My Balkan log

Chapter I Getting There

Athens and the curious behaviour of the Hun — The American ' drummer ' and what he really wanted — " Our Mr Brown " — Salonika and Charlie the dragoman — Introducing Steve — Subsidized War News — Greek soldiers — The Via Egnatia, the Muezzin, and a vision of the centuries — The man from " The Adelphi."

WE were a very happy family — French, British, Belgian — on the tubby little Messageries Maratimes boat, until we reached the Piraeus. It was October 1914, and the bond of a common danger, common hope drew us together in a wonderful mutual understanding. In the mornings we, the British, did ' physical jerks ' on the well-deck, watched by the passengers from the promenade above ; in the afternoons our men were lectured on their duties to the sick and wounded; in the evenings, under the Mediterranean stars, everyone sang patriotic songs, the Marseillaise, God save the King, and Tipperary — always Tipperary. At all hours everyone talked to everyone else, the barrier of language acting rather as a stimulus to effort. It was a marvellously glowing time, you will remember, October 1914, a time of tense emotion, intoxicating, fervorous, star-gazing. How far away it all seems now.

We were happy, as I have said, until we reached the Piraeus and the family began to break up. There also, for the first time, we began to come in contact with people who were critical, unsympathetic, even hostile to our common cause, people who looked at us and judged, from the outside.

I had my first experience of it coming down from the

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Acropolis, saturated with the calm white sculptured loveliness of the Parthenon, feeling that every moment was an almost too perfect realisation of anticipated joy. It was particularly inappropriate, at that moment, that my path should have crossed that of a tweed-clad fellow, the back of whose close-cropped head seemed to melt into a red roll of fat behind his ears. He glared at my uniform, stepped sideways, and spat on the ground — an act which seemed to me unpleasantly unnecessary. I stopped deliberately and told him what I thought of him, adding as a Parthian shot some entirely imaginary aspersions on his family connections. Of course he did not understand a word. I knew that, but the fact did not in the least detract from my malicious joy. We parted, perfectly absurdly, in mutual gesticulation, both roseate with patriotism. Then I made my way to the ship as a haven, only to find the happy family feeling was no more. We had filled up with Greeks, Bulgars, Roumanians, Jews, nondescript Levantines bound for Salonika, and, last but not least, had taken on an American ' drummer,' who said he was travelling, via Dedeagatch, through to Constantinople.

There was no avoiding the drummer. He was a large, rubicund person, full of effusive bonhomie. No group was sacred to him. That night we found him at our table, and he monopolised the conversation at dinner, talking with a mixture of shrewdness and sentimentality, rather over-characteristically American, giving us intimate details of his own life, birthplace, income, etc., and apparently expecting us to do the same.

Very soon he learnt all there was to tell : that there were six of us, doctors, each with two orderlies ; and that we were joining the Serbian Army. That set him off in an ecstacy of admiration for our courage and unselfishness, which naturally made us all feel very embarrassed, for though one may think oneself no end of a fellow in one's heart, yet no one cares to have it shouted at one by a stranger amongst other strangers. So, to avoid him, the little group of British doctors went up on deck immediately after dinner.

But we had reckoned without the pertinacity of the drummer. Presently he followed us, carrying a fountain-pen and a writing pad, producing from one of his pockets a small silk American flag on which he asked us to write our names. None of us wished to deface the flag of his country with our quite inconspicuous names ; but he would take no denial. And so he had his wish.

While we were all signing, he expatiated. The great heart of the American nation, it seemed, was with us in this struggle against Teutonic military despotism. We, the blushing group signing our names, were going to do noble work against tremendous odds. It was likely that some or all of us would never come back. But, whether we did or not, we would write our names on the roll of fame ; and it was proud he was to have our personal record on the flag of his country. While he talked we all became more and more uncomfortably shy. McLaren, the Canadian-Scotsman, our " Chief," got up hurriedly from his chair, moved fretfully to the side of the ship, looked over the rail at the dark unbroken horizon, and said : —

" We ought to be in Salonika to-night by time-table. We're two days late already."

