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.