SALONICA AND THE WAY THITHER
Salonica was undoubtedly the most curious of all the “war capitals,”
and no other was such a centre of contending claims and political
intrigues. Its population is unlike that of any other city, and
although most of the inhabitants took no active part in the war, all
were deeply interested in its eventual results. The majority are
Jews of Spanish origin, who had settled there after their expulsion
from Spain in the fifteenth century, and they still speak a bastard
Spanish dialect. The next element in importance are the Greeks, who
have largely increased by immigration since the annexation of Southern
Macedonia to Greece. There is also a considerable number of Turks and
other Moslems, and smaller communities of Bulgars, Serbs, Albanians,
Kutzo-Vlachs, Europeans of various nationalities, and even a few
Americans.
The city is in a certain sense an island, for it is surrounded on
three sides by an almost uninhabited country, and on the fourth by the
sea. It cannot be said to belong naturally to any State or race in
particular, and no population looks to it as a centre of intellectual
development and culture. But it is extremely important for the trade
of many lands, and has consequently been fiercely contested by many
peoples throughout the ages. It is this fatal attraction that has made
its history such a tragedy. P. Risal, the author of the only modern
work on Salonica, has rightly called it “_La ville convoitée_.” It is
indeed better situated than any other in the Ægean; along the European
shores of that sea it is half-way between the two extremities, at the
head of the most sheltered gulf, at the outlet of the Vardar valley
and consequently of the easiest road of access to the fertile lands
of the interior. As Professor Hogarth has stated,[32] the other ports
which might compete with it are either blocked by mountain barriers
or surrounded by unstable populations. Were it not for malaria,
the backward civilization and the lack of safety of its immediate
hinterland, Salonica might have become an important agricultural
and perhaps even industrial centre, but the farming methods of the
neighbouring territories are extremely primitive and industry is
non-existent. Its radius of commercial action is considerable. It is
easier to send goods from any part of Macedonia and even from parts of
Albania and Epirus to Salonica than to the ports of Albania; even the
upper reaches of the valleys of some of the tributaries of the Danube
are reached more easily from Salonica than from the Black Sea ports.
Salonica is the junction of the railways from Constantinople, Uskub and
Belgrade, and Monastir and Athens.
[Illustration: THE GREEK NATIONAL FESTIVAL ON APRIL 7, 1917.
M. Venizelos leaving the Church of S. Sophia, Salonica.]
[Illustration: KING ALEXANDER OF GREECE VISITS A FRENCH CAMP.
To face p. 158.
]
Under the Turks, Salonica was the outlet for the trade of half the
Balkan Peninsula, as it ought to be to-day. But the wars of 1912–13
drove the Turks from Macedonia and partitioned the hinterland among
several States, so that Greek Salonica is but a short distance from the
frontiers of Serbia, Bulgaria and Albania, and the customs barriers
have placed artificial obstacles in the way of traffic. The Greek, the
Serb, and the Bulgarian each aspired to the possession of Salonica,
hoping, in their narrow Balkan mentality, to capture its trade and
enjoy its advantages entirely for himself to the exclusion of his
neighbours. None of them understood that the prosperity of Salonica was
bound up with that of the interior as a whole and of all the peoples
of the Peninsula, and that commercial restrictions to the advantage of
one nation alone were bound to prove detrimental to all, the _non beati
possidentes_ included. The port cannot prosper unless trade comes to
it unhampered from Monastir and Uskub, from Nish and Belgrade, from
Kustendil, Sofia and Ochrida, and not merely from Verria, Florina and
Serres. As a Greek port it will always be a poor thing, and the
Piræus will never allow an appreciable portion, even of Greek trade,
to be diverted to Salonica, so that in present circumstances it is
destined to fall into decay. The same would happen if it were to become
exclusively a Serb or Bulgarian port. By its nature it is essentially
an international port, and it should be subjected to a special régime,
such as will probably be applied to many other ports in the near
future. It would in this way not only prosper, but also become a bond
of union to conciliate, through commercial interest, States and peoples
who now hate each other. Apart from political and administrative
difficulties, a great deal of capital will have to be invested in the
port to carry out important works to prevent it from being silted up by
the Vardar, but the capital will not be available unless investors are
first assured that trade will be attracted to the port and not driven
away from it by political quarrels.
