The voyage from Taranto to Salonica, via the Ionian Sea round Cape Matapan, took about three days, which was a great improvement on the Marseilles route, although it was by no means free from danger, and at times ships only travelled at night and had to take shelter in various intermediate ports, which, of course, increased the time. The usual precautions against submarines were taken, and the ships were painted all sorts of colours in curious geometrical designs, and the systems of intelligence and signalling were perfected. But in spite of all these efforts, many ships were lost on the Taranto-Salonica route, and still more among those which continued to cross from Marseilles or Southampton. Not infrequently, when a ship was expected carrying precious reinforcements or long-desired supplies, the ugly news would be flashed across the seas that she had been lost. Italian losses were not very numerous on this route, but among them was the large steamer Minas which sank with many hundreds of soldiers.
The possibility of shortening the dangerous passage was carefully studied. The first idea had been to land the troops somewhere in Greece and forward them by the Greek railways. But at that time the Greek Government, although nominally neutral, was really assisting the Central Empires and refused to grant permission for Allied troops to traverse Greek territory, and even if it had been forced to do so it would certainly have placed every conceivable obstacle in the way. This plan having been dropped, the Italians began to study the Santi Quaranta route. There was an elementary Turkish road or rather track across Albania, but it was absolutely impassable for lorries, and even light carts could not always use it. As soon as the Italian occupation in South Albania began to extend inland, work was commenced on the road between Santi Quaranta and Ersek, while the French started on the section between Florina and Ersek over the Pisoderi pass. By the spring of 1917 a few motor cars had succeeded in going over the whole route, although not without serious difficulty. In the summer the immense work was accomplished, and by the end of July the first columns of lorries began to circulate regularly between Santi Quaranta and Florina. But the carrying capacity of the road was limited, as was the capacity of the depots and magazines at Santi Quaranta, so that the route could not serve all the Allied armies and was not even sufficient for all the supplies of the Italian contingent, the more so as part of it was also used by the Albanian force. It was therefore decided to use it only for the mails land the transport of Italian troops; supplies, save in quite exceptional cases, continued to be sent by sea to Salonica. Allied officers, however, especially Serbs going to and from Corfu, made great use of it. Its main advantage lay in the fact that the passage from Taranto or Brindisi to Santi Quaranta was only one night’s crossing, so that the danger of submarine attacks was reduced approximately to one-sixth. Another advantage was that by establishing an uninterrupted line of posts right across from the Adriatic to the Ægean the passage of messengers between King Constantine’s Government and the Central Empires was practically precluded, and even after the fall of Constantine it was just as well to keep watch over the activities of Royalist sympathizers who might have continued to carry on their master’s policy. A part of the route, not far from Santi Quaranta, passed through Greek territory, and permission to use it had to be negotiated while Constantine was still on the throne.
About half-way between Salonica and Santi Quaranta is Koritza, a pleasant spot and the centre of many intrigues. The town, which is situated in a fertile plain at the junction of several important roads, had been assigned to Albania by the Ambassadors’ Conference in London (1913) and the Protocol of Florence (1914), the enormous majority of the population being Albanian. But as there was an active and intelligent minority professing Greek sentiments, Greece laid claim to the town and district. In 1914, Greek bands occupied it, numbers of Greek schools were opened by the Greek authorities which had installed themselves there, and the presence of a large Albanian population was explained away by being called “Albanophone Greeks.” When the Italian troops began to advance from the coast towards the interior, General Sarrail sent a detachment of cavalry under Colonel Descoins to occupy Koritza (November 1916). There remained the problem of administering the district; it could not be given to Greece, because the Treaty of London had assigned it to Albania, but Sarrail did not wish to hand it over to the latter as there was no regularly constituted Albanian Government, and he intended to make use of the district for eventual military operations. He solved the difficulty by making of the Kaza of Koritza an autonomous “Republic.” He created a local council composed of natives, with a certain Themistocles, a noted band-leader, as President, but under French military control. The Republic had its stamps, its paper money, its budget. Later the French authorities believed that they had evidence that Themistocles was dealing with the Austrians; he was court-martialled, condemned to death and shot. It afterwards appeared that the sentence was due to a judicial error, and that the members of the court martial had been deceived by agents of the local Greek party who wished to get rid of Themistocles because he was an influential Albanian leader. The local council was then dissolved and the territory administered very efficiently by the French military authorities. The Greeks, however, continued their attempts to get Koritza assigned to them, claiming that both that town and Moschopolje had been centres of Greek culture since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They conducted a vigorous propaganda to induce the inhabitants to send their children to the Greek schools, but the latter remained deserted, save by the children of the few Greek subjects and some Albanians of Greek sentiments. The question was not finally settled until October, 1921, when the Conference of Ambassadors definitely assigned Koritza to Albania and the Albanian State was recognized by the Powers. The French raised a small local force, known as the Koritza Gendarmerie and afterwards as the Koritza Tirailleurs. But they did not prove of much use during the war, any more than did the so-called Tabur of Essad Pasha; between these two forces there was bitter hostility, and they could not be brought within sight of each other.