His movement broke up the group, and we followed him to the rail. The drummer laughed, somewhat sarcastically.

" You're in the Orient now. Doc. Time doesn't count here. You'll find the Serb has one word for everything, and that's ' Sootra ' — to-morrow. When it comes to pro-crast-in-ation he's some bird"

With that he left us, his object accomplished ; and presently we heard his voice booming in the saloon, talking to some Smyrna Greeks. At the time we thought Kim a flamboyant ass. We knew no tiling then of the hyphenated- American, and the elaborate German secret service agency worked from Athens. How he must have laughed at us when he forwarded an actual autograph record of our names to his head office. It was an exquisite bit of fooling, and had we not been what we were, merely doctors, most valuable information.

What pleases me now in the retrospect is that all unwittingly, we focussed the attention of the ' drummer ' upon ourselves to the total exclusion of " our Mr Brown," a dapper little man travelling in Manchester goods, who came aboard at Malta, and first raised my suspicions by always keeping in step with me when we promenaded together on deck. No matter how I broke, stopped, shortened, lengthened, changed, " our Mr Brown " always kept in step automatically, right to right, left to left. I knew the trained man by that; the drummer didn't; and so " our Mr Brown," the torpedo expert, got up to Belgrade unsuspected, and proved himself a terrific nuisance to the Austrian Monitors on the Danube for many months to come.

But to resume. After the departure of the ' drummer ' below, we found the decks nearly deserted. It was a beautiful night of stars with a lumpy sea of molten lead around us. A chill wind blew on the starboard quarter from the island-dotted .Egean, making us turn up the flaps of our military great-coats around our ears. Far out to port the dark serrated outline of the Euboean coast loomed faintly continuous as we steamed steadily onwards in the night.

Except for our small group, the deck was deserted, the warmth-loving Levantines having betaken themselves below to their cabins, or the insufferably stuffy saloon where every porthole was kept religiously screwed up throughout the voyage.

The placid little ' Commandant,' very fat and rosy, had disappeared from the bridge; and his incredibly voluble, gesticulating, tall, thin ' premiere capitaine ' had taken his activities elsewhere. Even our English orderlies were nowhere to be seen, though the strain of choruses, somewhere aft, indicated their whereabouts. We had the ship to ourselves, until gradually the cold and the increasing night drove us also below.

Barclay and I shared what was left of a cabin after our kit-bags and accoutrements had been stowed. Affinity is a curious thing. We had met as strangers in a room in London a few weeks previously, and decided at once we should be friends. We had kept together on the troopship to Malta, wandered round there in the yellow sunshine, grown to like each other better daily, and had now, in the near unknown coming to us, firmly decided to take whatever fortune offered us, still together. Lying comfortably smoking in our warm bunks, with the choppy waves of the iEgean swishing alongside, we naturally fell into desultory talk. Neither of us had faced war before ; and it was difficult to tune our thoughts to the fact that the broad sweep of Europe from Brest to Constantinople was one long bristling battlefield ; and that soon we would be in the thick of it, patching torn bodies rent by the teeth of war, pitifully doing our little best to repair what the wrath of man had done.

" It looks to me," I said, " as if we were in for a devilish thick time. The news at Athens was that the Serbs were being driven back, and the Austrians would be in Nish before we got there."

Barclay flicked the end from his cigarette.

" I think McLaren, our ' Chief,' hasn't quite grasped it," he said. " He talks of what we will do, and what we won't do at Nish, as if we were likely to be able to choose. It seems to me we shall be dumped right into it without choice, as soon as we get there. It must be a horrible business to be behind a beaten army, with the wounded always being pushed back on you, and you always moving back trying to evacuate them amongst the ruck of retreating troops."

" If all's true we have been hearing, the need for us must be appalling. I expect you're right. But I've given up trying to arrange the future," I said. " Make a working plan for the comfort of your soul, but let it be elastic, is a good rule. If it won't work, when you are faced with facts, scrap it altogether, and start afresh."