The climate of Salonica is not an ideal one. In summer the heat is
intolerable, and the summer lasts from May to the end of September.
For weeks on end the thermometer marks 40 degrees Centigrade in the
shade. There is the sea, it is true, but the sea at Salonica does not
contribute to render the heat more tolerable, and sea bathing is an
arduous enterprise.
Distractions were neither very numerous nor particularly edifying.
The hotels were bad and dear; before the fire there were some good
but expensive restaurants, and after the fire a few of them were
resuscitated. The local Cercle de Thessalonique was quite attractive
before the fire, but afterwards it was transferred to smaller and
more modest quarters. Naturally, during the war, the military element
was absolutely predominant. Six armies were represented in the town,
of whom three--the French, the British and the Serb--by very large
contingents. The Italians were less numerous, and the Russians still
fewer at first, ended by disappearing altogether, save for some
derelict officers, whose behaviour was not exactly exemplary. The
masters of the house--the Greeks--in the early days of the war, kept
very much to themselves, being suspected by the Allies; then, after
the arrival of Venizelos, they made themselves more conspicuous, and
finally, when Greece was again united and the army reconstituted,
they spread all over the place. Never in any other city did one see
such a collection of different uniforms as at Salonica during the war
years. British khaki, Highland kilts, French _bleu horizon_, Italian
_grigio-verde_, the Serbs in grey, the Greeks in uniforms combining
features of all the others, Russians who invented their own, Colonials
of various kinds--coal-black Sudanese, swarthy Algerians, yellow
Tonkinese and Annamites, dignified Indians in imposing turbans. Of
these various armies the French, the British, the Serbs, and afterwards
the Greeks, had their respective G.H.Q.’s at Salonica, which to the
outside observer meant chiefly innumerable officers and swift Staff
cars. The French occupied a large, ugly, inconvenient building near
the port; afterwards, while retaining that one for their Q services,
they removed the _Etat Major de l’Avant_ to a row of villas in the
residential quarter, one of them the ex-Bulgarian Consulate. The
British were scattered all over the town, but most of the offices of
the General Staff, which had at first been spread over three or four
villas, were concentrated in a huge building, formerly a hospital and
orphanage, popularly known as the “War Office,” far more commodious
than the French quarters. The Serbs were modestly housed in the
ex-Austrian Consulate and one or two other buildings, and the Greeks
mostly in the large ex-Turkish barracks in the Place d’Armes. We
were close to the Greeks in a group of small buildings, some of them
constructed for the purpose by Italian soldiers. The Russians were in
the Russian Consulate.
Military messes were of course a great feature of Salonica life.
British messes were all small, and consequently numerous; they were
usually installed in private houses where the members of the mess also
resided, and they were more characteristically bits of England than the
French or Italian messes were bits of Italy or France. The French and
Italian messes were much larger--our Base mess comprised some forty
or fifty officers. Our M.T. mess, to which I was attached, became
essentially the reception mess, as it was here that most foreign
officers were invited; indeed in few places was the inter-Allied spirit
more sedulously and agreeably cultivated.
The French created a military institution for which they deserve great
credit--the Cercle Militaire. It was not, as its named implied, a
real club, but a large military restaurant, intended primarily for
French officers, but to which all Allied officers were admitted. Meals
were good and cheap, while if one ordered a special dinner one could
obtain all possible delicacies. Later, the British also instituted an
Officers’ Rest House, with a large but not very good restaurant, and
many comfortable bedrooms reserved for officers who had come down from
the front for a few days. Foreign officers were not admitted, except
the liaison officers and guests.
