourtesy no Salonikan could comprehend.

The wonder was that among so many mixed races the clashes were so few.

In one place seldom have people of so many different nationalities met, and with interests so absolutely opposed. It was a situation that would have been serious had it not been comic. For causing it, for permitting it to continue, Greece was responsible. Her position was not happy. She was between the Allies and the Kaiser. Than Greece, no country is more vulnerable from an attack by sea; and if she offended the Allies, their combined fleets at Malta and Lemnos could seize all her little islands and seaports. If she offended the Kaiser, he would send the Bulgarians into eastern Thrace and take Salonika, from which only two years before Greece had dispossessed them. Her position was indeed most difficult. As the barber at the Grande Bretange in Athens told me: "It makes me a headache."

On many a better head than his it had the same effect. King Constantine, because he believed it was best for Greece, wanted to keep his country neutral. But after Venizelos had invited the Allies to make a landing-place and a base for their armies at Salonika, Greece was no longer neutral. If our government invited 170,000 German troops to land at Portland, and through Maine invade Canada, our neutrality would be lost. The neutrality of Greece was lost, but Constantine would not see that. He hoped, although 170,000 fighting men are not easy to hide, that the Kaiser also would not see it. It was a very forlorn hope. The Allies also cherished a hope. It was that Constantine not only would look the other way while they slipped across his country, but would cast off all pretense of neutrality and join them. So, as far as was possible, they avoided giving offense. They a.s.sisted him in his pretense of neutrality.

And that was what caused the situation. It was worthy of a comic opera.

Before the return of the allied troops to Salonika, there were on the neutral soil of Greece, divided between Salonika and the front in Serbia, 110,000 French soldiers and 60,000 British. Of these, 100,000 were in Salonika. The advanced British base was at Doiran and the French advanced base at Strumnitza railroad-station. In both places martial law existed. But at the main base, at Salonika, both armies were under the local authority of the Greeks. They submitted to the authority of the Greeks because they wanted to keep up the superst.i.tion that Salonika was a neutral port, when the mere fact that they were there proved she was not. It was a situation almost unparalleled in military history. At the base of a French and of a British army, numbering together 170,000 men, the generals who commanded them possessed less local authority than one Greek policeman. They were guests. They were invited guests of the Greek, and they had no more right to object to his other guests or to rearrange his house rules than would you have the right, when a guest in a strange club, to reprimand the servants. The Allies had in the streets military police; but they held authority over only soldiers of their own country; they could not interfere with a Greek soldier, or with a civilian of any nation, and even the provost guard sent out at night was composed not alone of French and English but of an equal number of Greeks. I often wondered in what language they issued commands. As an instance of how strictly the Allies recognized the authority of the neutral Greek, and how jealously he guarded it, there was the case of the Entente Cafe. The proprietor of the Entente Cafe was a Greek. A British soldier was ill-treated in his cafe, and by the British commanding officer the place, so far as British soldiers and sailors were concerned, was declared "out of bounds." A notice to that effect was hung in the window. But it was a Greek policeman who placed it there.

In matters much more important, the fact that the Allies were in a neutral seaport greatly embarra.s.sed them. They were not allowed to censor news despatches nor to examine the pa.s.sports of those who arrived and departed. The question of the censors.h.i.+p was not so serious as it might appear. General Sarrail explained to the correspondents what might and what might not be sent, and though what we wrote was not read in Salonika by a French or British censor, General Sarrail knew it would be read by censors of the Allies at Malta, Rome, Paris, and London. Any news despatch that, unscathed, ran that gantlet, while it might not help the Allies certainly would not harm them. One cablegram of three hundred words, sent by an American correspondent, after it had been blue-pencilled by the Greek censors in Salonika and Athens, and by the four allied censors, arrived at his London office consisting entirely of "ands" and "thes." So, if not from their censors, at least from the correspondents, the Allies were protected. But against the really serious danger of spies they were helpless. In New York the water-fronts are guarded. Unless he is known, no one can set foot upon a wharf. Night and day, against spies and German military attaches bearing explosive bombs, steamers loading munitions are surrounded by police, watchmen, and detectives. But in Salonika the wharfs were as free to any one as a park bench, and the quay supplied every spy, German, Bulgarian, Turk or Austrian, with an uninterrupted view. To suppose spies did not avail themselves of this opportunity is to insult their intelligence.

