From Salonica

June 2, 1916.

I HAVE been here seven months now and am beginning to feel like an old inhabitant. We reached here early in November, and now it is June. One’s main impression of this country, if one is a native of northern Europe, is sunshine and ever sunshine blazing over the slender whiteness of minarets. I speak now of the town and not of the moors beyond. Macedonia, like Caledonia, is ‘stern and wild,’ though I doubt much whether its inhabitants are ‘romantic children.’

We came here in November and had to begin at the beginning. Luckily there was the harbor and three good quays. On them we poured our men, our stores and ammunition, to say nothing of our mules and horses, guns, ovens, and pontoons. How we sorted ourselves all out is still a mystery. Men slept literally anywhere, in the mud, in the cold, in passable hotels. I, as an old campaigner, had little to complain about. I slept in a bed (and quite a good bed too), after seeing to it that my men were under cover. They took it all good-humoredly, and so went the first night. The next day I had time to skirmish and constituted myself the unit’s billeting officer. I found rooms for all my friends, and the mosquitoes took stock of us. They were on the wane, however, a dying race, and only Captain F—, a succulent morsel, was pretty properly attacked. Perhaps some of my own immunity was bought at the cost of a night’s rest.

I was given a ‘dump’ of canned meat and biscuit, a string of motor-lorries, a herd of native labor, and told to feed the division, more or less. My men and I and the native labor checked and filled up the lorries. We worked by some kind of artificial light fed by benzine. The native laborers were Greek refugees from Thrace and Asia Minor, and we shoved them along by signs and plentiful cursing. We were five Europeans to eighty of these enigmas. We half expected them to cut our throats in the dark and make off with the meat and biscuit. Why they did not do so, I have never discovered. However, about one o’clock in the morning the heavens began to open and the stormy winds to blow. Out went our flimsy lights, down came the rain. A lorry driver, returned from up country, reported a bridge carried away and all the rest of the lorries stuck. It seemed about time to close the shop. The piece of waste land which was the scene of this first act had now become a swamp, the darkness was illuminated only by flashes of lightning, we Were all wet to the skin; so I gave the signal to retire, which was obeyed with alacrity. Home I floundered to bed, leaving the division to ‘the unconsumed portion of its emergency ration.’ Nor did the division take much hurt. I can see it bivouacked, huddled together, wet and muddied, snoring blissfully, too tired to ‘grouse.’

So much for Chaos. To-day the swamp where I worked on that first night is drained and firm; good roads lead to it, good roads run away inland and climb the hills; the flimsy bridges of yesterday are replaced by work unknown in Macedonia since the days of the Roman legionaries; and the legionaries of the Allies now repose in cities of wood and canvas, pitched in the shadow of prehistoric tumuli or covering hillsides more ancient still. Down in the dusty plain, too, are our legions, and even in the sun-baked marshland to the east — Serb, French, and British, and at one point scores of Canadians.

Mud and dust seem to be the leading products of this side of Macedonia. The soil is a friable, crumbling substance — limestone I fancy — which when dry is a powder, when wet a paste. On a dry, windy day your eyes are filled with the stuff; on a rainy day you flounder or your car skids and wallows. But mostly we have the sun, and now at noon a stillness. The heat pours down, your energy departs from you, and toward evening you revive. Such is June here. The winter was different — days of an English April, varied by sudden icy spells when the wind came down the Vardar valley. Inland among the mountains the cold was fierce. Our poor fellows had the worst of it just before and during the retreat.

The retreat and the four air raids are the only things that have happened since we came here, except for our troubles with the Greek government, which while I write (June 3) seem to be exceptionally flourishing. Outside this quiet room, Allied troops and marines are moving to positions before the Prefecture and Post Office, and I daresay that, by the time this letter is read, the administration of Greek Macedonia will be in the capable hands of General Sarrail.

But to return to events that have happened. The retreat of the Allies from Serbia made most of us sit up. It was a very breathless business, of which the full story will be told in time. The men that came down were pretty well spent — spent to the world, in fact, and rather relieved to find themselves alive.

Of the four air raids I have a somewhat closer knowledge. The first was just a pretty picture seen against a cloudless sky. The Taubes — we always call them Taubes — looked like wicked moths playing amid white puffs of shrapnel. They did little damage and soon retired. The first Zeppelin was a sterner foe. It came when we were all innocently asleep; and at two o’clock in the morning, waking or sleeping, a man’s courage is not at its proudest.

