Campaigning in the Balkans

Part II Chapter Page

I. The Prelude 188

II. The Balkans and the War . . . 201

III. The Importance of Salonika . . 212

IV. Peace in the Balkans .... 220

VI

PART I CHAPTER I

THERE is a hill which rises to the north of the small and ugly village of Ambarkoj, which in its turn is twelve miles north of Salonika. It is not a particularly impressive hill, but it happens to command a good view of the country for many miles around, so I climbed to the top of it, uncomfortably enough by reason of the tangle of evergreen oak, the harsh edges of the rock, and the thickets of brambles. Right on the summit I found all that the birds and beasts and sun and storm of Macedonia had left of a man who must have fallen in one of the half-forgotten wars which have troubled the land. There were the scattered bones. Rags of clothing were embedded in the ground. Close at hand a couple of clips of cartridges proved that he had fallen in the midst of his fight. There was the merest remnant of his cap, and there was a button which showed him to have been a Bulgarian. His rifle had been taken away jut the rest had been left as it fell, left to remain through the years, to be a symbol and token of all that land which one could see standing there beside the tangled rubbish which used to be a man.

It is hard to think of a better place than that for the beginning of some account of the country of which so many tens of thousands of our men are gaining an intimate knowledge, and of their difficulties and sufferings and achievements. From that high place it is possible to see all the different kinds of land which go to make up Macedonia, and to remember all the problems which mountain, valley, and plain present. And those forgotten bones were the witness of the history of the country, of all that past conduct of its affairs, of all its custom and habit — of all those things which are producing so direct an effect on our life today. It may not appear that there is an connection between a dead Bulgarian on a little hill three thousand miles away and the war-time price of sugar in England, and yet the connection exists, and will be made plain later on.

If you were to stand where I was standing and face the north, you would have on your left a great plain rolling away to a blue wall of distant mountains in the west. Immediately before you, but still a little to the left, you would see a line of trees and a fresh green in the herbage which would prove the presence of water with occasional swamps. Due north and on all the right would be the hills, some of them smooth and gentle, some of them great gray mountains. Between them you would find the little valleys, and the occasional habitations of men.

One valley there is in particular. It lies at the foot of the hill which, indeed, closes the southern end of it. From the line where the evergreen oak ends it sweeps downward very gently and delicately for about a couple of miles to where a tiny village stands at the foot of its eastern slope, and then winds out of sight round a westerly bend. On either side it is fenced by considerable hills. They rise about it, very grim and forbidding. It is not an easy valley to enter from any direction, and in consequence it has all the appearance of prosperity and comfort. The soil is cultivated. There are the wide fields of maize, and the great patches of tobacco. In one part of it I found a whole series of plots given over to funny little plants which made me realize for the first time that the tomato and the vegetable marrow are very closely related to each other. There is abundant pasture. Two small square towers of whitish brick mark the presence of springs, and all the appearance of the ground proves that you could find water anywhere by sinking a well twenty feet deep or less. The houses of the village have a settled, established appearance, very unlike that of the flimsy mud-plastered hovels of Ambarkoj. It looks like a place where the generations have followed each other in peace, and that is very unusual in Macedonia. The bones of the dead Bulgarian are there to explain why such tranquillity is unusual; the sheltering hills give the reason for the happiness of this one village.

All that delightful valley is a picture of what Macedonia might be, and the most insistent reminder of what it is not. Even the people are different. Wandering down the length of it one day I found two women and a man working in the fields, with two great black pigs frisking and gamboling round them like a couple of terriers. I asked some question about water, and they stood up and answered to the best of their power, frankly and courteously. The day after, in another village across the hills and down in the plain three miles to the west, I tried to buy some eggs, and met with nothing but glum silence, averted eyes and closed doors. They were the people of the plain, whose homes lay open and defenceless; they were a people accustomed to war.

As the village of the hills stands for what Macedonia might be, so does Karadza Kadi, the village of the plain, stand for what it is. It is a village which knows and obeys the law of that war^- troubled land. The homes of its people are poor, mean structures with never a hint or trace of beauty or security about them. If they were burnt down and destroyed it would be no great loss, for they could be rebuilt so easily. All around stretch the miles of utterly fertile land, but only tiny patches are cultivated. The approach to the village might easily be made into a good safe road but it is left a wretched, half-obliterated track swamped with water and mud at every time of rain.