Of the resorts open to the public there was one deserving special
mention, though not quite in a eulogistic sense--the famous Tour
Blanche, near the historic monument of that name. It was a large
café and restaurant, with a theatre and concert hall, surrounded
by a garden. At all times of the year it was much frequented, but
particularly in summer. The meals were fair, the drinks bad, but sold
at exorbitant prices, the performances less than mediocre, but the
spectators themselves were the most interesting part of the show. The
place was usually crammed, mostly with officers and soldiers. Even if
the artistes had been Carusos or Tetrazzinis, not a note of their songs
would have been heard on account of the uproarious shouting of the
audience--a large part of which was obviously “the worse.” The Russians
excelled in these Bacchanals, but the British were good seconds. A
little trick of the Russians, which the French sometimes imitated, was
to demolish the partitions between the boxes and to jump down from the
upper circle into the pit. It was by no means unusual to see officers
and soldiers dancing wildly on the stage. Sometimes the pandemonium got
to such a pitch that serious rioting took place, and then the C.A.A.
would have it closed or declared out of bounds for Allied troops for
several evenings.
The Salonica Press was of some interest. Before the fire there were
no less than eighteen daily papers, for a city of barely 200,000
inhabitants. Even after that catastrophe their numbers were only
reduced to ten. Of these four were printed in French; one of them,
_L’Indépendant_, was the organ of a group of local Jews and was, on
the whole, the best written, while _La Tribune_ was a Greek paper
published in French, opposed to the more extreme Chauvinism of the
Greek people and anxious to bring about a good understanding with
Italy. The other two, _L’Opinion_ and the _Echo de France_ were more
or less organs of the French G.H.Q. and represented the political
attitude of the Commander-in-Chief towards the different Allies. From
a journalistic point of view, none of them ranked very high, while the
two latter belonged to the class which Bismarck defined as the “reptile
press.” The British had only one paper, _The Balkan News_, edited by
Mr. Collinson Owen. It was purely a paper for the army, containing
the news of the day and a few special articles, and was well written,
bright, full of wholesome cheerfulness and wit, and wholly free from
local political tendencies--unlike the French papers, it never tried
to create bad feeling between the Allies. We also had only one paper,
_La Voce d’Italia_; it was not badly edited, but was sometimes too
violent and inclined to enter into polemics with other local papers,
until the Italian Command undertook to censor it (a function which, for
his sins, was entrusted to the present writer). There were five papers
printed in Greek, all equally violent, tendentious and wholly free from
scruples or respect for accuracy. The Serbs published three papers,
and the Russians, until their collapse, two. One of the Serb papers
printed long poems in the style of the Kossovo cycle almost daily; they
were eagerly read by the Serb soldiers, and a Serb officer told me that
his batman always cut them out and kept them when the paper was thrown
into the waste paper basket. There were two papers in Hebrew-Spanish,
of no particular character, and several small weeklies in different
languages. There were always plenty of foreign papers, although they
naturally arrived many days or even weeks late. The _Journal de
Genève_, which, like all neutral papers, was banned in most other
war zones, was obtainable in Salonica and much sought after, as it
contained the enemy communiqués. The British G.H.Q. issued a daily
bulletin of war news from all sources, including those of the enemy,
which was distributed to Allied Commands and Staffs.
A curious figure of Salonica life was Essad Pasha, the Albanian. An
ex-General in the Turkish Army, he had fought against the Balkan Allies
in the war of 1912–13, and when Prince William of Wied’s Government was
set up in Albania, he organized a rebellion against it. He exercised
a certain amount of influence in Central Albania, where he had large
landed estates, and was thus able to raise some armed bands. After
the departure of Wied he tried to set up a government of his own; at
one time he professed friendship for Italy, but he ended by turning
against us when he found that Italian policy was not in conformity with
his own personal ambitions. After the Allied Armies came to Salonica
he also repaired thither, having had to leave Albania in September,
1916, as he was causing trouble to the Italian military authorities.
General Sarrail received him officially and recognized his self-styled
title of “President of the Albanian Government.” Protected more or
less by various Powers, and subsidized simultaneously by at least
four, he does not appear to have rendered useful services to anyone.
He had set up a miniature _opéra-bouffe_ court at Salonica, with a
Government and Ministries of War, Foreign Affairs, Agriculture, etc.,
although he had neither a State nor an Army. He lived in a handsome
villa, with his harem, and he disported himself about the town in the
uniform of an Albanian General, invented by himself, and every now
and then he promoted himself to a higher rank by adding a fresh star.
