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.