I was billeted at that time in a little smelly house of three floors and six apartments. The house was packed with the original tenants, Jew and Greek, together with such lodgers as myself. In our flat of four rooms and a kitchen were the landlord and his lady, four sons and two daughters. The sons slept on the sitting-room floor, and if you came home in the dark you were likely to tread on them. Two French officers shared the best bedroom, while I slept alone in the second best. Bangbang-bang went the bombs from the Zeppelin; the French officers cried, ‘ En bas! ’ and the boys banged at my door yelling, ‘ Embros! ’ which is Greek for ‘Forwards!’ As it did n’t seem to matter much where one went, the whole thing, failing dugouts, being purely a question of luck, I stayed in bed and touched wood. The crashes of the big bombs were terrifying. The house shook with each explosion; but as all things — good or bad — must come to an end, so too, after a while, ended this business. A wonderful orangecolored blaze lit up the world outside, and so I got out of bed and watched it, deciding at last to dress and see things at close quarters.

Three hundred yards from the house, in the middle of a road, was the first big hole. I turned on my electric torch and found a sergeant of my late unit, apparently looking for something he had lost.

‘What is it, Cryer?’ I asked. ‘Money?’

' ‘I’m after a souvenir,’ he aswered. And I left him groping for a relic to send home.

Most of the stragglers I met were looking out for fragments of the German bombs; and yet, a hundred yards farther on blazed one of the biggest and most lovely fires a man could wish to see.

At home I found all the tenants of the house assembled in a room on the ground floor, Jews and Gentiles, ladies and gentlemen, young and middleaged and old. The invaded tenant made coffee, cigarettes were lit, and everybody discussed the visitor. Most of us were in a fine state of déshabille. This was my first appearance in Salonica society. They stayed up, so they told me afterwards, till daylight.

I was three months in this billet with the Jewish family and the French officers before I went under canvas. It was in rather a low quarter of the town, but handy for my work. The Florentins were poor but proud Jews; they had good blood, and had been better off. But Florentin Senior had lost his job shortly after the Greeks came in and ruined Salonica commercially, and ever since they had been living by expedients. The sons helped a little, but the two French officers and I were the best expedients of the lot. The war was really a stroke of luck for the Florentins. The old man is now the overseer of a gang of navvies who are employed on one of the new roads we have made and are continuing to make.

The children, of whom there were four little ones, were likable, and fiercely intelligent, as is often the way with Jews. Niña, the fourteen-year-old girl, — her mother had married at fifteen, — used to say, ‘I am not pretty

—I am too thin.’ She had no illusions about this world or the next. ‘We believe in God,’ she would chaff me, ‘while you believe in Jesus Christ.’ To believe in Jesus Christ was with her rather a piece of amiable folly than an act of faith. ‘ I’m not so sure that I believe in God after all,’ she sometimes admitted. They all, however, believed whole-heartedly in a mythical person called ‘Rothschild.’

‘Rothschild,’ so I learned, dwelt in London and spent millions on his lightest whim. He had a horse that cost a million, he had pleasures and palaces; in short, he was It. If I had told them that the present Lord Rothschild is a bearded giant with a passion for natural history and of a retiring and quiet habit, they would never have believed me. Out here he is a symbol rather than a human being. Even Eli, the third boy, who believed in nothing else, believed in Rothschild. Eli was a proGerman because he was a pro-Turk. As we grew more friendly he admitted it.

‘When the Turks were here,’ he used to say, ‘ everything was cheap. The Greeks have made everything dear.’ He wished me no ill, but he would have been made entirely happy had the whole lot of us, and especially the Greeks, been driven headlong into the Ægean Sea. The Turks would come back then, so he fancied, and Turk and Jew have always been able to live together.

There was one exception to this rule. In Israel Zangwill’s book, Dreamers of the Ghetto, you will find the story of Sabbatei Zevi. He was a Jew who wanted to convert the Turk to Judaism. This was going a bit too far. So Sabbatei — who incidentally was a pseudo-Messiah with a large following — was given the choice between Islam and death. He chose Islam, and being a skillful theologian, naturally discovered most excellent reasons. These he revealed to his followers, and several thousands went over with him. They are called Deunmehs, meaning, ‘the converted,’ and are a feature of Salonica to-day. I should have said that Sabbatei’s strange adventure happened three hundred years ago.