His suite comprised a very small number of officers and soldiers, the
latter mostly employed in cultivating a diminutive kitchen garden. In
spite of all this, some of the Allies appeared or professed to take
him seriously: the French, the Greeks and the Serbs had appointed
diplomatic agents to his “Court,” and did not fail to show him a
certain deference. Among the Italian element the _mauvaises langues_
said that he was thus supported in order to oppose Italian interests
in Albania. As his own influence was limited to Central Albania, he
had no hope of dominating the northern and southern territories, and
was therefore disposed to give away the former to the Serbs and the
latter to the Greeks. I do not profess to know what motive inspired
the attitude of the French Government towards this disreputable and
ridiculous adventurer, but I believe that the C.A.A. treated him with
consideration for the following reason. He claimed to be in a position
to raise a rebellion in the part of Albania occupied by Austria,
and although the _Deuxième Bureau_ was somewhat sceptical as to his
professions, it was thought worth while not to cast him off altogether,
on the chance that something might come of it. As a matter of fact,
he never did anything useful for the Allies, and was indeed hated by
the enormous majority of the Albanians. According to Miss Durham,[33]
who knows more about Albania than almost any other writer, if he had
been thrown over at the beginning of the war a large Albanian force
might have been raised to fight against the Austrians, and the Serbian
_débâcle_ prevented. His only merit was that he contributed something
to the gaiety of nations during the duller periods of the campaign.
After the Armistice, he redoubled his intrigues with Belgrade and
Athens in the hope of carrying off his little plan for a Central
Albania ruled by himself and the rest of the country sold to Serbia and
Greece. But the trick did not come off, and while he was in Paris he
was murdered by an Albanian student on June 13, 1920. If the deed must
be deplored as an act of violence, it cannot be said this his death was
a loss to humanity in general nor to the Albanian people in particular.
His assassin was acquitted by a Parisian jury.
The great problem of the Macedonian expedition was that of
communication and transport. Whereas the enemy could send
reinforcements and supplies from Central Europe to the Macedonian
front by rail, every man and every ton of goods which the Allies sent
out had to be conveyed across submarine-infested seas. This was one
of the chief arguments of those who were opposed to the undertaking
altogether, as tonnage was so precious and so inadequate even for
supplying Britain, France and Italy.
In the early days of the campaign, the Allied bases were Marseilles,
Toulon and certain English ports. Even from Marseilles the voyage
to Salonica required about a week, and when submarines were sighted
immense detours were made, involving a journey of two or three weeks,
or more. The voyage from England was, of course, longer, but even
the British generally made use of Marseilles. When Italy decided
to take part in the Macedonian campaign the Italian contingent was
embarked at Naples, but soon afterwards the port of Taranto became the
Italian base, and was eventually used by the British and French as
well, all troops and part of the supplies being transported by rail
through France and Italy. Taranto offered many advantages; the port is
admirably sheltered, and the Mare Piccolo is an immense land-locked
bay with unlimited space. Large British French and Italian camps were
established near the town, and in due course the convoy system was
adopted for greater safety. Besides the important Italian naval base,
both the other Allies instituted naval bases there, and the British
drifters and other anti-submarine craft became regular visitors to the
Apulian port.
The voyage from Taranto to Salonica, via the Ionian Sea round Cape
Matapan, took about three days, which was a great improvement on the
Marseilles route, although it was by no means free from danger, and at
times ships only travelled at night and had to take shelter in various
intermediate ports, which, of course, increased the time. The usual
precautions against submarines were taken, and the ships were painted
all sorts of colours in curious geometrical designs, and the systems
of intelligence and signalling were perfected. But in spite of all
these efforts, many ships were lost on the Taranto-Salonica route,
and still more among those which continued to cross from Marseilles
or Southampton. Not infrequently, when a ship was expected carrying
precious reinforcements or long-desired supplies, the ugly news would
be flashed across the seas that she had been lost. Italian losses were
not very numerous on this route, but among them was the large steamer
_Minas_ which sank with many hundreds of soldiers.
The possibility of shortening the dangerous passage was carefully
studied. The first idea had been to land the troops somewhere in
Greece and forward them by the Greek railways. But at that time the
Greek Government, although nominally neutral, was really assisting
the Central Empires and refused to grant permission for Allied troops
to traverse Greek territory, and even if it had been forced to do so
it would certainly have placed every conceivable obstacle in the way.
