WITH THE ALLIES IN SALONIKA
SALONIKA, December, 1915.
We left Athens on the first ship that was listed for Salonika. She was
a strange ship. During many years on various vessels in various seas,
she was the most remarkable. Every Greek loves to gamble; but for some
reason, or for that very reason, for him to gamble on shore is by law
made difficult. In consequence, as soon as the _Hermoupolis_ raised
anchor she became a floating gambling-hell. There were twenty-four
first-class passengers who were in every way first class; Greek
officers, bankers, merchants, and deputies, and their time on the
steamer from eleven each morning until four the next morning was spent
in dealing baccarat.
When the stewards, who were among the few persons on board who did
not play, tried to spread a table-cloth and serve food, they were
indignantly rebuked. The most untiring players were the captain and
the ship's officers. Whenever they found that navigating their ship
interfered with their baccarat we came to anchor. We should have reached
Salonika in a day and a half. We arrived after four days. And all of
each day and half of each night we were anchored in midstream while the
captain took the bank. The hills of Euboea and the mainland formed a
giant funnel of snow, through which the wind roared. It swept the ship
from bow to stern, turning to ice the woodwork, the velvet cushions,
even the blankets. Fortunately, it was not the kind of a ship that
supplied sheets, or we would have frozen in our berths. Outside of
the engine-room, which was aft, there was no heat of any sort, but
undaunted, the gamblers, in caps and fur coats, their breath rising in
icy clouds, crouched around the table, their frozen fingers fumbling
with the cards.
There were two charming Italians on board, a father and son--the father
absurdly youthful, the boy incredibly wise. They operate a chain of
banks through the Levant. They watched the game but did not play. The
father explained this to me. "My dear son is a born gambler," he said.
"So, in order that I may set him an example, I will not play until after
he has gone to sleep."
Later, the son also explained. "My dear father," he whispered, "is
an inveterate gambler. So, in order that I may reprove him, I do not
gamble. At least not until he has gone to bed." At midnight I left them
still watching each other. The next day the son said: "I got no sleep
last night. For some reason, my dear father was wakeful, and it was four
o'clock before he went to his cabin."
When we reached Volo the sun was shining, and as the day was so
beautiful, the gamblers remained on board and played baccarat. The rest
of us explored Volo. On the mountains above it the Twenty-Four Villages
were in sight, nestling on the knees of the hills. Their red-tiled
houses rose one above the other, the roof of one on a line with the
door-step of the neighbor just overhead. Their white walls, for Volo is
a summer resort, were merged in the masses of snow, but in Volo itself
roses were still blooming, and in every garden the trees were heavy with
oranges. They were so many that they hid the green leaves, and against
the walls of purple, blue, and Pompeian red, made wonderful splashes of
a gorgeous gold.
Apparently the captain was winning, for he sent word he would not sail
until midnight, and nine of his passengers dined ashore. We were so long
at table, not because the dinner was good, but because there was a
charcoal brazier in the room, that we missed the moving-pictures. So
the young Italian banker was sent to bargain for a second and special
performance. In the Levant there always is one man who works, and one
man who manages him. A sort of impresario. Even the boatmen and
bootblacks have a manager who arranges the financial details. It is
difficult to buy a newspaper without dealing through a third party. The
moving-picture show, being of importance, had seven managers. The young
Italian, undismayed, faced all of them. He wrangled in Greek, Turkish,
French, and Italian, and they all talked to him at the same time.
Finally the negotiations came to an end, but our ambassador was not
satisfied.
"They got the best of me," he reported to us. "They are going to give
the show over again, and we are to have the services of the pianist, the
orchestra of five, and the lady vocalist. But I had to agree to pay for
the combined entertainment entirely too much."
"How much?" I asked.
"Eight drachmas," he said apologetically, "or, in your money, one dollar
and fifty-two cents."
"Each?" I said.
He exclaimed in horror: "No, divided among the nine of us!"
No wonder Volo is a popular summer resort, even in December.
The next day, after sunset, we saw the snow-capped peak of Mount Olympus
and the lamps of a curving water-front, the long rows of green air ports
that mark the French hospital ships, the cargo lights turned on the red
crosses painted on their sides, the gray, grim battleships of England,
France, Italy, and Greece, and a bustling torpedo-boat took us in tow,
and guided us through the floating mines and into the harbor of
Salonika.