These Deunmehs are perhaps the strangest of the many strange people who inhabit Salonica. The men wear the fez, the women the veil, but not too strictly. Though publicly they profess the Mohammedan religion and their chief mosque is the richest in the town, in secret they are said to cling to Judaism, and in fact they marry only one wife, who is chosen from their own community, and they are an active, commercially prosperous people widely separate from the true Mohammedan. Once, by an accident, I had quite a conversation with two Deunmeh ladies. It was conducted in French, and was mainly about French literature and especially Pierre Loti. Their chaperon arrived, a yellow-skinned female with black eyes and a nose like a beak. Needless to say, she broke up the meeting and made the girls lower their veils. I had time to divine a busy fancy, a keen and entirely bookish speculation on life as it is lived in Europe.

A curious feature of Salonica is that everybody says ‘Europe’ when speaking of the countries outside the Balkans. Here, apparently, we are not in Europe, and there is some sense in the notion. Move away from the modern city which sprawls all white and stucco along the bay, and go inland to where the old town climbs the hill. Swiftly you enter another world.

Old Salonica is beautiful, new Salonica is tawdry, cheap, and garish. Uphill there are no sidewalks, no gas, no electric light, and water is drawn from wells or fountains.

Uphill, past the Roman road that runs from Durazzo to Constantinople, you find the quiet mosques and the secret, hidden houses. There are narrow, winding ways whose blank walls every now and again are pierced by the doors through which the veiled women of the Turkish quarter descend into the modern city. The life beyond those walls is hidden from the infidel. In a romantic mood you may conceive it as passionate and seductive; my own view is that it is tedious, depressing, and airless. The Turk in Europe is a playedout monster, hard up, shabby, with no one to squeeze or pillage — for he was ever a brigand or a parasite. Here he survives in greasy eating-houses, or as barber, porter, cobbler; and only in a few cases is he a merchant of any consequence. Yet though his day be spent, and his cemeteries — those acres of cemeteries! — are places of desolation that will soon be one with the moor and waste outside the walls, in his mosques and their courtyards he is memorable and even lovable. There alone in all Salonica may you find quiet, peace, and contemplation. You enter, and the Greeks, whose flag flies on the citadel, seem like a lot of chattering, noisy sparrows. A puny race, nervous, unstable, they seem in this quarter. I am told that the Greeks of the islands and the hills are more manly. The Cretan police who have been imported here in some number certainly testify to another strain: they are handsome fellows and carry themselves proudly.

Salonica, however, whether Greek, Turk, or Macedonian, is primarily a Jewish city: the bulk of its population and most of its enterprise are governed by that faith. On Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, the town keeps holiday. Exiled from Spain in the days of the Inquisition, the Jews of Salonica still speak a language which, though written in Hebrew characters, is akin to pure Castilian. This Judæo-Espagnol, as it is called, is admixed with Italian and Turkish; and though it possesses no literature, it is eloquent in half-a-dozen periodicals, the chief of which no Spaniard would recognize, although the Hebrew letters when spelt out announce them as El Liberal and El Avenir.

The French language, thanks to several excellent schools and charitable foundations, is gradually replacing the dialect brought from Spain; and with it, too, will go the distinctive Jewish dress and headdress worn by the women, a hideous affair of greens, yellows, purple, scarlet, and seed-pearls. Already the younger generation looks to Paris, and if France, in addition to nice clothes and a congenial civilization, could only promise the material prosperity which went with the Sultans and the Turk, all Salonica Jewry would gladly embrace the tricolor.

Having read so far, you will perhaps recall my attention to the fact that we are at war, and that my business is to deal with this rather than with the larger fauna of Macedonia. Most of the year, however, the war has shifted from this quarter; and apart from the gunners, whose thunders punctuate the writing of these notes and sketches, we are all busy with routine-work which, save for a higher pressure, is very like the work of peace. Incidentally I may say that since I began this paper, I have shifted toward the Serbian frontier, a line of lake and hills, and am now encamped in a paradise of pied meadows, ever-changing butterflies, and plentiful tortoises. I sit out of doors, in the never-failing sunshine, and continue. Bang go the guns, and miles away in the Bulgar lines you see the smoke that follows the bursting of the heavy shells. Our business all winter was to make this possible.

To me now, looking back, it was chiefly a matter of lost sleep, of lorries going endlessly up country, night and day, and of brother officers, here and there, getting very ragged about the nerves. Much of that time I was on ‘night duty,’ and an agreeable feature of my work was that it brought me into close contact with the Navy.