For this is the law of Macedonia, that you shall not build yourself a secure and costly home which your enemy may at any time destroy or take for himself; you shall not plant great fields or any more than is strictly necessary for yourself lest your enemy come and reap your rich harvest; you shall not make an easy road to your home lest your enemy come down it swiftly to your destruction. It is better and safer to have so poor a house that it is not worth the burning, so small a crop that it is not worth the gathering, so painful a road that it is not worth the traveling. The dead Bulgarian explained all these things. The poor confusion of his bones was the witness that this country has not ceased to be ravaged by war, that it has known no accustomed peace, that its people have not dared to surround themselves with those permanent things which are the mark of happier lands.

There can be, one imagines, few more fertile countries in the world, and few indeed in Europe. All sorts of rare, desirable things will grow on its soil in splendid profusion. Maize is a most flourishing crop. Tobacco is grown here which is valued all over the world. Such things as the little grapes which are turned into currants and raisins thrive on the hillsides, and there are the plantations from which comes attar of roses. There does not appear to be any end to the possibilities of Macedonia. Civilized nations spend millions in reclaiming land in far countries, in clearing it of swamps, mosquitoes and malaria, in perfecting systems of drainage and irrigation, and yet here is this rich land, in Europe itself, barren and desolate, given over to thistles and scrub, with the poison of fever haunting every valley, with miserable tracks instead of roads — wasted altogether.

For Macedonia today is not very far from being a wilderness. Before the army came to Salonika there was scarcely a road worthy of the name between the sea and the Bela Sitza range and the Struma. There are the hundreds of square miles that might be so busy growing food for man and beast, and they grow nothing but thistles. The hillsides might be rich with vineyards, and they are desolate with evergreen oak. There is water everywhere, and it is allowed to serve a little space and then to wander aimlessly to the sea. There might be herds of great cattle and mighty flocks of sheep, but all you shall find is a few tiny cows, a few attenuated goats, and a few scraggy, fleshless sheep. Each wretched village worries along as best it may, a self-contained community, having little traffic with the outer world. And between the villages there sweep the miles of the wasted land. Wasted because here is no security of tenure, no consecutive rule, no assurance that he who sows shall also reap. Wasted because it is a country where you may find the bones of the dead on the tops of little hills.

And in addition to being wasted, the country is poisonous. In every low-lying, swampy area the mosquito finds an admirable home prepared; and there arises the problem of malaria. Modern science understnds how to deal with that problem. Macedonia could be cleared of it as other countries have been cleared. Drainage and the discipline of fire would make the country free— only there has been no one sufficiently interested in the country to take the matter up. The natives, I suppose, are accustomed to fever, or perhaps they develop immunity. No one from the outside has been attracted to the place. Even the wildest American millionaire would shrink from working out development schemes in a country compared with which the average South American republic is a model of stable and constitutional government. People have been fighting in and for and about

Macedonia from the dawn of history, and so we have it as it is today.

That such a land should be in such a condition is a fact that arouses a very bitter kind of anger. Few of us, perhaps, have brought, or will bring, pleasant memories away from it, but that is the fault, not of the land, but of the circumstances which have made it what it is. And in spite of the things we endured in it, we shall probably remember as the years pass by that it is a country which has great beauty, grandeur, and an appealing loveliness, as one moves from place to place and learns all the variety of it. We shall remember again the wooded slopes of Kotos, Ajvasil resting so happily on the border of the lake, the dim mountains that hide Fort Rupel, and the little streams that run in secret valleys. We shall remember such things as these; perhaps we shall forget the unpleasant facts. But those unpleasant facts are the things which have to be remembered at this time, and in any future considering of the Salonika campaign; for they have the power to condition and to limit every operation that has been or will be planned. They are more potent to hinder than all the strength of the enemy. When our rulers decided on the expedition they opened war not against man alone, but also against Nature — Nature neglected, misused, spurned. The generations to come may ask why they added such a task to the burden we were already bearing. It is not my business to ask that question, but — the fact must be borne in mind, for if it is not remembered there may be heavy injustice to those who were charged to carry out the adventure.