" Yes," said Barclay sleepily.

In the morning we woke to a sunlit dimpling sea. We were in the Gulf of Salonika. Land lay on either side and ahead of us. To starboard were the blue hills of the Calcidice, to port the mountains of Macedonia, with the great peak of high Olympus, sacred to Zeus the Thunderer, dazzling white, immaculate, dominating all. It was not to these, however, storied though they be, that all eyes were turned, but directly ahead. Salonika was in sight, and it represented not only the end of a voyage, but also the beginning of a new life, with all the unexpected possibilities involved, awaiting us.

Seen at a distance, in the early morning light, the city appeared as an irregular quadrilateral mosaic of black and white and terra-cotta, with curious long needle-like streaks of white amid the reds and blacks. As we drew nearer the mosaic resolved itself into square white houses with red tiled roofs, bowered in gardens dark with cypresses and mulberry trees ; and the curious white streaks became the slender minarets of the many domed mosques, scattered irregularly over the city, which lay four square within its battlemented encircling walls, rising from the water's edge precipitously to the Calamerian hills behind.

Gradually as we drew nearer, the masts of many feluccas, sterns close-hauled against the low stone sea-front, appeared ; whilst nearer us, anchored inside the protecting arms of the breakwater, were steamships flying the flags of every European country except Germany and Austria, an indication of the unseen power of our navy which we were quick to note.

The sea-front itself extended for over a mile from west to east, ending in a striking white battlemented round tower, which, from the nameless cruelties perpetrated within its walls in the past, bore the grim title of " The Tower of Blood." All along this front were the palatial facades of hotels, restaurants, banks and other public buildings, past which electric trams ran to and fro, producing in our minds a curious confusion of thought, such as we had already experienced when we found we could travel from the Piraeus to Athens by a similar ultra-modern method of locomotion. Somehow this made it difficult for us to realise that we were gazing on the ancient Thessalonika of the Greeks, the scene of the early missionary efforts of St Paul, the siege torn city held in turn by the Romans, Byzantines, Saracens, Normans, Venetians, captured by the Turks as long ago as 1430 a.d., and torn from their hands by the victorious Greeks, after almost five centuries of occupation, only eighteen months before our arrival.

As it happened I was orderly officer for the day, and to me fell the duty of seeing our baggage and stores safely landed. Frankly I did not relish the job. At an English port such duty would have been simplicity itself; but, with memories of the East coming back, I knew I had something in front of me which would tax my watchfulness and patience to the uttermost. For in the Levant the fable still exists that every travelling Englishman is a milord, and there is a deep-laid allpervasive conspiracy, therefore, between dragomen, porters, boatmen, custom-house officers, hotel touts, cabmen, and all the flotsam and jetsam of a foreign port, to bleed him mercilessly of his gold, a conspiracy which it is almost impossible to circumvent. All these bandits hover over him Hke vultures, fight for his body, fasten their tentacles into him at every turn, exhaust his patience, lose his baggage, and finally, when they have driven him to the verge of madness, take refuge from his just fury behind the barrier of a foreign tongue, spreading deprecating hands, shrugging shoulders, but never for a moment relaxing their steady siege on his rapidly diminishing resources.

We made fast alongside the wharf about 7 a.m. ; and here one would have imagined the passengers, without further fuss, would have been allowed to land directly. But no ! Salonika has a large population of longshoremen, and, to keep these comparatively appeased, passengers are compelled by port regulations to pile themselves and their belongings into rickety boats on the off-side of the ship, and thus get taken to the landing steps on the sea-front, there to wrangle over the fare as one used to do with the old London cabby.

So, in the intervals of directing our orderlies to get our baggage and stores on deck, I watched our fellow passengers, French, Greek, Belgian, Serb, Roumanian, etc., getting their personal effects away, and wondered how we were going to dispose of our mountainous impedimenta.