They swarmed. In solid formation spies lined the quay. For every landing-party of bluejackets they formed a committee of welcome. Of every man, gun, horse, and box of ammunition that came ash.o.r.e they kept tally. On one side of the wharf stood "P. N. T. O.," princ.i.p.al naval transport officer, in gold braid, ribbons, and armlet, keeping an eye on every box of sh.e.l.l, gun-carriage, and caisson that was swung from a transport, and twenty feet from him, and keeping count with him, would be two dozen spies. And, to make it worse, the P. N. T. O. knew they were spies. The cold was intense and wood so scarce that to obtain it men used to row out two miles and collect the boxes thrown overboard from the transports and battles.h.i.+ps. Half of these men had but the slightest interest in kindling-wood; they were learning the position of each battles.h.i.+p, counting her guns, noting their caliber, counting the men crowding the rails of the transports, reading the insignia on their shoulder-straps, and, as commands and orders were wigwagged from s.h.i.+p to s.h.i.+p, writing them down. Other spies took the trouble to disguise themselves in rags and turbans, and, mixing with the Tommies, sold them sweetmeats, fruit, and cigarettes. The spy told the Tommy he was his ally, a Serbian refugee; and Tommy, or the _poilu_, to whom Bulgarians, Turks, and Serbians all look alike, received him as a comrade.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph, copyright by American Press a.s.sociation._

"The quay supplied every spy--German, Bulgarian, Turk, or Austrian--with an uninterrupted view."]

"You had a rough pa.s.sage from Ma.r.s.eilles," ventures the spy. "We come from the peninsula," says Tommy. "Three thousand of you on such a little s.h.i.+p!" exclaims the sympathetic Serbian. "You must have been crowded!"

"Crowded as h.e.l.l," corrects Tommy, "because there are five thousand of us." Over these common spies were master spies, Turkish and German officers from Berlin and Constantinople. They sat in the same restaurants with the French and English officers. They were in mufti, but had they appeared in uniform, while it might have led to a riot, in this neutral port they would have been entirely within their rights.

The clearing-houses for the spies were the consulates of Austria, Turkey, and Germany. From there what information the spies turned in was forwarded to the front. The Allies were helpless to prevent. How helpless may be judged from these quotations that are translated from _Phos_, a Greek newspaper published daily in Salonika, and which any one could buy in the streets. "The English and French forces mean to retreat. Yesterday six trains of two hundred and forty wagons came from the front with munitions." "The Allies' first line of defense will be at Soulowo, Doiran, Goumenitz. At Topsin and Zachouna intrenchments have not yet been started, but strong positions have been taken up at Chortiatis and Nihor." "Yesterday the landing of British reinforcements continued, amounting to 15,000. The guns and munitions were out of date.

The position of the Allies' battles.h.i.+ps has been changed. They are now inside the harbor." The most exacting German General Staff could not ask for better service than that! When the Allies retreated from Serbia into Salonika every one expected the enemy would pursue; and thousands fled from the city. But the Germans did not pursue, and the reason may have been because their spies kept them so well informed. If you hold four knaves and, by stealing a look at your opponent's hand, see he has four kings, to attempt to fight him would be suicide. So, in the end, the very freedom with which the spies moved about Salonika may have been for good. They may have prevented the loss of many lives.

During these strenuous days the position of the Greek army in Salonika was most difficult. There were of their soldiers nearly as many as there were French and British combined, and they resented the presence of the foreigners in their new city and they showed it. But they could not show it in such a way as to give offense, because they did not know but that on the morrow with the Allies they would be fighting shoulder to shoulder. And then, again, they did not know but that on the morrow they might be with the Germans and fighting against the Allies, gun to gun.

Not knowing just how they stood with anybody, and to show they resented the invasion of their newly won country by the Allies, the Greeks tried to keep proudly aloof. In this they failed. For any one to flock by himself in Salonika was impossible. In a long experience of cities swamped by conventions, inaugurations, and coronations, of all I ever saw, Salonika was the most deeply submerged. During the j.a.panese-Russian War the j.a.panese told the correspondents there were no horses in Corea, and that before leaving j.a.pan each should supply himself with one.

Dinwiddie refused to obey. The j.a.panese warned him if he did not take a pony with him he would be forced to accompany the army on foot.

"There will always," replied Dinwiddie, "be a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie." It became a famous saying. When the alarmist tells you all the rooms in all the hotels are engaged; that people are sleeping on cots and billiard-tables; that there are no front-row seats for the Follies, no berths in any cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie. The rule is that the hotel clerk discovers a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges a front-row seat, and the s.h.i.+p's doctor sells you a berth in the sick bay.