An army is a large and complex thing with innumerable needs. If you send it to any distant place you must either be prepared to supply those needs or else be very certain that they can be supplied on the spot. Whether or not the fact was realized, one cannot say, but a fact it is that scarcely a single need of our army in Macedonia can be supplied on the spot. I cannot, indeed, remember a single article that was bought in large quantities from the inhabitants except forage. That was rounded up and stacked — under guard — at convenient places, but there was little or nothing besides.

The land has no food to give us. The great spaces which might have grown corn are, as I have said, busy with thistles. The cattle are so scarce and of such shocking quality that if the army had begun to eat them they would have been extinct in a week and the troops would have been mutinously demanding bully beef. All our corn and meat came, and still must come, across the perilous sea. There were, of course, such trifles as melons, eggs and tomatoes and occasional fowls, but all that Macedonia can give us to eat is the merest drop in the bucket. Every fresh battalion that is sent to Salonika means that more ships must bring food behind it, and keep on bringing it so long as it remains there.

And not food alone, but everything else which an army can possibly require. Guns and ammunition must be brought as a matter of course, but there must be also all clothing, every detail of equipment, tools for every imaginable purpose, materials for putting up wire entanglements — there is not enough wood in the country to form the uprights — and all sorts of hospital stores. Paper, pens and pencils, books, bacon, baths, soap, /candles, tobacco, matches — all such things must be brought across the sea. Galvanized iron, wagons, mules, telephone wire, water buckets and bivouac sheets — every imaginable thing. For the one thing certain about Macedonia is that you will not find in the country anything that you want.

The relation between the dead Bulgar and the price of sugar in England is, perhaps, becoming apparent. Because so many ships are busy carrying things to the Salonika army there are the fewer to fetch and carry for the people at home ; the traffic of the seas is diverted, and Britain has to put up with the consequences. But if, on the other hand, Macedonia in the past had been free from war, with power to fulfill its own enormous possibilities, half the stuff required might have been bought on the spot, and half the transport saved.

But that, after all, is a side issue. The problems of sea transport are the problems of the people who sent us there. My concern is only with our own problems, those interesting puzzles which began as soon as the stuff reached the wharves at Salonika, and which do continually perplex and worry all sorts of people, high and low, and must be the greatest trouble General Sarrail has ever known. For we came to a country without roads, and undertook to push armies into that country along tracks radiating as do the sticks of a fan. A country without bridges also, and one in which the most innocent trickle of a stream may whirl up into a great river in the course of an afternoon. A country where a way had to be found across swamps, and over great hills— a way where no way had been before.

And a modern army cannot be content with mere tracks, trodden down though they may be by bare feet and unshod bullocks through the years. A modern army has heavy, cumbersome things to carry with it — great guns, ammunition limbers and the rest. These heavy things drive the tires into the ground till at last a swamp is reached which cries a halt to all adventuring. Moreover, a modern army in a wilderness has to be fed. If it will advance, then food must be brought up to it, day after day. There must be

ii rations enough for all the men, forage for all the animals, material to repair all the inevitable wastage of war. These things must be close up to the troops and instantly available. They must follow close behind each new advance if the ground once taken is to be held. If its transport breaks down the army is defeated and must inevitably retire, or die most uselessly where it stands — and an army which dies uselessly is rather worse than no army at all. It comes to this, that if you cannot keep your army supplied you must not send it forward.

That was the first problem of the Salonika expedition, and it is still and will always be the chief difficulty in the way. Standing there beside that dead Bulgar one could realize it all so clearly. Transport was not so great a difficulty when he lived and died. Heavy artillery was not of the first importance and, to a considerable extent, armies could live on the land which they occupied. A man could go out with his ammunition and his rifle and a loaf of bread and do his work for days on end. His campaigning did not call for wellmade roads and strings of motor lorries. It was a simple matter of skirmishing men, of good shooting, and desperate unrecorded little conflicts.