And then we suddenly discovered that we were really important people. The Serbian Consul, the English Vice-consul, and " Charlie " appeared — especially " Charlie." The English Vice-consul and I had been at the same public school. Faintly surprised at the unexpected meeting, we grinned at one another.

"Hullo, Bones," I said. "Hullo, Father," he answered. Then he became a government official again. What he really had come about was to meet " Our Mr Brown," standing very quietly at my elbow, very inconspicuous. I introduced them, and they disappeared together. The Serbian Consul on the other hand, knew nothing officially about this mysterious gentleman. He was there publicly to receive us, and smooth our path as far as the frontier.

Our " Chief " was therefore soon deep in conversation with him; and it was at this moment that " Charlie " discovered me, and took possession in the way that only a ' dragoman ' can.

" Charlie " was a large, loose, bottle-nosed, polyglot, obviously Hebraic person in a uniform cap. He seemed to know and be known to everyone. He was evidently willing to do anything, or anyone, provided he was sufficiently well paid, and there was no physical risk attached. He never mentioned the word " pay " of course. That was understood as between gentlemen. He told me he had run a " Hotel " at Shepherd's Bush. If he overcharged his customers as unblushingly as he did us at Salonika, I do not wonder he had to return to the Levant. And yet in his way he served us well.

The Serbian Consul had arranged that we should be allowed to land direct on the wharf. As soon as " Charlie " grasped this, he assumed charge at once, fixed up our rooms for the night, and took all the responsibility of getting us off in the morning from the Consul's shoulders.

" You will want of your baggage, sir, what you will need to sleep. The rest — no use. It can go with the stores, soh ! and with you will arrive at Nish," he said, spreading his hands palms upwards. The " Chief," who had been having some difficulty with the Serbian Consul's French, and had called upon " Charlie " to interpret, agreed that this was a good plan. But I had not been in the Levant before without learning something. It sounded too good. I knew it was too good, and acted accordingly, detailing two orderlies to make sure that all the personal baggage of the unit was separated from the stores, holding them responsible that all kit should arrive complete at the hotel. It was lucky I did so, for, as it turned out, we heard nothing of our stores until ten days after our arrival in Serbia, although we saw them loaded into railway trucks, complete, before we left the quay-side. The Austrians had a playful little way at that time of bribing the Greek porters to lose trucks containing presumably military stores. They managed to lose ours for almost a fortnight somewhere about Monastir.

I found the others already half way through breakfast in the big Restaurant of the Olympus Palace Hotel, when I had finished the baggage question. It was an interesting cosmopolitan crowd to watch, a crowd in which Greek officers in khaki, very gorgeous in gold epaulettes and big curving swords, predominated, for the Greek army had recently been mobilized.

Many-tongued rumour was busy. The Serbs were said to be breaking before the onslaught of the Austrian hordes. There were circumstantial reports that the Grey-coats had already got as far south as Nish, and that nothing short of marching straight on Salonika would satisfy them now. The Bulgars were reported to have concentrated 250,000 men on the frontier, ready to join up with the Austrians, determined to wrest Macedonia from the Greeks and Serbs, by whose combined " perfidy " they had been deprived of it barely two years before. The air was electric ; and we felt, after the quiet of the sea, as though we had been plunged suddenly into a maelstrom. Editions of the local papers were coming out every hour; and small boys circled round the tables in the restaurant selling them. There were papers in Greek, French, German, Turkish, Judo-Spanish and Italian, indicating the extraordinary cosmopolitan nature of the population. We ourselves were hungry for news, and fell eagerly on such as we could read. We had learnt almost nothing at Malta, the censorship there was so severe ; and the English papers at Athens were already ten days old. Anything might have happened in the meantime.

Jefferson, our Australian educated in the United

States, who was the most junior member of the Unit, had been looking round for later English news, and finding none.

By now everyone had come to know him as " Steve " ; and " Steve " he remained until the end. He was a constant joy to us, with his mixture of restless energy, American slang, careless generosity, flashes of shrewdness, general youthfulness, and occasional sound common sense.