If it is true that happy are the people without a history, then Salonika
should be thoroughly miserable. Some people make history; others have
history thrust upon them. Ever since the world began Salonika has had
history thrust upon her. She aspired only to be a great trading seaport.
She was content to be the place where the caravans from the Balkans met
the ships from the shores of the Mediterranean, Egypt, and Asia Minor.
Her wharfs were counters across which they could swap merchandise. All
she asked was to be allowed to change their money. Instead of which,
when any two nations of the Near East went to the mat to settle their
troubles, Salonika was the mat. If any country within a thousand-mile
radius declared war on any other country in any direction whatsoever,
the armies of both belligerents clashed at Salonika. They not only used
her as a door-mat, but they used her hills to the north of the city for
their battle-field. In the fighting, Salonika took no part. She merely
loaned the hills. But she knew, whichever side won, two things would
happen to her: She would pay a forced loan and subscribe to an entirely
new religion. Three hundred years before Christ, the people of Salonika
worshipped the mysterious gods who had their earthly habitation on the
island of Thasos. The Greeks ejected them, and erected altars to Apollo
and Aphrodite, the Egyptians followed and taught Salonika to fear
Serapis; then came Roman gods and Roman generals; and then St. Paul. The
Jews set up synagogues, the Mohammedans reared minarets, the Crusaders
restored the cross, the Tripolitans restored the crescent, the Venetians
re-restored Christianity. Romans, Greeks, Byzantines, Persians, Franks,
Egyptians, and Barbary pirates, all, at one time or another, invaded
Salonika. She was the butcher's block upon which they carved history.
Some ruled her only for months, others for years. Of the monuments
to the religions forced upon her, the most numerous to-day are the
synagogues of the Jews and the mosques of the Mohammedans. It was not
only fighting men who invaded Salonika. Italy can count her great
earthquakes on one hand; the United States on one finger. But a resident
of Salonika does not speak of the "year of the earthquake." For him, it
saves time to name the years when there was no earthquake. Each of those
years was generally "the year of the great fire." If it wasn't one
thing, it was another. If it was not a tidal wave, it was an epidemic;
if it was not a war, it was a blizzard. The trade of Asia Minor flows
into Salonika and with it carries all the plagues of Egypt. Epidemics of
cholera in Salonika used to be as common as yellow fever in Guayaquil.
Those years the cholera came the people abandoned the seaport and lived
on the plains north of Salonika, in tents. If the cholera spared them,
the city was swept by fire; if there was no fire, there came a great
frost. Salonika is on the same latitude as Naples, Madrid, and New York;
and New York is not unacquainted with blizzards. Since the seventeenth
century, last winter was said to be the coldest Salonika has ever known.
I was not there in the seventeenth century, but am willing to believe
that last winter was the coldest since then; not only to believe it,
but to swear to it. Of the frost in 1657 the Salonikans boast the cold
was so severe that to get wood the people destroyed their houses. This
December, when on the English and French front in Serbia, I saw soldiers
using the same kind of fire-wood. They knew a mud house that is held
together with beams and rafters can be rebuilt, but that you cannot
rebuild frozen toes and fingers.
In thrusting history upon Salonika, the last few years have been
especially busy. They gave her a fire that destroyed a great part
of the city, and between 1911 and 1914 two cholera epidemics, the
Italian-Turkish War, which, as Salonika was then Turkish, robbed her of
hundreds of her best men, the Balkan-Turkish War, and the Second Balkan
War. In this Salonika was part of the spoils, and Greece and Bulgaria
fought to possess her. The Greeks won, and during one year she was at
peace. Then, in 1914, the Great War came, and Serbia sent out an S. O.
S. call to her Allies. At the Dardanelles, not eighteen hours away, the
French and English heard the call. But to reach Serbia by the shortest
route they must disembark at Salonika, a port belonging to Greece, a
neutral power; and in moving north from Salonika into Serbia they must
pass over fifty miles of neutral Greek territory. Venizelos, prime
minister of Greece, gave them permission. King Constantine, to preserve
his neutrality, disavowed the act of his representative, and Venizelos
resigned. From the point of view of the Allies, the disavowal came too
late. As soon as they had received permission from the recognized Greek
Government, they started, and, leaving the King and Venizelos to fight
it out between them, landed at Salonika. The inhabitants received them
calmly. The Greek officials, the colonel commanding the Greek troops,
the Greek captain of the port, and the Greek collector of customs may
have been upset; but the people of Salonika remained calm. They were
used to it. Foreign troops were always landing at Salonika. The oldest
inhabitant could remember, among others, those of Alexander the Great,
Mark Antony, Constantine, the Sultan Murad, and several hundred thousand
French and English who over their armor wore a red cross. So he was not
surprised when, after seven hundred years, the French and English
returned, still wearing the red cross.