But that old order has changed. The Bulgar of today digs himself excellent trenches from which he must be shelled with heavy guns. To aid him he has all sorts of German guns, brought up along carefully prepared roads to the selected positions. For a defence he has the almost impassable country before him, so that he can deal at leisure with his enemies as they advance to the attack. That, at least, was the state of things at the beginning of the Salonika adventure.

*5

Chapter II

EASTWARD from Salonika runs the road which leads at last to Stavros and all the land which controls the mouth of the Struma. Some five miles out from the town it passes through the village of Kireckoj.

It is a fine road, one of the best whcih the armyhas made in all the country. Broad and smooth it sweeps onward and upward, threading the valleys which lead at last to the Hortiack plateau. But when it comes to Kireckoj it is beaten altogether, forced to remember that it is in Macedonia and most unkindly reminded that it cannot behave as a road might in a civilized country. I shall never forget the surprise and amusement and understanding which came in due succession when first I marched up that road and encountered that obstructive village.

We had been coming so freely and easily, with room to spare for the passing of all the bustling motor lorries which raced to and fro. The surface was so good that marching was easy. The gradient

H had been so excellently contrived that we climbed without effort higher and higher into the heart of the hills. And then quite suddenly we saw a few houses before us. Our road disappeared between them, and a private, with the armlet of the military police, stepped forward and stopped our little column. In a little while we realized that he had a companion who was busy at the side of the road with a telephone. Presently another body of marching men appeared, and when they had passed we were told that we might go on.

We passed between the houses of Kireckoj. Our fine, broad road had vanished, strangled in midcareer. In its place we had a narrow, winding track that worked a zig-zag course upwards and onwards. If we met a little native cart we had to pass it in single file. How motor lorries ever contrive to get through the place I cannot imagine. It must be a far longer and more trying performance than the rest of the five-mile run to Salonika, yet scores of them accomplish it daily. When at last we came out at the other end and recovered our road we found another policeman and another telephone operator stationed at the side of it, and then we understood. They were on duty there all the time to prevent collisions in the village. They were the signalmen of the road whose duty it was to see that no one went forward from either end unless it was certain that the way was clear.

There could not be a better illustration of the contrast between Macedonia as it is and Macedonia as the warfare of today requires it to be, or as, indeed, modern civilization requires it to be. As Eastern villages go, Kireckoj is very good indeed. Planted in the security of the hills, its houses are well built and substantial. It is quite unusually clean, its shops do not wear the general Macedonian air of being utterly ashamed of themselves, and its people appear to be happy, prosperous and unafraid. But there was that horrid little winding street, a silent witness to that hatred of free movement and development which marks the East, a barrier to trade as well as to war, the symbol of a people who are content if only they are allowed to live in a close-packed little circle remote from the striving of the world.

They may be right, of course. That is a question with which I have no present concern. The only point of immediate importance is that their symbolical street is a confounded nuisance to soldiers who have a war to worry about. It was well enough, no doubt, in the days before artillery reigned on the battlefield and hiding carefully behind the corner of a house the soldier shot his less cautious enemy and advanced to the next corner. But it is not at all well now, as any gunner can testify who has tried to take a battery through that serpentine alley.

I have written so much about Kireckoj, not because it is exceptional, but because it is so thoroughly typical. It is a village of the very best type, and yet it turns the march of an army into a sort of inglorious obstacle race, and all the villages of Macedonia have the same awkward characteristic. I do not know one with a road running clear through from end to end. Salonika itself has streets which twist and turn in every direction.

This was one of the facts which had to be considered when the plans were made for pushing the army forward. It is natural when one is making a road in a new place to follow any existing tracks. Those tracks have usually been chosen by the wisdom of the centuries because they afford the easiest way of getting from one place to another. The folly of men is certainly stupendous, but you don't get people toiling along a difficult way year after year when an easier and safer way is open to them. Therefore it would have been natural for the new roads to follow the old paths, but the nature of these obstructive villages made such a simple course very generally impossible. In the particular case of Kireckoj it could scarcely be avoided, for the valley in which it lies is so narrow and precipitous that there was no room to swing round it on one side or the other.

