6
Having sat there all those months, the order to move, when it did finally come, was of the most urgent nature. It was received one afternoon at tea time and the next morning before dawn we were marching down the canal road.
Just before the end we had done a little training, more to get the horses in draught than anything else. With that and the horse shows it wasn’t at all a bad turnout.
Once more we didn’t know for certain where we were bound for, but the betting was about five to four on Greece. How these things leak out is always a puzzle, but leak out they do. Sure enough we made another little sea voyage and in about three days steamed up the Ægean, passing many boats loaded with odd looking soldiers in khaki who turned out to be Greek, and at last anchored outside Salonica in a mass of shipping, French and English troopships, destroyers and torpedo boats and an American battleship with Eiffel-tower masts.
From the sea Salonica was a flashing jewel in a perfect setting. Minarets and mosques, white and red, sprouted everywhere from the white, brown and green buildings. Trees and gardens nestled within the crumbling old city wall. Behind it ran a line of jagged peaks, merging with the clouds, and here and there ran a little winding ribbon of road, climbing up and up only to lose itself suddenly by falling over a precipice.
Here again the M.L.O. had not quite the Public School and Varsity manner and we suffered accordingly. However, they are a necessary evil presumably, these quayside warriors. The proof undoubtedly lies in the number of D.S.O.’s they muster,——but I don’t remember to have seen any of them with wound stripes. Curious, that.
We marched through mean streets, that smelled worse than Egypt, and a dirty populace, poverty-stricken and covered with sores; the soldiers in khaki that looked like brown paper and leather equipments that were a good imitation of cardboard. Most of the officers wore spurs like the Three Musketeers and their little tin swords looked as if they had come out of toy shops. None of them were shaved. If first impressions count for anything then God help the Greeks.
Our camp was a large open field some miles to the north-west of the town on the lower slopes of a jagged peak. The tinkle of cow bells made soft music everywhere. Of accommodation there was none of any sort, no tents, nothing but what we could improvise. The Colonel slept under the lee of the cook’s cart. The Adjutant and the doctor shared the Maltese cart and the Vet. and I crept under the forage tarpaulin, from which we were awakened in the dark by an unrestrained cursing and the noise of a violent rainfall.
Needless to say everybody was soaked, fires wouldn’t light, breakfast didn’t come, tempers as well as appetites became extremely sharp and things were most unpleasant,—the more so since it went on raining for three weeks almost without stopping. Although we hadn’t seen rain for half a year it didn’t take us five minutes to wish we were back in Egypt. Fortunately we drew bell tents within forty-eight hours and life became more bearable. But once more we had to go through a sort of camp drill by numbers,—odd numbers too, for the order came round that tents would be moved first, then vehicles, and lastly the horses.
Presumably we had to move the guns and wagons with drag-ropes while the horses watched us, grinning into their nose bags.
Anyhow, there we were, half the artillery in Greece, all eighteen-pounders, the other half and the infantry somewhere in the Dardanelles. It appeared, however, that the —— Division had quite a lot of perfectly good infantry just up the road but their artillery hadn’t got enough horses to go round. So we made a sort of Jack Sprat and his wife arrangement and declared ourselves mobile.
About four days after we’d come into camp the Marquette was wrecked some thirty miles off Salonica. It had the —— Divisional Ammunition Column on board and some nurses. They had an appalling time in the water and many were lost. The surviving officers, who came dressed in the most motley garments, poor devils, were split up amongst the brigade.
On the Headquarters Staff we took to our bosoms a charming fellow who was almost immediately given the name of Woodbine,—jolly old Woodbine, one of the very best, whom we left behind with infinite regret while we went up country. I’d like to know what his golf handicap is these days.
The political situation was apparently delicate. Greece was still sitting on the fence, waiting to see which way the cat would jump, and here were we and our Allies, the French, marching through their neutral country.
Slight evidences of the “delicacy” of the times were afforded by the stabbing of some half dozen Tommies in the dark streets of the town and by the fact that it was only the goodly array of guns which prevented them from interning us. I don’t think we had any ammunition as yet, so we couldn’t have done very much. However that may be and whatever the political reasons, we sat on the roadside day after day, watching the French streaming up country,—infantry, field guns, mountain artillery and pack transport,—heedless of Tino and his protests. Six months in Egypt, and now this! We were annoyed.
However, on about the twentieth day things really happened. “Don” battery went off by train, their destination being some unpronounceable village near the firing line. We, the Headquarters Staff, and “AC” battery followed the next day. The railway followed the meanderings of the Vardar through fertile land of amazing greenness and passed mountains of stark rock where not even live oak grew. The weather was warm for November, but that ceaseless rain put a damper on everything, and when we finally arrived we found “Don” battery sitting gloomily in a swamp on the side of the road. We joined them.