With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

“You had a rough passage from Marseilles,” ventures the spy. “We come from the peninsula,” says Tommy. “Three thousand of you on such a little ship!” exclaims the sympathetic Serbian. “You must have been crowded!” “Crowded as hell,” corrects Tommy, “because there are five thousand of us.” Over these common spies were master spies, Turkish and German officers from Berlin and Constantinople. They sat in the same restaurants with the French and English officers. They were in mufti, but had they appeared in uniform, while it might have led to a riot, in this neutral port they would have been entirely within their rights.

The clearing-houses for the spies were the consulates of Austria, Turkey, and Germany. From there what information the spies turned in was forwarded to the front. The Allies were helpless to prevent. How helpless may be judged from these quotations that are translated from Phos, a Greek newspaper published daily in Salonika, and which any one could buy in the streets. “The English and French forces mean to retreat. Yesterday six trains of two hundred and forty wagons came from the front with munitions.” “The Allies’ first line of defense will be at Soulowo, Doiran, Goumenitz. At Topsin and Zachouna intrenchments have not yet been started, but strong positions have been taken up at Chortiatis and Nihor.” “Yesterday the landing of British reinforcements continued, amounting to 15,000. The guns and munitions were out of date. The position of the Allies’ battleships has been changed. They are now inside the harbor.” The most exacting German General Staff could not ask for better service than that! When the Allies retreated from Serbia into Salonika every one expected the enemy would pursue; and thousands fled from the city. But the Germans did not pursue, and the reason may have been because their spies kept them so well informed. If you hold four knaves and, by stealing a look at your opponent’s hand, see he has four kings, to attempt to fight him would be suicide. So, in the end, the very freedom with which the spies moved about Salonika may have been for good. They may have prevented the loss of many lives.

During these strenuous days the position of the Greek army in Salonika was most difficult. There were of their soldiers nearly as many as there were French and British combined, and they resented the presence of the foreigners in their new city and they showed it. But they could not show it in such a way as to give offense, because they did not know but that on the morrow with the Allies they would be fighting shoulder to shoulder. And then, again, they did not know but that on the morrow they might be with the Germans and fighting against the Allies, gun to gun.

Not knowing just how they stood with anybody, and to show they resented the invasion of their newly won country by the Allies, the Greeks tried to keep proudly aloof. In this they failed. For any one to flock by himself in Salonika was impossible. In a long experience of cities swamped by conventions, inaugurations, and coronations, of all I ever saw, Salonika was the most deeply submerged. During the Japanese-Russian War the Japanese told the correspondents there were no horses in Corea, and that before leaving Japan each should supply himself with one. Dinwiddie refused to obey. The Japanese warned him if he did not take a pony with him he would be forced to accompany the army on foot.

“There will always,” replied Dinwiddie, “be a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie.” It became a famous saying. When the alarmist tells you all the rooms in all the hotels are engaged; that people are sleeping on cots and billiard-tables; that there are no front-row seats for the Follies, no berths in any cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie. The rule is that the hotel clerk discovers a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges a front-row seat, and the ship’s doctor sells you a berth in the sick bay. But in Salonika the rule failed. As already explained, Salonika always is overcrowded. Suddenly, added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000 Greek soldiers, their officers, and with many of them their families, 60,000 British soldiers and sailors, 110,000 French soldiers and sailors, and no one knows how many thousand Serbian soldiers and refugees, both the rich and the destitute. The population was quadrupled; and four into one you can’t. Four men cannot with comfort occupy a cot built for one, four men at the same time cannot sit on the same chair in a restaurant, four men cannot stand on that spot in the street where previously there was not room enough for one. Still less possible is it for three military motor-trucks to occupy the space in the street originally intended for one small donkey. Of Salonika, a local French author has written: “When one enters the city he is conscious of a cry, continuous and piercing. A cry unique and monotonous, always resembling itself. It is the clamor of Salonika.”

