For many days our extravagant shabbiness stood in the way of a complete realization that we were no longer underdogs of the fortune of war, but had come back into our own. Bulgarian officers, their truculence in no way impaired by their country's downfall, wanted us to leave our first-class carriage on the way to Sofia. Outside Sofia station it was impossible to hire a cab, for no cabman would credit us with the price of a fare. The staff of the British Mission, to whom we gave reams of reports, tried their politest not to laugh outright at our clothes, but broke down before the green-and-yellow check waistcoat, many sizes too large, which White had received from a British civilian in Odessa.
Even the real Ford car, lent us by the British Mission for the journey to Salonika, failed to establish a sense of dignity. Once, when we stopped on the road near a British column, the driver was asked who were his pals the tramps.
We drove joyously down the Struma valley and through the Kreshna and Ruppel passes, still littered with the débris of the Bulgarian retreat. Rusted remnants of guns lolled on the slopes descending to the river. Broken carts, twisted motor-lorries, horse and oxen skeletons—all the flotsam of a broken army—mottled the roadside. In the rocky sides of the mountain passes were great clefts from which dislodged boulders had hurtled down on the Bulgarian columns when British aeroplanes helped the retreat with bomb-dropping. We passed through the scraggy uplands of Lower Macedonia, and so to Salonika.
The real Ford car halted in the imposing grounds that surrounded the imposing building occupied by British General Headquarters at Salonika. As we climbed the steps leading to the front door, warmly expectant of a welcome by reason of our information from South Russia, an orderly pointed out that this entrance was reserved for Big Noises and By-No-Means-Little Noises. We swerved aside, and entered an unpretentious side-door, labelled "Officers Only."
"Wojer want?" asked a Cockney Tommy, who sat at a desk inside it.
"We want to report to Major Greentabs, of the Intelligence Department."
The Tommy looked not-too-contemptuously at our sunken cheeks, our shapeless hats, our torn, creased, mud-spotted tatterdemalion clothes, and almost admiringly at White's check waistcoat.
"Nah, look 'ere, civvies," he instructed, "yer speak English well inuf. Carncher read it? The notice says 'Officers Only', an' it means only officers. Dagoes 'ave ter use the yentrance rahnd the corner, so aht yew go, double quick."
That day Salonika gave itself up to revelry by reason of an unfounded report that an armistice had been signed on the Western front. One of the celebrators was a certain 2nd-class air mechanic of the Royal Air Force. We stopped him in the street, and asked the way to R.A.F. headquarters. Beatifically he breathed whiskied breath at me as he stared in unsteady surprise.
"George," he called to his companion, "the war's over—hic—and here's two English blokes in civvies. Want to join the Royal Air Force, they do." Then, tapping me on the chest—"Don't you join the Royal Air Force. We're a rotten lot."