What that situation may be, whether the Bulgar-Germans will attack Salonika, or the Allies will advance upon Sofia, and as an inevitable sequence draw after them the Greek army of 200,000 veterans, only the spring can tell.
If the Teutons mean to advance, having the shorter distance to go, they may launch their attack in April. The Allies, if Sofia is their objective, will wait for the snow to leave the hills and the roads to dry. That they would move before May is doubtful. Meanwhile, they are accumulating many men, and much ammunition and information. May they make good use of it.
CHAPTER IX
VERDUN AND ST. MIHIEL
Paris, January, 1916.
It is an old saying that the busiest man always seems to have the most leisure. It is another way of complimenting him on his genius for organization. When you visit a real man of affairs you seldom find him surrounded by secretaries, stenographers, and a battery of telephones. As a rule, there is nothing on his desk save a photograph of his wife and a rose in a glass of water. Outside the headquarters of the general there were no gendarmes, no sentries, no panting automobiles, no mud-flecked chasseurs-à-cheval. Unchallenged the car rolled up an empty avenue of trees and stopped beside an empty terrace of an apparently empty château. At one end of the terrace was a pond, and in it floated seven beautiful swans. They were the only living things in sight. I thought we had stumbled upon the country home of some gentleman of elegant leisure.
When he appeared the manner of the general assisted that impression. His courtesy was so undisturbed, his mind so tranquil, his conversation so entirely that of the polite host, you felt he was masquerading in the uniform of a general only because he knew it was becoming. He glowed with health and vigor. He had the appearance of having just come indoors after a satisfactory round on his private golf-links. Instead, he had been receiving reports from twenty-four different staff-officers. His manner suggested he had no more serious responsibility than feeding bread crumbs to the seven stately swans. Instead he was responsible for the lives of 170,000 men and fifty miles of trenches. His duties were to feed the men three times a day with food, and all day and night with ammunition, to guard them against attacks from gases, burning oil, bullets, shells; and in counter-attack to send them forward with the bayonet across hurdles of barb-wire to distribute death. These were only a few of his responsibilities.