With the French in France and Salonika

by Richard Harding Davis

The hill was the highest point of a ridge that looked down into the valleys of the Vardar and of Bodjinia. Toward the Bulgarians we could see the one village of Kosturino, almost indistinguishable against the snow, and for fifty miles, even with glasses, no other sign of life. Nothing but hills, rocks, bushes, and snow. When the “seventy-fives” spoke with their smart, sharp crack that always seems to say, “Take that!” and to add, with aristocratic insolence, “and be damned to you!” one could not guess what they were firing at. In Champagne, where the Germans were as near as from a hundred to forty yards; in Artois, where they were a mile distant, but where their trench was as clearly in sight as the butts of a rifle-range, you could understand. You knew that “that dark line over there” was the enemy.

A year before at Soissons you had seen the smoke of the German guns in a line fifteen miles long. In other little wars you had watched the shells destroy a blockhouse, a village, or burst upon a column of men. But from hill 516 you could see no enemy; only mountains draped in snow, silent, empty, inscrutable. It seemed ridiculous to be attacking fifty miles of landscape with tiny pills of steel. But although we could not see the Bulgars, they could see the flashes on hill 516, and from somewhere out of the inscrutable mountains shells burst and fell. They fell very close, within forty feet of us, and, like children being sent to bed just at dessert time, our hosts hurried us out of the trenches and drove us away.

While on “516” we had been in Bulgaria; now we returned to Serbia, and were halted at the village of Valandova. There had been a ceremony that afternoon. A general, whose name we may not mention, had received the medaille militaire. One of the French correspondents asked him in recognition of which of his victories it had been bestowed. The general possessed a snappy temper.

“The medal was given me,” he said, “because I was the only general without it, and I was becoming conspicuous.”

It had long been dark when we reached Strumnitza station, where we were to spend the night in a hospital tent. The tent was as big as a barn, with a stove, a cot for each, and fresh linen sheets. All these good things belong to the men we had left on hill 516 awake in the mud and snow. I felt like a burglar, who, while the owner is away, sleeps in his bed. There was another tent with a passageway filled with medical supplies connecting it with ours. It was in darkness, and we thought it empty until some one exploring found it crowded with wounded and men with frozen legs and hands. For half an hour they had been watching us through the passageway, making no sign, certainly making no complaint. John Bass collected all our newspapers, candles, and boxes of cigarettes, which the hospital stewards distributed, and when we returned from dinner our neighbors were still wide awake and holding a smoking concert. But when in the morning the bugles woke us we found that during the night the wounded had been spirited away, and by rail transferred to the hospital ships. We should have known then that the army was in retreat. But it was all so orderly, so leisurely, that it seemed like merely a shifting from one point of the front to another.

We dined with the officers and they certainly gave no suggestion of men contemplating retreat, for the mess-hall in which dinner was served had been completed only that afternoon. It was of rough stones and cement, and the interior walls were covered with whitewash. The cement was not yet dry, nor, as John McCutcheon later discovered when he drew caricatures on it, neither was the whitewash. There were twenty men around the dinner-table, seated on ammunition-boxes and Standard Oil cans, and so close together you could use only one hand. So, you gave up trying to cut your food, and used the free hand solely in drinking toasts to the army, to France, and the Allies. Then, to each Ally individually. You were glad there were so many Allies. For it was not Greek, but French wine, of the kind that comes from Rheims. And the army was retreating. What the French army offers its guests to drink when it is advancing is difficult to imagine.

From a photograph by R. H. Davis.

Headquarters of the French commander in Gravec, Serbia.

We were waited upon by an enormous negro from Senegal with a fez as tall as a giant firecracker. Waiting single-handed on twenty men is a serious matter. And because the officers laughed when he served the soup in a tin basin used for washing dishes his feelings were hurt. It was explained that “Chocolat” in his own country was a prince, and that unless treated with tact he might get the idea that waiting on a table is not a royal prerogative. One of the officers was a genius at writing impromptu verses. During one course he would write them, and while Chocolat was collecting the plates would sing them. Then by the light of a candle on the back of a scrap of paper he would write another and sing that. He was rivalled in entertaining us by the officers who told anecdotes of war fronts from the Marne to Smyrna, who proposed toasts, and made speeches in response, especially by the officer who that day had received the Croix de Guerre and a wound.