This plan having been dropped, the Italians began to study the Santi
Quaranta route. There was an elementary Turkish road or rather track
across Albania, but it was absolutely impassable for lorries, and even
light carts could not always use it. As soon as the Italian occupation
in South Albania began to extend inland, work was commenced on the
road between Santi Quaranta and Ersek, while the French started on the
section between Florina and Ersek over the Pisoderi pass. By the spring
of 1917 a few motor cars had succeeded in going over the whole route,
although not without serious difficulty. In the summer the immense work
was accomplished, and by the end of July the first columns of lorries
began to circulate regularly between Santi Quaranta and Florina. But
the carrying capacity of the road was limited, as was the capacity of
the depots and magazines at Santi Quaranta, so that the route could
not serve all the Allied armies and was not even sufficient for all
the supplies of the Italian contingent, the more so as part of it was
also used by the Albanian force. It was therefore decided to use it
only for the mails land the transport of Italian troops; supplies,
save in quite exceptional cases, continued to be sent by sea to
Salonica. Allied officers, however, especially Serbs going to and from
Corfu, made great use of it. Its main advantage lay in the fact that
the passage from Taranto or Brindisi to Santi Quaranta was only one
night’s crossing, so that the danger of submarine attacks was reduced
approximately to one-sixth. Another advantage was that by establishing
an uninterrupted line of posts right across from the Adriatic to the
Ægean the passage of messengers between King Constantine’s Government
and the Central Empires was practically precluded, and even after
the fall of Constantine it was just as well to keep watch over the
activities of Royalist sympathizers who might have continued to carry
on their master’s policy. A part of the route, not far from Santi
Quaranta, passed through Greek territory, and permission to use it had
to be negotiated while Constantine was still on the throne.
About half-way between Salonica and Santi Quaranta is Koritza, a
pleasant spot and the centre of many intrigues. The town, which is
situated in a fertile plain at the junction of several important
roads, had been assigned to Albania by the Ambassadors’ Conference
in London (1913) and the Protocol of Florence (1914), the enormous
majority of the population being Albanian. But as there was an active
and intelligent minority professing Greek sentiments, Greece laid claim
to the town and district. In 1914, Greek bands occupied it, numbers of
Greek schools were opened by the Greek authorities which had installed
themselves there, and the presence of a large Albanian population was
explained away by being called “Albanophone Greeks.” When the Italian
troops began to advance from the coast towards the interior, General
Sarrail sent a detachment of cavalry under Colonel Descoins to occupy
Koritza (November 1916). There remained the problem of administering
the district; it could not be given to Greece, because the Treaty of
London had assigned it to Albania, but Sarrail did not wish to hand
it over to the latter as there was no regularly constituted Albanian
Government, and he intended to make use of the district for eventual
military operations. He solved the difficulty by making of the Kaza of
Koritza an autonomous “Republic.” He created a local council composed
of natives, with a certain Themistocles, a noted band-leader, as
President, but under French military control. The Republic had its
stamps, its paper money, its budget. Later the French authorities
believed that they had evidence that Themistocles was dealing with the
Austrians; he was court-martialled, condemned to death and shot. It
afterwards appeared that the sentence was due to a judicial error, and
that the members of the court martial had been deceived by agents of
the local Greek party who wished to get rid of Themistocles because
he was an influential Albanian leader. The local council was then
dissolved and the territory administered very efficiently by the French
military authorities. The Greeks, however, continued their attempts
to get Koritza assigned to them, claiming that both that town and
Moschopolje had been centres of Greek culture since the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. They conducted a vigorous propaganda to
induce the inhabitants to send their children to the Greek schools, but
the latter remained deserted, save by the children of the few Greek
subjects and some Albanians of Greek sentiments. The question was not
finally settled until October, 1921, when the Conference of Ambassadors
definitely assigned Koritza to Albania and the Albanian State was
recognized by the Powers. The French raised a small local force, known
as the Koritza Gendarmerie and afterwards as the Koritza Tirailleurs.