What sort of a task the engineers must have

^7 had who planned the first roads out from Salonika one can only imagine by studying the obstacles which they avoided or overcame, the expedients to which they were compelled, and the occasional awkwardness of their results. Out in the country beyond they could, of course, work with a freer hand. On the waste land between the villages you can put a road practically where you like, and the villages themselves can usually be avoided.

But there, where there are no dwellings to be respected, no claims for compensation to be considered, there are other problems, no less intricate and baffling. Nothing but personal experience could teach the unkindness of those problems, but any man who served for any length of time in the Salonika army will remember and understand. All of us had our turn at road-making at one time or another, and it is more than likely that all the troops at present in Macedonia or who may be sent there in the future will have the same tasks to perform, for as I have tried to insist, roads are the first essential. Somehow or other they had to be made, improvised or improved as the army pushed forward, with all its inevitable guns and lorries and limbers, trailing along behind.

There is one stretch of road in Macedonia which I shall be remembering with mingled hatred and affection all the days of my life. When we came to the place and pitched our camp on the hills above, nothing at all had been done. Probably some one at General Headquarters bad drawn a line on the map from one point to another and said, "Make a road here," but that was all. The rest was left to us and the engineers who were our rulers and instructors for the time being. It was our job, and we were to get on with as best we could.

High up on the right the great gray hills were piled; on the left ran the river, with the wide plain beyond. When the engineers went out to mark the track of the road they looked at the hills and shook their heads, went down to the river bed and shook their heads again. I was new to Macedonia in those days and I had never seen one of the storms which are so characteristic of that violent country. Also I was puzzled by the fact that considerable boulders were strewn about at the foot of the hills, some of them almost as far away as the bed of the river. It was difficult to see how they had come to roll down the slope and across so much level ground. . . . After a time I realized that they had simply been swept along by the torrents of water rushing down the hills, and the difficulties of the engineers began to appear even to me.

They went to and fro, those trained and competent men, studying the ground with quick, accustomed eyes. They studied the ground about the river till they had decided on a line above which the water was not likely to rise ; they studied every turn and swerve of the slope coming down from the hills till they had found where the descending water would pour on to their road, and where it would be safe from such attacks. Presently they were marking out the track, and appointing places for bridges and culverts, ordaining cuttings and embankments. There was a magic in their curt sentences which in the end had the power of making one see the road as it would be — as indeed it is today — although one could not in the least understand how it was to be done, what material was to be used, where it was to come from, or how it was to be brought to the required position. As I have said, I was new to Macedonia, and all these things were mysteries. I had not at that time begun to learn how much can be done with very little in the way of tools or material.

The next day we were busy opening a quarry. The great advantage of working in a wilderness is that you can take such liberties with it. If you desire to remove a mountain and throw it into a valley it is not necessary to get permission from the landlord before you begin. The engineers chose a place in the hillside and we set to work to clear away the scrub and the thin layer of earth which covered the face of the stone. Down below a space was cleared where the stone could be stacked, and the chubby youth in charge of the operations remarked airily that as soon as it was in good working order we should be getting out a hundred tons a day.

If there is anything which the British soldier cannot do, I should like to know what it is. Ours was not one of the pioneer battalions which is supposed to understand such jobs as this and draws extra pay for doing so. The men were just ordinary — which means extraordinary — soldiers, and they set about their work as though they had been quarrying all their lives. There were the rifles piled in ordered ranks on the ground below to prove that they were the servants of another trade, but they wrought with pick and shovel in expert fashion, and afterwards with hammer and drill, boring for the charges of blasting powder. The holes were filled and tamped, with the fuses in position, and we all went back to the camp to eat, to swallow large quantities of vigorously chlorinated water, and to rest in such shade as we could find through those midday hours when the sun seems determined to burn up all Macedonia. Only the engineer remained behind to light the fuses, and the only victim of the explosions was a sorrowful sheep which seemed to have made a hermitage for itself just above the place where we had been working. We found some of it when we went back in the late afternoon. There is nothing at all to be said for Macedonian mutton.