Our Senior Service, unlike our Army, was ready for war; was, indeed, seemingly ready for anything and everybody. Here no improvisation was needed: a sailor is a sailor, whether he belong to the Grand Fleet or be only the humble master of a trawler. Gunnery is but an added virtue; the discipline and craftsmanship are there already. The fleet out here — and by fleet I mean every conceivable kind of vessel — had mainly been switched on from Gallipoli, and from lighter to battleship was full of stories and escapes that now are history. The transports interested me more than the fighting units; they came and went so pluckily, with but the slightest means of defense. Hardly one that had not its tale of a submarine, and often of several. Here and there one met the submarined now serving on another vessel. Out again they would go, making strange courses, running through the darkest nights without a light. Coming here, I had ten days of similar expectancy, enough to last me a lifetime. These seamen take such journeyings as the normal, with loads of responsibility and possible Boards of Enquiry that may cost them their career as an added burden.

Before I leave t hese seamen and their quiet heroisms, splendid efficiency, and freedom from red tape, I would like to thank them for the many glimpses they gave me of Salonica by night. Seated or lounging on their decks, or even strenuously employed, I was forever aware of the old city sprawling uphill and pricked out with its little clusters and constellations of oil-lamps, these were always beautiful, and patterned like another sky of stars; a smaller sky, enclosed like a garden by the battlemented walls of the historic town, and falling into all kinds of designs that varied with the hour as the oil ran down and lamp after lamp expired. Below on the sea-front were gas and electricity, particularly emphatic on the faces of the cinema theatres and other halls and palaces of extremely sophisticated delight, while to and fro ran well-lit electric trams; yet somehow my eyes would always go uphill to the oil-lamps and the curious twists and curvings of the Turkish streets whose lines they followed and explored. Here, under the velvet Eastern sky, was the true nocturne; the gas-lamps and the electric bulbs belonged to Europe.

More seriously interesting than these personal fancies is the active quality of the Entente which one discovers in Salonica. In France the two armies were separated; here they mingle. On the Western front, the Belgians held their section of the line, then came the British, and below them was the great French section; one hardly met a Belgian or a French soldier except by accident. Here in Macedonia we mingle freely, in fact are arriving at friendships that must survive the war; and the ridiculous thing out here is the way we go discovering one another. From a hundred British mouths I have heard what a wonderful army is that of our Ally, and that if we were one tenth part as efficient, and so forth, and so forth; and again, from my French friends I hear how wonderfully organized is the army of Great Britain, and if theirs were one tenth part as well equipped and found, and so forth, and so forth. Both parties are quite sincere; in some points each army takes the lead, and it is on a few such points that we fasten. Nor must it be forgotten that the art of war is essentially a French art, and that in the mathematical side of war, as exemplified, let us say, by gunnery and fortification, the world has never known their betters. This scientific intensity of the good French soldier has rather surprised us of the New Armies, as it must surprise any other body of amateurs, be they British, Chinese, or American. In aviation, too, the Frenchmen win our unstinted admiration, partly because they have taken over the whole of that side of our common effort, and partly on account of the splendid human material which they employ in this heroic arm. It interested me vastly to discover that many of the French ‘observers’ were young painters in normal times, and really far more preoccupied with art than with aerial duels. Young Boutet de Monvel, for instance, is such an one: he has accounted for two Taubes, and will, I hope, account for more. ‘If you don’t get the other fellow, the odds are he gets you’; yet when we dined together the other night the conversation was mostly about — CUBISM!

This was shortly after the naval gunners had brought down the Zeppelin. I assisted at that strange spectacle, and have since lost all faith in such engines of terror. It is rather tempting Providence to say so, for while I write, the anti-aircraft guns on the other side of the hill are popping away at Herr Taube, who may take a fancy to the half mile of infantry going by on the road in column of four, bands playing, and totally indifferent to the hovering pursuer. The Zeppelin, however, is a different proposition. The first time it came we all stood by helpless and gasped. The second time we were ready; and then all we had to do was to blind it with a sun of searchlights that stabbed it straight in the eye — the rest was easy marksmanship and a great blaze.

A few such exciting moments have varied the monotony of our lives during these seven mont hs. The only other diversion — and I speak for most of our officers who are entrusted with the Army’s rationing and equipment — has been the thieving propensity of the ordinary Greek. At first we were angry with them, especially when most of our motor-lorry drivers, who live and sleep in their old ’buses, had their kits stolen in an unguarded moment. We were then surrounded by a badly clad and half-fed Greek soldiery who later were ordered out of our lines. By night these brigands were a positive danger. In the wild country outside the town, one would scale the tailboard of a lorry, throw a fifty-pound case of jam overboard to his comrades, and follow after it himself; or it might be corned beef, or a bale of compressed forage. Several subalterns have told me how, returning to camp late at night by this simple method, they were startled by voices, and their electric torch showed them the swarthy face of a Greek Evzone peering over the tailboard. A good punch with the fist or the butt of a revolver sent the thief back into the darkness, whence a rifle-shot or two would follow the lorry as it jogged on to its supply depot or ordnance store. Such incidents led to armed guards and less eventful journeys.