[Illustration: "In Salonika the water-front belongs to everybody."]
One of the greatest assets of those who live in a seaport city is a view
of their harbor. As a rule, that view is hidden from them by zinc sheds
on the wharfs and warehouses. But in Salonika the water-front belongs to
everybody. To the north it encloses the harbor in a great half-moon
that from tip to tip measures three miles. At the western tip of this
crescent are tucked away the wharfs for the big steamers, the bonded
warehouses, the customs, the goods-sheds. The rest of the water-front
is open to the people and to the small sailing vessels. For over a mile
it is bordered by a stone quay, with stone steps leading down to the
rowboats. Along this quay runs the principal street, and on the side
of it that faces the harbor, in an unbroken row, are the hotels, the
houses of the rich Turks and Jews, clubs, restaurants, cafes, and
moving-picture theatres. At night, when these places are blazing with
electric lights, the curving water-front is as bright as Broadway--but
Broadway with one-half of the street in darkness. On the dark side of
the street, to the quay, are moored hundreds of sailing vessels. Except
that they are painted and gilded differently, they look like sisters.
They are fat, squat sisters with the lines of half a cantaloupe. Each
has a single mast and a lateen-sail, like the Italian felucca and the
sailing boats of the Nile. When they are moored to the quay and the
sail is furled, each yard-arm, in a graceful, sweeping curve, slants
downward. Against the sky, in wonderful confusion, they follow the edge
of the half-moon; the masts a forest of dead tree trunks, the slanting
yards giant quill pens dipping into an ink-well. Their hulls are rich in
gilding and in colors--green, red, pink, and blue. At night the electric
signs of a moving-picture palace on the opposite side of the street
illuminate them from bow to stern. It is one of those bizarre contrasts
you find in the Near East. On one side of the quay a perfectly modern
hotel, on the other a boat unloading fish, and in the street itself,
with French automobiles and trolley-cars, men who still are beasts of
burden, who know no other way of carrying a bale or a box than upon
their shoulders. In Salonika even the trolley-car is not without its
contrast. One of our "Jim Crow" street-cars would puzzle a Turk. He
would not understand why we separate the white and the black man. But
his own street-car is also subdivided. In each there are four seats that
can be hidden by a curtain. They are for the women of his harem.
[Illustration: "On one side of the quay, a moving-picture palace, ... on
the other a boat unloading fish."]
From the water-front Salonika climbs steadily up-hill to the row of
hills that form her third and last line of defense. On the hill upon
which the city stands are the walls and citadel built in the fifteenth
century by the Turks, and in which, when the city was invaded, the
inhabitants sought refuge. In aspect it is mediaeval; the rest of the
city is modern and Turkish. The streets are very narrow; in many the
second stories overhang them and almost touch, and against the skyline
rise many minarets. But the Turks do not predominate. They have their
quarter, and so, too, have the French and the Jews. In numbers the Jews
exceed all the others. They form fifty-six per cent of a population
composed of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Bulgarians, Egyptians, French, and
Italians. The Jews came to Salonika the year America was discovered. To
avoid the Inquisition they fled from Spain and Portugal and brought
their language with them; and after five hundred years it still obtains.
It has been called the Esperanto of the Salonikans. For the small
shopkeeper, the cabman, the waiter, it is the common tongue. In such an
environment it sounds most curious. When, in a Turkish restaurant, you
order a dinner in the same words you last used in Vera Cruz, and the
dinner arrives, it seems uncanny. But, in Salonika, the language most
generally spoken is French. Among so many different races they found, if
they hoped to talk business--and a Greek, an Armenian, and a Jew are not
averse to talking business--a common tongue was necessary. So, all those
who are educated, even most sketchily, speak French. The greater number
of newspapers are in French; and notices, advertisements, and official
announcements are printed in that language. It makes life in Salonika
difficult. When a man attacks you in Turkish, Yiddish, or Greek, and you
cannot understand him, there is some excuse, but when he instantly
renews the attack in both French and Spanish, it is disheartening. It
makes you regret that when you were in college the only foreign language
you studied was football signals.