He had the natural assurance of the Australian aggravated by an American education, and, without any suspicion of the absurdity of his attitude, was accustomed to lecture us daily on the war — how it should be run, how badly it was being run, how much better he could do it if he were in control.

It was a priceless performance, and I, for one, would not have missed it for anything. But in spite of this, he really was quite a competent doctor, rather apt to rush to a diagnosis on insufficient grounds like most young doctors, but with the makings of a first-class clinician in him.

Already we were very fond of Steve.

Just before I arrived to breakfast he had managed to get hold of a French journal. It was called Le Nouveau Steele, and his face grew longer and longer as he read.

" Say, Father. We're in a bad way," he exclaimed when I came in. " Listen to this," and he read out a long message about great German victories on the Marne. Barclay by then had got another paper. It was called UOpinion, and presented the cause of the Allies in the most roseate way. According to it the Germans were at the last gasp, the Austrians suing for peace, the Russians triumphant everywhere. Sherlock, the stolid little man from Manchester, meanwhile had ferretted out yet another journal, Uhidependent. It too, was optimistic on our side, but not quite so roseate as UOpinion. Accordingly we began to compare notes.

"I've got a hunch," said Steve, " that one of these editors is some Uar."

" It all depends on one's point of view which is the liar," said Barclay, sagely.

Afterwards, of course, we discovered that all three papers were subsidised to present news favourable to one or other side, and that Austria in particular was spending money like water to influence Greek opinion against intervention on the side of the Allies, knowing that if her cause succeeded all the Balkan States must fall automatically under her suzerainty.

Before our arrival in Serbia two attempts at invasion by Austria had failed, one in August, one in September. The third was now in progress, and as it seemed, on the crest of success.

After breakfast, knowing we could not leave for the frontier before the following day, we started to scour the town. The first place we sought naturally was the Post Office, in order to get rid of the mail accumulated since we left Malta. All along the front, in the streets, the trams, the cafes, the place was swarming with Greek soldiers dressed in khaki. In the Post Office we found half a dozen of them, and when I was enquiring in halting French about the postal rates to England, one of them turned suddenly on me.

" Say. Mister. Are you British ?" he said in a pronounced American accent; and we all became friends at once.

He was a reservist from Pittsburg, recalled to the colours ; and there were hundreds like him, he informed us, in Salonika. Indeed we could not help seeing it was so, for they stopped us constantly in the most friendly manner in the street, insisting on conversing with us, sometimes possibly to air their English before their less travelled comrades, but always with a genuine friendly feeling which there was no mistaking. Whatever was the feeling of their officers, and we had a sensation it was none too kindly at times, there was no doubt as to that

Plate I.^Crcck soldier. Creek \lbaniau soldier.

Salonika.

of the men. They were quite sure that they would be at war within a fortnight on the side of the Allies, and the relish with which they talked of cutting up the Bulgars, showed that they, at any rate, had a very definite idea whom the enemy would be. That, you will remember, was in the end of October 1914.

Salonika, like every other ancient city, still flourishing, is a palimpsest of history. Situated on the broad alluvial plain, formed by the junction of the Vardar and the Inji Karasu, spreading up to the hills on the north between its crumbling walls, from the Tower of Blood on the sea-front to the Castle of the Seven Towers (Heptapyrgion), it presents a moving picture in which the Eastern note is ever dominant, in spite of the modernity of electric cars on the front, and elaborately stuccoed white villas along the sea-shore beyond the walls to the east. This note is partly due to the constant panorama presented by the kaleidoscopic passers-by — portly fezzed Turks, white capped Albanians, Cretans with enormously baggy trousers, tall, white-kilted Greek mountaineers with whiskered shoes, solemn Greek priests all in black, patriarchal Jewish Rabbis, dark skinned piratical-looking sailors, gold earringed, with gaudy handkerchiefs tied round their heads, arriving from the neighbouring ^gean islands with their cargoes of fish, mussels, squids, sponges, which they were unloading from the feluccas along the sea-front — but it is chiefly, I think, caused by the fact, that no matter where you wander you constantly come across some great-domed mosque, with its soul uplifting minaret, a slender white finger pointing towards high heaven, the one great contribution Mohammedan architecture has given to the aesthetic pleasure of the world.