I have said that at first we were angry, but gradually we came to recognize that thieving is a form of sport in this country, and that if found out the player will take his beating like a man. He simply shrugs his shoulders, as much as to say, ‘The luck was against me this time; I must try again.’ He gets no sympathy from the spectators. These regard his misfortune as an excellent joke and chuckle over the summary punishment inflicted. It was once my luck to detect a robber of a higher type — indeed, an acquaintance whose house stood in our lines and whose knowledge of French made conversation easy. He was a very particular little man, and had first come to me with a complaint about the filthy habits of our Greek laborers. After that we chatted often and I did what I could for him. Nominally he had a brick-and-tile business, and parcels of these goods seemed to leave his house each day. However, at a time when I was on night duty and had (1) arrested a Greek corporal for stabbing one of our workmen who had declined to steal; (2) gone through said corporal’s guard and guard-room and relieved these gentry of a barrow-load of our property; (3) got most fanatically savage with the whole Hellenic population — I noticed a light or two burning in the home of my friend the brick-and-tile merchant. ‘Now what is he up to at 1 A.M?’ I asked myself; and determined to go inside and see.

I banged at his door and stood on his doorstep. Presently his bald head looked out of a first-floor window.

‘Ouvrez!’ I commanded. As he hesitated and wished to argue, I sent for our guard, five good men with gleaming bayonets — then down he came. The door opened, and I set eyes on thirteen cases, each of fifty tins, of raspberry jam, to begin with. There were three men, two women, and some children in the house. I had a good acetylene lamp and could see everything. In the business part of the house I discovered enough of our property to fill a large van —provisions, shirts, breeches, and even barbed wire. Going upstairs into the living rooms, it occurred to me that the three men might lose their heads and knife me. I had seen such things done in panic before. However, they were merciful; indeed, the respectable little man’s nerve was so far gone that instead of answering me in French, he began jabbering away in Greek. It was all too ludicrous. Every corner and cupboard of those living-rooms was stuffed with British rations. The ladies slept on beds raised from the floor on a neat layer of packing-cases stamped ‘Wheatmeal Biscuit, 50 lbs.' They had Heinz’s pickles and Black Cat cigarettes, Clarifying Powder and Oxo Cubes. There was no end to the stuff, and when I had made my host unlock the last cupboard, I simply sat down on a packing-case and shook with laughter; and to make matters worse he was explaining everything away in a series of lies that would not have deceived a cinema audience. I left him and his associates under a guard, and neither of the two ladies seemed to appreciate having these honest British rustics in the house at such an hour of the morning. Except the men doing patrol work on the frontier, and those directly affected by air-raids, very few of my acquaintances have had a more engrossing night than the one I have attempted to describe.

To tell the truth, this Salonica campaign, always barring the retreat, is child’s play to what most of us underwent in France. What we actually have done, and that in itself is a notable feat, has been to turn a wilderness into a country fit for settlement and permanent occupation. Each day now I ride out on new-made roads, planned by the Allied engineers and made by the Allied infantry. The villages I pass are tragic with ruined houses and the desolation wrought by Turk and Comitadji. There are villages made dead by massacre and fire, and others halfstanding and half-destroyed. In some new houses have been built since the Greeks took over, and in almost all, at this season, you see that great bird, the stork, sitting on her huge nest. Really, once the mountains overpassed, it is a beautiful country, fine in climate, rich in soil, with splendid pasturages, and now so full of good roads, new light railways, and other connections as to be within easy access of the town and sea.

The sun is setting as I end these random notes. I am, as usual, outdoors, sitting on one biscuit box and writing on two others. I have found an elm tree that is shady and is moreover full of bluebirds — jays. Over the great plain I look out to Kilindir, which is being bombarded, and the three lakes. Of Lake Doiran I have only a glimpse through the broken hills. Behind the lake is an inaccessible wall of mountain which looks like the end of the world. It is the boundary of New Serbia, and there the Bulgars are perched. Sausage-shaped observation balloons go up and we pound away at one another, trying to locate and destroy gun-positions for the most part. Every other day a few deserters dribble in from the other side, looking very cheerful and full of vin ordinaire and information — the French very wisely induce the one by the other. Such is the war as we are seeing it just now. By the time this reaches you the kaleidoscope may have taken another turn.