From Koritza the road ascends the Tchafa Kiarit range, then down into the broad Starja plain to Ersek, keeping at a height varying from 1,000 to 1,200 m. above the sea. The plain is green and fertile, and surrounded by fairly high mountains, the Mavri Petra, on the Graeco-Albanian frontier being 1,960 m. high. Ersek, where one usually spends the night, is the first Italian post.
The next place of some importance is Liaskoviki; this was once a pleasant and prosperous little town, in a very healthy situation amid grand and wild scenery, where many wealthy Albanian landowners had their summer residences in order to escape the malaria of the plains. But during the Greek invasion of 1914 it was almost completely devastated, save for the houses of the few orthodox Albanians who were presumed to be of Greek sentiments. In October, 1916, Italian troops occupied Liaskoviki and the Greeks withdrew. Here I first saw the Albanian bands in Italian service; their appearance was satisfactory, but opinions differed as to their military qualities and reliability. As a rule those who were more directly under Italian control were the best; left to themselves they were less useful.
Before the Italian occupation Santi Quaranta was a wretched village, consisting of large Turkish barracks, a custom-house and a few fishermen’s huts. During the war it became an important military and naval base; many large huts and even some handsome brick buildings were erected. It had been chosen as a base for transport to all parts of South Albania and later for Macedonia on account of its well-sheltered port, easy to defend against submarine attacks, and protected by the island of Corfu just opposite. Steamers cannot be moored up to the pier as the water is too shallow near the shore, and no attempt was made to deepen it or lengthen the jetties, as it was realized that after the war Santi Quaranta would lose much of its importance, Durazzo being a far more suitable starting point for a trans-Albanian commercial road or railway. The curious name of this little town is derived from the legend that forty Christians inhabiting it were massacred at some unspecified date by the Turks. The old town was not on the shore, but on a height dominating the port, and the ruins of two Venetian castles and other buildings are still visible. A third Venetian castle, with fine walls, is in the middle of the modern town. Throughout the latter period of the war Santi Quaranta was a busy place, when large troopships were constantly arriving and landing troops and stores, while torpedo boats and destroyers flitted about the bay, smaller boats plied to and from Corfu, and lorries dashed up and down the one long narrow street. At Corfu itself there were various military forces and more or less vague military missions. The French had a naval base and a military mission, the British a convalescent hospital and a mission, the Serbs a whole Government with the Skuptschina and the Diplomatic Corps, the Italians a military mission, a battalion of territorial militia and a squadron of cavalry. The atmosphere proved as fertile for inter-Allied intrigue as the soil was for olives, vegetables and fruit.
After the abdication of Constantine and the entry of Greece into the ranks of the Allies, a new route to Macedonia was opened up—that via the Gulf of Patras and Itea. It was used only by the French and the British, but officers of other Allied armies travelled by it occasionally. The sea-passage from Taranto to Itea was much longer than that to Santi Quaranta (forty-eight hours instead of fifteen), but the part of it exposed to submarine attack was just the same, as the boats crossed from Taranto in one night to Corfu, lay off the island all day, sailed again at nightfall, along the channel between the mainland and the Ionian Islands, which was practically safe from attack, to the entrance of the Gulf of Patras, and thence up the Gulf to Itea on the northern shore.
At Itea there was a small Franco-British base, whence a good road leads to Vralo on the Athens-Salonica railway.
Altogether the journey from Taranto to Salonica via Santi Quaranta could be covered in three days, if one had a good car, while by lorry it took a little longer; but the front of the A.F.O. could be reached in two and a half days. The route from Itea to Salonica was longer—nearly four days. Detachments of troops, of course, required more time to reach their destination, so that the all-sea route was decidedly shorter, but the latter was infinitely more risky, and the opening up of the two land, or rather, semi-land routes reduced the losses from submarines very considerably, and contributed their share to the defeat of the enemy’s submarine campaign.