But in Salonika the rule failed. As already explained, Salonika always is overcrowded. Suddenly, added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000 Greek soldiers, their officers, and with many of them their families, 60,000 British soldiers and sailors, 110,000 French soldiers and sailors, and no one knows how many thousand Serbian soldiers and refugees, both the rich and the dest.i.tute. The population was quadrupled; and four into one you can't. Four men cannot with comfort occupy a cot built for one, four men at the same time cannot sit on the same chair in a restaurant, four men cannot stand on that spot in the street where previously there was not room enough for one. Still less possible is it for three military motor-trucks to occupy the s.p.a.ce in the street originally intended for one small donkey. Of Salonika, a local French author has written: "When one enters the city he is conscious of a cry, continuous and piercing. A cry unique and monotonous, always resembling itself. It is the clamor of Salonika."

Every one who has visited the East, where every one lives in the streets, knows the sound. It is like the murmur of a stage mob. Imagine, then, that "clamor of Salonika" increased by the rumble and roar over the huge paving-stones of thousands of giant motor-trucks; by the beat of the iron-shod hoofs of cavalry, the iron-shod boots of men marching in squads, companies, regiments, the shrieks of peasants herding flocks of sheep, goats, turkeys, cattle; the shouts of bootblacks, boatmen, sweetmeat venders; newsboys crying the names of Greek papers that sound like "Hi hippi hippi hi," "Teyang Teyang Teyah"; by the tin horns of the trolley-cars, the sirens of automobiles, the warning whistles of steamers, of steam-launches, of donkey-engines; the creaking of cordage and chains on cargo-hoists, and by the voices of 300,000 men speaking different languages, and each, that he may be heard above it, adding to the tumult. For once the alarmist was right. There were no rooms in any hotel. Early in the rush John McCutcheon, William G. Shepherd, John Ba.s.s, and James Hare had taken the quarters left vacant by the Austrian Club in the Hotel Olympus. The room was vast and overlooked the princ.i.p.al square of the city, where every Salonikan met to talk, and the only landing-place on the quay. From the balcony you could photograph, as it made fast, not forty feet from you, every cutter, gig, and launch of every war-s.h.i.+p. The late Austrian Club became the headquarters for lost and strayed Americans. For four nights, before I secured a room to myself by buying the hotel, I slept on the sofa. It was two feet too short, but I was very fortunate.

Outside, in the open halls on cots, were English, French, Greek, and Serbian officers. The place looked like a military hospital. The main salon, gilded and bemirrored, had lost its ident.i.ty. At the end overlooking the water-front were Serbian ladies taking tea; in the centre of the salon at the piano a little Greek girl taking a music lesson; and at the other end, on cots, British officers from the trenches and Serbian officers who had escaped through the snows of Albania, their muddy boots, uniforms, and swords flung on the floor, slept the drugged sleep of exhaustion.

Meals were a continuous performance and interlocked. Except at midnight, dining-rooms, cafes, and restaurants were never aired, never swept, never empty. The dishes were seldom washed; the waiters--never. People succeeded each other at table in relays, one group giving their order while the other was paying the bill. To prepare a table, a waiter with a napkin swept everything on it to the floor. War prices prevailed. Even the necessities of life were taxed. For a sixpenny tin of English pipe tobacco I paid two dollars, and Scotch whiskey rose from four francs a bottle to fifteen. On even a letter of credit it was next to impossible to obtain money, and the man who arrived without money in his belt walked the water-front. The refugees from Serbia who were glad they had escaped with their lives were able to sleep and eat only through the charity of others. Not only the peasants, but young girls and women of the rich, and more carefully nurtured cla.s.s of Serbians were glad to sleep on the ground under tents.

The scenes in the streets presented the most curious contrasts. It was the East clas.h.i.+ng with the West, and the uniforms of four armies--British, French, Greek, and Serbian--and of the navies of Italy, Russia, Greece, England, and France contrasted with the dress of civilians of every nation. There were the officers of Greece and Serbia in smart uniforms of many colors--blue, green, gray--with much gold and silver braid, and wearing swords which in this war are obsolete; there were English officers, generals of many wars, and red-cheeked boys from Eton, clad in businesslike khaki, with huge, cape-like collars of red fox or wolf skin, and carrying, in place of the sword, a hunting-crop or a walking-stick; there were English bluejackets and marines, Scotch Highlanders, who were as much intrigued over the petticoats of the Evzones as were the Greeks astonished at their bare legs; there were French _poilus_ wearing the steel casque, French aviators in short, s.h.a.ggy fur coats that gave them the look of a grizzly bear balancing on his hind legs; there were Jews in gabardines, old men with the n.o.ble faces of Sargent's apostles, robed exactly as was Irving as Shylock; there were the Jewish married women in sleeveless cloaks of green silk trimmed with rich fur, and each wearing on her head a cus.h.i.+on of green that hung below her shoulders; there were Greek priests with matted hair reaching to the waist, and Turkish women, their faces hidden in yashmaks, who looked through them with horror, or envy, at the English, Scotch, and American nurses, with their cheeks bronzed by snow, sleet, and sun, wearing men's hobnailed boots, men's blouses, and, across their b.r.e.a.s.t.s, war medals for valor.