[Illustration: Outside the Citadel, which is mediaeval, Salonika is
modern and Turkish.]
At any time, without the added presence of 100,000 Greeks and 170,000
French and English, Salonika appears overpopulated. This is partly
because the streets are narrow and because in the streets everybody
gathers to talk, eat, and trade. As in all Turkish cities, nearly every
shop is an "open shop." The counter is where the window ought to be, and
opens directly upon the sidewalk. A man does not enter the door of a
shop, he stands on the sidewalk, which is only thirty-six inches wide,
and makes his purchase through the window. This causes a crowd to
collect. Partly because the man is blocking the sidewalk, but chiefly
because there is a chance that something may be bought and paid for.
In normal times, if Salonika is ever normal, she has a population of
120,000, and every one of those 120,000 is personally interested in
any one else who engages, or may be about to engage, in a money
transaction. In New York, if a horse falls down there is at once an
audience of a dozen persons; in Salonika the downfall of a horse is
nobody's business, but a copper coin changing hands is everybody's.
Of this local characteristic, John T. McCutcheon and I made a careful
study; and the result of our investigations produced certain statistics.
If in Salonika you buy a newspaper from a news-boy, of the persons
passing, two will stop; if at an open shop you buy a package of
cigarettes, five people will look over your shoulder; if you pay your
cab-driver his fare, you block the sidewalk; and if you try to change a
hundred-franc note, you cause a riot. In each block there are nearly a
half dozen money-changers; they sit in little shops as narrow as a
doorway, and in front of them is a show-case filled with all the moneys
of the world. It is not alone the sight of your hundred-franc note that
enchants the crowd. That collects the crowd; but what holds the crowd
is that it knows there are twenty different kinds of money, all current
in Salonika, into which your note can be changed. And they know the
money-changer knows that and that you do not. So each man advises you.
Not because he does not want to see you cheated--between you and the
money-changer he is neutral--but because he can no more keep out of a
money deal than can a fly pass a sugar-bowl.
The men on the outskirts of the crowd ask: "What does he offer?"
The lucky ones in the front-row seats call back: "A hundred and eighteen
drachmas." The rear ranks shout with indignation. "It is robbery!" "It
is because he changes his money in Venizelos Street." "He is paying the
money-changer's rent." "In the Jewish quarter they are giving nineteen."
"He is too lazy to walk two miles for a drachma." "Then let him go to
the Greek, Papanastassion."
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 shillings. 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 passion 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 pass 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 assisted 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 superstition 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 embarrassed them. They were not allowed to
censor news despatches nor to examine the passports of those who arrived
and departed. The question of the censorship 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 ashore they kept
tally. On one side of the wharf stood "P. N. T. O.," principal naval
transport officer, in gold braid, ribbons, and armlet, keeping an eye on
every box of shell, 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 battleships. Half of these men had but the
slightest interest in kindling-wood; they were learning the position of
each battleship, 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 ship
to ship, 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.
[Illustration: _From a photograph, copyright by American Press
Association._
"The quay supplied every spy--German, Bulgarian, Turk, or
Austrian--with an uninterrupted view."]
"You had a rough passage from Marseilles," ventures the spy. "We come
from the peninsula," says Tommy. "Three thousand of you on such a little
ship!" exclaims the sympathetic Serbian. "You must have been crowded!"
"Crowded as hell," 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' battleships 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 Japanese-Russian
War the Japanese told the correspondents there were no horses in Corea,
and that before leaving Japan each should supply himself with one.
Dinwiddie refused to obey. The Japanese 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 ship'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 destitute. 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 space 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
Bass, and James Hare had taken the quarters left vacant by the Austrian
Club in the Hotel Olympus. The room was vast and overlooked the
principal 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-ship. 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 identity. 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 class 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 clashing 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,
shaggy 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 noble
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 cushion 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
breasts, 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 pushing, slipping, struggling for a
foothold on the muddy stones. In the circle of light cast by the
automobiles, out of the mass 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 "Brass 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 tassel 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.