Although the Allied Governments continued to desire the recall of Sarrail, they considered that it was advisable to suspend their demand for the moment. In France there was great depression and pessimism about the progress of the war, owing to the unsuccessful offensive at the Chemin des Dames and the enormous losses suffered, as well as to the serious military mutinies organized by the Socialists, which had to be repressed with ruthless but just severity. The Allies, therefore, deemed it inadvisable to add to the embarrassments of the French Government.
After the May operations, the Governments of France, Great Britain and Italy were more than ever convinced, as Mr. Lloyd George had said, that an Allied offensive in Macedonia was impossible, at least for the moment—perhaps they did not yet understand how large a part of the failure was due to the strategic errors of General Sarrail. Although it was not their intention to withdraw the expeditionary force altogether, a shortening of the front was contemplated. The British, above all, were anxious to achieve this, and two Divisions (the 10th and 60th) were already in course of evacuation, being destined for Palestine, and the French, although they did not withdraw any of their units, allowed their strengths to drop progressively without filling the gaps. We alone had, until then, maintained our effectives up to strength—our 3 brigades comprised 18,000 rifles—but now, seeing that the Allies were reducing their strengths, we also ended by sending to Albania and thence to Italy, the so-called 7th Battalions.[35] The British Government wished that the whole front should be withdrawn within the entrenched camp at Salonica, and the French were not altogether opposed to this scheme. Its execution, it is true, presented serious practical difficulties. A withdrawal of this kind in the face of an enemy in full efficiency is always a very risky operation. It would probably have caused the loss of a great many men and of a large part of the artillery, which it would have been difficult to transport over the rough ground of Macedonia. Another problem was how to defend the entrenched camp, if a great deal of the artillery were lost. The strongest opposition to the scheme came from the Serbs. The Prince-Regent declared definitely that a withdrawal would have a disastrous moral effect on the whole Serbian Army, and that if it were effected he would have great difficulty in exercising authority over it. Depressed as the troops already were, the evacuation of the small tract of Serbian territory which they had reconquered with so much bloodshed, would have produced a regular débâcle, and as the Austrians at that time were offering them extremely advantageous peace terms, which an influential party in the army were prepared to accept, it was by no means impossible that the Russian collapse would have been followed by a Serbian separate peace. Finally, if the Allies had limited themselves to holding the entrenched camp at Salonica, the Central Empires would no longer have been prevented from communicating with their friends in Greece. For all these reasons the plan, which was really a mad one, was abandoned.
We had another difficulty with General Sarrail concerning the extension of our front. He was always insisting that we should extend our line so as to give the French divisions a chance of more frequent turns of rest, but our sector was one of the most difficult, and the defences were anything but complete, so that General Petitti had constantly opposed this request. General Pennella, to whom it was presented again, replied to the same effect. On General Mombelli, General Sarrail brought new and stronger pressure to bear with the same end in view, but after a careful study of the situation, he came to the same conclusion, and appealed to the Italian Comando Supremo. The latter referred the question to the Commander-in-Chief in France, who stated that he would try to convince General Sarrail, but that if the latter insisted on his plan, he would not be able to take upon himself the responsibility of giving contrary orders. As a matter of fact, however, General Sarrail did not insist and the Italian front remained for the moment unchanged.
CHAPTER XI
FROM THE SALONICA FIRE TO THE RECALL OF SARRAIL
On August 18, 1917, there occurred one of those catastrophes in which the history of Salonica is so rich. At about three p.m. a fire broke out in a small house occupied by a poor Jewish widow in the central part of the old town. For four months not a drop of rain had fallen, and at Salonica there was no adequate organization for fighting the flames, except a small and ill-equipped fire-brigade inherited from the Turks. The Allied Armies had their own fire-engines, but the C.A.A. had made no arrangements in view of a possible conflagration in the city, for which the local authorities were supposed to provide. Big fires were by no means unknown in Salonica; some thirty years before a considerable part of the town had been destroyed by the flames, and other fires had occurred fairly frequently. The water supply was totally inadequate and the pressure very weak. The great majority of the houses in the old town were of wood and even in the others there was a great deal of woodwork; as if this were not enough, a high wind was blowing at the time. All circumstances were therefore propitious for a first-class fire. In a very short time the flames spread far and wide, and from the poor hovel of the Jewish widow it soon enveloped a large part of the city in a vast conflagration. About sunset the Italian military band was still playing in the Place de la Liberté near the sea, and no one imagined that the flames could possibly come so far down (the quarter where it had broken out was half-way up the hill). But by ten at night the handsome buildings along the sea front were menaced, and had to be rapidly evacuated; during the night they, too, caught fire. The heat of the flames was so terrific that, although these structures were of brick and stone, they were swept away like the wooden hovels. Even the rails of the railway along the quay on the side opposite the houses and many yards away from them, were twisted out of shape by the heat. Throughout the night there was a general exodus of the population from the awful furnace. One saw families abandoning their homes carrying some clothes, bedding and other household goods, which were afterwards set alight by sparks scattered by the wind.
Allied detachments were distributed about the various quarters of the town to prevent pillaging, to which the local hooligans and a certain number of soldiers belonging to one or two of the Allied armies devoted themselves. We were glad to be able to establish that no Italian soldiers took part in these operations, and the same may be said of the British. The military lorries, especially those of the British Army, accomplished admirable salvage work; all through the night and the following day they plied back and forth between the fire zone and the British camps outside the city. Our own lorries were for the most part engaged in clearing our clothing depot, which was the only military establishment in the centre of Salonica; fortunately the flames only just reached its outer wall, which was blackened, and a few days later it was possible to occupy it again. The premises occupied by the C.A.A. were also evacuated for a day or two, as they were at one moment in danger, but the fire never actually reached them. Luckily no military establishment was destroyed, save one or two depots of trifling importance.
BULGARIAN PRISONERS.
IN THE “CASTELLETTO” TRENCHES.