All day long these people of all races, with conflicting purposes, speaking, or shrieking, in a dozen different tongues, pushed, shoved, and shouldered. At night, while the bedlam of sounds grew less, the picture became more wonderful. The lamps of automobiles would suddenly pierce the blackness, or the blazing doors of a cinema would show in the dark street, the vast crowd pus.h.i.+ng, slipping, struggling for a foothold on the muddy stones. In the circle of light cast by the automobiles, out of the ma.s.s a single face would flash--a face burned by the sun of the Dardanelles or frost-bitten by the snows of the Balkans.

Above it might be the gold visor and scarlet band of a "Bra.s.s Hat,"

staff-officer, the fur kepi of a Serbian refugee, the steel helmet of a French soldier, the "bonnet" of a Highlander, the white cap of a navy officer, the ta.s.sel of an Evzone, a red fez, a turban of rags.

This lasted until the Allies retreated upon Salonika, and the Greek army, to give them a clear field in which to fight, withdrew, 100,000 of them in two days, carrying with them tens of thousands of civilians--those who were pro-Germans, and Greeks, Jews, and Serbians. The civilians were flying before the expected advance of the Bulgar-German forces. But the Central Powers, possibly well informed by their spies, did not attack. That was several months ago, and at this writing they have not yet attacked. What one man saw of the approaches to Salonika from the north leads him to think that the longer the attack of the Bulgar-Germans is postponed the better it will be--for the Bulgar-Germans.

CHAPTER VII

TWO BOYS AGAINST AN ARMY

SALONIKA, December, 1915.

On the day the retreat began from Krivolak, General Sarrail, commanding the Allies in Serbia, gave us permission to visit the French and English front. The French advanced position, and a large amount of ammunition, six hundred sh.e.l.ls to each gun, were then at Krivolak, and the English base at Doiran. We left the train at Doiran, but our French "guide" had not informed the English a "mission militaire" was descending upon them, and in consequence at Doiran there were no conveyances to meet us. So, a charming English captain commandeered for us a vast motor-truck.

Stretched above it were ribs to support a canvas top, and by clinging to these, as at home on the Elevated we hang to a strap, we managed to avoid being b.u.mped out into the road.

The English captain, who seemed to have nothing else on his hands, volunteered to act as our escort, and on a splendid hunter galloped ahead of and at the side of the lorry, and, much like a conductor on a sight-seeing car, pointed out the objects of interest. When not explaining he was absent-mindedly jumping his horse over swollen streams, ravines, and fallen walls. We found him much more interesting to watch than the scenery.

The scenery was desolate and bleak. It consisted of hills that opened into other hills, from the summit of which more hills stretched to a horizon entirely of mountains. They did not form ridges but, like men in a crowd, shouldered into one another. They were of a soft rock and covered with snow, above which to the height of your waist rose scrub pine-trees and bushes of holly. The rain and snow that ran down their slopes had turned the land into a sea of mud, and had swamped the stone roads. In walking, for each step you took forward you skidded and slid several yards back. If you had an hour to spare you had time for a ten-minute walk.

In our motor-truck we circled Lake Doiran, and a mile from the station came to a stone obelisk. When we pa.s.sed it our guide on horseback shouted to us that we had crossed the boundary from Greece, and were now in Serbia. The lake is five miles wide and landlocked, and the road kept close to the water's edge. It led us through little mud villages with houses of mud and wattle, and some of stone with tiled roofs and rafters, and beams showing through the cement. The second story projected like those of the Spanish blockhouses in Cuba, and the log forts from which, in the days when there were no hyphenated Americans, our forefathers fought the Indians.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph copyright by Medem Photo Service._

"Hills bare of trees, from which the snow that ran down their slopes had turned the road into a sea of mud."]

Except for some fishermen, the Serbians had abandoned these villages, and they were occupied by English army service men and infantry. The "front," which was hidden away among the jumble of hills, seemed, when we reached it, to consist entirely of artillery. All along the road the Tommies were waging a hopeless war against the mud, shovelling it off the stone road to keep the many motor-trucks from skidding over a precipice, or against the cold making shelters of it, or was.h.i.+ng it out of their uniforms and off their persons.

s.h.i.+vering from ears to heels and with teeth rattling, for they had come from the Dardanelles, they stood stripped to the waist scrubbing their sun-tanned chests and shoulders with ice-water. It was a spectacle that inspired confidence. When a man is so keen after water to wash in that he will kick the top off a frozen lake to get it, a little thing like a barb-wire entanglement will not halt him.

