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.
7
The weather changed in the night and we were greeted with a glorious sunshine in the morning that not only dried our clothes but filled us with optimism.
Just as we were about to start the pole of my G.S. wagon broke. Everybody went on, leaving me in the middle of nowhere with a broken wagon, no map, and instructions to follow on to the “i” of Causli in a country whose language I couldn’t speak and with no idea of the distance. Fortunately I kept the brigade artificer with me and a day’s bully beef and biscuits, for it was not till two o’clock in the afternoon that we at last got that wagon mended, having had to cut down a tree and make a new pole and drive rivets. Then we set off into the unknown through the most glorious countryside imaginable. The autumn had stained all the trees red and the fallen leaves made a royal carpet. Vaguely I knew the direction was north by east and once having struck the road out of the village which led in that direction I found that it went straight on through beds of streams, between fields of maize and plantations of mulberries and tumbled villages tenanted only by starving dogs. The doors of nearly every house were splashed with a blue cross,—reminiscences of a plague of typhus. From time to time we met refugees trudging behind ox-drawn wagons laden with everything they possessed in the world, including their babies,—sad-faced, wild-looking peasants, clad in picturesque rags of all colours with eyes that had looked upon fear. I confess to having kept my revolver handy. For all I knew they might be Turks, Bulgars or at least brigands.