Steve, Sherlock and I wandered round on foot, freed from further responsibility for the day. A military band was playing in the square just beyond our hotel, and the little marble tables of the Odeon and other cafes around were fully occupied. We followed the street leading out of the square at right angles to the sea-front, as most of the European shops were there, and it would be our last opportunity of acquiring various things we needed before we left. Sherlock dubbed it " Oxford Street " at once; and ever after we used the name when talking of it. Presently we found it narrowed, then was roofed over, and we were now in the dim-lit centre of the bazaar, whose streets, teeming with ant-like life, opened out on either side, completely oriental in their careless irregularity of outline, narrow width, and heterogeneous, multi-coloured contents.

Wandering round, turning at a right angle, we presently found ourselves in a wider street with tram lines. Compared with those we had just been through, it seemed modern, tamie ; and then, suddenly we came upon a crumbling, weather-beaten arch stretching over it, supported on square columns, carved in three tiers of worn old bas-reliefs in marble, representing Roman legionaries marching in triumph. It was as if the finger of time had set the clock violently back for centuries. We all stared at it solemnly.

A little Greek clerk who was passing turned his head.

" C^est VArc de Triomphe d^ Alexandre le grand,^^ he said politely.

Steve drew a long breath. Coming from a country with no history, and no monuments, he was staggered.

" Gee," he said. " This is some Arch. Why it's B.C. ! Great snakes, to think of it."

And then it dawned on me. The commonplace modern street in which we were walking with its commonplace tram-lines, and tumble-down mean houses, was the " VIA EGNATIA," the great Roman road running from Constantinople across Macedonia to the Adriatic, built to connect the two great capitals of the Empire ; and the arch we were looking at was the

Arch of Constantine over the Calamerian Gate. Under it, grim Roman centurians had led their legionaries out to battle against the barbarian hordes. It had seen the gorgeous processions of Byzantine emperors. Fierce hook-nosed Saracens had stormed through it, scimitar in hand, in triumph. It had looked down upon the armed hosts of the Crusaders. The Norman knights of Boniface, Marquis of Montferret, King of Thessalonika, had kept watch and ward within its portals. Captains of the great Republic of Venice, panoplied in armour, had defended it against the onslaughts of the dread Osmanli. Finally the Crescent had triumphed over the Cross ; and then, for over five hundred years, it had slumbered peacefully under the shadow of the Padishah. For five hundred years it had heard the silver call of the muezzin from the corbelled gallery of the minaret adjoining :

" God is great. I bear witness that there is no God but God. I bear witness that Mohammed is the Prophet of God. Come to prayers. Come to salvation. God is great. There is no God but God."

The call had been repeated so many thousand times that the memory of other things had become as it were the shadow of a dream. Constant reiteration had blotted out all memory of the pale-faced Nazarene. It seemed as though its sleep was destined to last for ever.

And then had come the change, sudden, sharp, dramatic, heralded by the rapid staccato of the machine gun. A miracle had happened. The immemorial Turk had vanished like a vision in the night. His reign was over. The voice of the muezzin had ceased to call the faithful to prayer. The Cross was once again in the ascendant. The Crescent was no more. The conflict had been so recent that the scars were still fresh when we came upon the scene. Through the adjoining streets the struggle had lasted for forty-eight hours; and here and there the stuccoed fronts of the houses were still pitted by the bullet holes no one had yet had time to plaster over.

Most of the mosques had now been closed. Such as were churches before the time of the Moslem, notably St. Sophia, and St. Demetrius, had been reconsecrated to their original use. St. Sophia was built in the time of Justinian. It became a mosque in 1589, and was reconsecrated again in 1913. Thus we were able to see the curious sight of a minaret standing alongside the great central dome, from whose apex a cross once more shone golden against the blue.