Every one who has visited the East, where every one lives in the streets, knows the sound. It is like the murmur of a stage mob. Imagine, then, that “clamor of Salonika” increased by the rumble and roar over the huge paving-stones of thousands of giant motor-trucks; by the beat of the iron-shod hoofs of cavalry, the iron-shod boots of men marching in squads, companies, regiments, the shrieks of peasants herding flocks of sheep, goats, turkeys, cattle; the shouts of bootblacks, boatmen, sweetmeat venders; newsboys crying the names of Greek papers that sound like “Hi hippi hippi hi,” “Teyang Teyang Teyah”; by the tin horns of the trolley-cars, the sirens of automobiles, the warning whistles of steamers, of steam-launches, of donkey-engines; the creaking of cordage and chains on cargo-hoists, and by the voices of 300,000 men speaking different languages, and each, that he may be heard above it, adding to the tumult. For once the alarmist was right. There were no rooms in any hotel. Early in the rush John McCutcheon, William G. Shepherd, John Bass, and James Hare had taken the quarters left vacant by the Austrian Club in the Hotel Olympus. The room was vast and overlooked the principal square of the city, where every Salonikan met to talk, and the only landing-place on the quay. From the balcony you could photograph, as it made fast, not forty feet from you, every cutter, gig, and launch of every war-ship. The late Austrian Club became the headquarters for lost and strayed Americans. For four nights, before I secured a room to myself by buying the hotel, I slept on the sofa. It was two feet too short, but I was very fortunate.

Outside, in the open halls on cots, were English, French, Greek, and Serbian officers. The place looked like a military hospital. The main salon, gilded and bemirrored, had lost its identity. At the end overlooking the water-front were Serbian ladies taking tea; in the centre of the salon at the piano a little Greek girl taking a music lesson; and at the other end, on cots, British officers from the trenches and Serbian officers who had escaped through the snows of Albania, their muddy boots, uniforms, and swords flung on the floor, slept the drugged sleep of exhaustion.

Meals were a continuous performance and interlocked. Except at midnight, dining-rooms, cafés, and restaurants were never aired, never swept, never empty. The dishes were seldom washed; the waiters—never. People succeeded each other at table in relays, one group giving their order while the other was paying the bill. To prepare a table, a waiter with a napkin swept everything on it to the floor. War prices prevailed. Even the necessities of life were taxed. For a sixpenny tin of English pipe tobacco I paid two dollars, and Scotch whiskey rose from four francs a bottle to fifteen. On even a letter of credit it was next to impossible to obtain money, and the man who arrived without money in his belt walked the water-front. The refugees from Serbia who were glad they had escaped with their lives were able to sleep and eat only through the charity of others. Not only the peasants, but young girls and women of the rich, and more carefully nurtured class of Serbians were glad to sleep on the ground under tents.

The scenes in the streets presented the most curious contrasts. It was the East clashing with the West, and the uniforms of four armies—British, French, Greek, and Serbian—and of the navies of Italy, Russia, Greece, England, and France contrasted with the dress of civilians of every nation. There were the officers of Greece and Serbia in smart uniforms of many colors—blue, green, gray—with much gold and silver braid, and wearing swords which in this war are obsolete; there were English officers, generals of many wars, and red-cheeked boys from Eton, clad in businesslike khaki, with huge, cape-like collars of red fox or wolf skin, and carrying, in place of the sword, a hunting-crop or a walking-stick; there were English bluejackets and marines, Scotch Highlanders, who were as much intrigued over the petticoats of the Evzones as were the Greeks astonished at their bare legs; there were French poilus wearing the steel casque, French aviators in short, shaggy fur coats that gave them the look of a grizzly bear balancing on his hind legs; there were Jews in gabardines, old men with the noble faces of Sargent’s apostles, robed exactly as was Irving as Shylock; there were the Jewish married women in sleeveless cloaks of green silk trimmed with rich fur, and each wearing on her head a cushion of green that hung below her shoulders; there were Greek priests with matted hair reaching to the waist, and Turkish women, their faces hidden in yashmaks, who looked through them with horror, or envy, at the English, Scotch, and American nurses, with their cheeks bronzed by snow, sleet, and sun, wearing men’s hobnailed boots, men’s blouses, and, across their breasts, war medals for valor.