The cold of those hills was like no cold I had ever felt. Officers who had hunted in northern Russia, in the Himalayas, in Alaska, a.s.sured us that never had they so suffered. The men we pa.s.sed, who were in the ambulances, were down either with pneumonia or frost-bite. Many had lost toes and fingers. And it was not because they were not warmly clad.[B]

[Footnote B: It has been charged that the British troops in the Balkans wore the same tropic uniforms they wore in the Dardanelles. This was necessarily true, when first they landed, but almost at once the winter uniform was issued to all of them. I saw no British or French soldier who was not properly and warmly clad, with overcoat, m.u.f.fler, extra waistcoat, and gloves. And while all, both officers and men, cursed the cold, none complained that he had not been appropriately clothed to meet it. R. H. D.]

Last winter in France had taught the war office how to dress the part; but nothing had prepared them for the cold of the Balkans. And to add to their distress, for it was all of that, there was no fire-wood. The hills were bare of trees, and such cold as they endured could not be fought with green twigs.

It was not the brisk, invigorating cold that invites you out of doors.

It had no cheery, healthful appeal to skates, toboggans, and the jangling bells of a cutter. It was the damp, clammy, penetrating cold of a dungeon, of an unventilated ice-chest, of a morgue. Your clothes did not warm you, the heat of your body had to warm your clothes. And warm, also, all of the surrounding hills.

Between the road and the margin of the lake were bamboo reeds as tall as lances, and at the edge of these were gathered myriads of ducks. The fishermen were engaged in bombarding the ducks with rocks. They went about this in a methodical fas.h.i.+on. All around the lake, concealed in the reeds and lifted a few feet above the water they had raised huts on piles. In front of these huts was a ledge or balcony. They looked like overgrown bird-houses on stilts.

One fisherman waited in a boat to pick up the dead ducks, and the other hurled stones from a sling. It was the same kind of a sling as the one with which David slew Goliath. In Athens I saw small boys using it to throw stones at an electric-light pole. The one the fisherman used was about eight feet long. To get the momentum he whirled it swiftly above his head as a cowboy swings a lariat, and then let one end fly loose, and the stone, escaping, smashed into the ma.s.s of ducks. If it stunned or killed a duck the human water-spaniel in the boat would row out and retrieve it. To duck hunters at home the sport would chiefly recommend itself through the cheapness of the ammunition.

On the road we met relays of water-carts and wagons that had been up the hills with food for the gunners at the front; and engineers were at work repairing the stone bridges or digging detours to avoid those that had disappeared. They had been built to support no greater burden than a flock of sheep, an ox-cart, or what a donkey can carry on his back, and the a.s.sault of the British motor-trucks and French six-inch guns had driven them deep into the mud.

After ten miles we came to what a staff officer would call an "advanced base," but which was locally designated the "Dump." At the side of the road, much of it uncovered to the snow, were stores of ammunition, "bully beef," and barb-wire. The camp bore all the signs of a temporary halting place. It was just what the Tommies called it, a dump. We had not been told then that the Allies were withdrawing, but one did not have to be a military expert to see that there was excellent reason why they should.

They were so few. Whatever the force was against them, the force I saw was not strong enough to hold the ground, not that it covered, but over which it was sprinkled. There were outposts without supports, supports without reserves. A squad was expected to perform the duties of a company. Where a brigade was needed there was less than a battalion.

Against the white ma.s.ses of the mountains and the desolate landscape without trees, houses, huts, without any sign of human habitation, the scattered groups of khaki only accented the bleak loneliness.

At the dump we had exchanged for the impromptu motor-truck, automobiles of the French staff, and as "Jimmie" Hare and I were alone in one of them we could stop where we liked. So we halted where an English battery was going into action. It had dug itself into the side of a hill and covered itself with snow and pine branches. Somewhere on one of the neighboring hills the "spotter" was telephoning the range. The gunners could not see at what they were firing. They could see only the high hill of rock and snow, at the base of which they stood shoulder high in their mud cellars. Ten yards to the rear of them was what looked like a newly made grave reverently covered with pine boughs. Through these a rat-faced young man, with the receivers of a telephone clamped to his ears, pushed his head.

[Ill.u.s.tration: _From a photograph by William G. Shepherd._

John T. McCutcheon. John F. Ba.s.s.

Richard Harding Davis. James H. Hare.