But they did not prove of much use during the war, any more than did
the so-called Tabur of Essad Pasha; between these two forces there was
bitter hostility, and they could not be brought within sight of each
other.
From Koritza the road ascends the Tchafa Kiarit range, then down into
the broad Starja plain to Ersek, keeping at a height varying from
1,000 to 1,200 m. above the sea. The plain is green and fertile,
and surrounded by fairly high mountains, the Mavri Petra, on the
Graeco-Albanian frontier being 1,960 m. high. Ersek, where one usually
spends the night, is the first Italian post.
The next place of some importance is Liaskoviki; this was once a
pleasant and prosperous little town, in a very healthy situation amid
grand and wild scenery, where many wealthy Albanian landowners had
their summer residences in order to escape the malaria of the plains.
But during the Greek invasion of 1914 it was almost completely
devastated, save for the houses of the few orthodox Albanians who were
presumed to be of Greek sentiments. In October, 1916, Italian troops
occupied Liaskoviki and the Greeks withdrew. Here I first saw the
Albanian bands in Italian service; their appearance was satisfactory,
but opinions differed as to their military qualities and reliability.
As a rule those who were more directly under Italian control were the
best; left to themselves they were less useful.
Before the Italian occupation Santi Quaranta was a wretched village,
consisting of large Turkish barracks, a custom-house and a few
fishermen’s huts. During the war it became an important military and
naval base; many large huts and even some handsome brick buildings were
erected. It had been chosen as a base for transport to all parts of
South Albania and later for Macedonia on account of its well-sheltered
port, easy to defend against submarine attacks, and protected by the
island of Corfu just opposite. Steamers cannot be moored up to the pier
as the water is too shallow near the shore, and no attempt was made to
deepen it or lengthen the jetties, as it was realized that after the
war Santi Quaranta would lose much of its importance, Durazzo being
a far more suitable starting point for a trans-Albanian commercial
road or railway. The curious name of this little town is derived from
the legend that forty Christians inhabiting it were massacred at some
unspecified date by the Turks. The old town was not on the shore,
but on a height dominating the port, and the ruins of two Venetian
castles and other buildings are still visible. A third Venetian castle,
with fine walls, is in the middle of the modern town. Throughout the
latter period of the war Santi Quaranta was a busy place, when large
troopships were constantly arriving and landing troops and stores,
while torpedo boats and destroyers flitted about the bay, smaller boats
plied to and from Corfu, and lorries dashed up and down the one long
narrow street. At Corfu itself there were various military forces and
more or less vague military missions. The French had a naval base and
a military mission, the British a convalescent hospital and a mission,
the Serbs a whole Government with the Skuptschina and the Diplomatic
Corps, the Italians a military mission, a battalion of territorial
militia and a squadron of cavalry. The atmosphere proved as fertile for
inter-Allied intrigue as the soil was for olives, vegetables and fruit.
After the abdication of Constantine and the entry of Greece into the
ranks of the Allies, a new route to Macedonia was opened up--that
via the Gulf of Patras and Itea. It was used only by the French and
the British, but officers of other Allied armies travelled by it
occasionally. The sea-passage from Taranto to Itea was much longer than
that to Santi Quaranta (forty-eight hours instead of fifteen), but the
part of it exposed to submarine attack was just the same, as the boats
crossed from Taranto in one night to Corfu, lay off the island all
day, sailed again at nightfall, along the channel between the mainland
and the Ionian Islands, which was practically safe from attack, to the
entrance of the Gulf of Patras, and thence up the Gulf to Itea on the
northern shore.
At Itea there was a small Franco-British base, whence a good road leads
to Vralo on the Athens-Salonica railway.
Altogether the journey from Taranto to Salonica via Santi Quaranta
could be covered in three days, if one had a good car, while by
lorry it took a little longer; but the front of the A.F.O. could be
reached in two and a half days. The route from Itea to Salonica was
longer--nearly four days. Detachments of troops, of course, required
more time to reach their destination, so that the all-sea route was
decidedly shorter, but the latter was infinitely more risky, and the
opening up of the two land, or rather, semi-land routes reduced the
losses from submarines very considerably, and contributed their share
to the defeat of the enemy’s submarine campaign.