CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/campaigninginbalOOIakerich £AmMGNlNG INTHEBAIMNS BY Lieutenant Harold LaKe 01 =T^^(i/ fc^ ■ ' ^ NEW YORK Robert M. McBride & Company 1918 Copyright 1918 by ROBERT M. McBRIDE CT COMPANY Printed in the United States of America. Published September. I9I8 CONTENTS PART I CHAPTER PAGE I. The Bulgar on the Hill . . . i IL Roads and Their Making 14 III. The Seres Road 27 IV. "Peace-Time Soldiering" 39 V. Marching by Night . . 50 VI. Concerning War 60 VII. Our Houses and Tin 69 VIIL Rations and the Dump . 79 IX. Heat and Some Animals 91 X. Sundays at the War . . lOI XL Playtime in Macedonia . . no XII. How We Went to Janes . 121 XIII. Concerning Spies . . 135 XIV. Our Feasting . . 145 XV. Mosquitoes and Malaria . 153 XVI. These Are the Heroes . . 163 XVII. The Way Out of the Land . 173 PART II CHAPTER PAGE I. The Prelude i88 II. The Balkans and the War . . . 201 III. The Importance of Salonika . . 212 IV. Peace in the Balkans .... 220 VI PART I CHAPTER I THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 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 CAJVTPAIiGNING IN THE BALKANS 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 moun- tains 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 THE BULGAR ON THE HILL prove the presence of water with occasional owamps. 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 deli- cately 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 abun- dant 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 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 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 tran- quillity 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 re- minder 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 Mace- donia 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. THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 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 Bul- garian explained all these things. The poor con- fusion of his bones was the witness that this coun- try 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 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 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 flourish- ing 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, mosqui- toes 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 haunt- ing 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 Avater 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 THE BULGAR ON THE HI LL flocks of sheep, but all you shall find is a few tiny cows, a few attenuated goats, and a few scraggy, fieshless sheep. Each wretched village worries along as best it may, a self-contained com- munity, having little traffic with the outer world. And between the Tillages there sweep the miles of the wasted land. Wasted because here is no security of tenure, no consecutive rule, no assur- ance 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 outride has been attracted to the place. Even the wildest American millionaire would shrink from working out de- velopment 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 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 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 remem- ber as the years pass by that it is a country which has great beauty, grandeur, and an appealing love- liness, 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 moun- tains 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 genera- tions to come may ask why they added such a 8 THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 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 in- numerable 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, re- member 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 mutin- ously 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 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 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 ammuni- tion 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, icandles, 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, Mace- donia in the past had been free from war, with power to fulfill its own enormous possibilities, half the stuff required might have been bought 10 THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 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 limlbers 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 // CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS rations enoug-h 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 expe- dition, 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. jTransport 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 well- made roads and strings of motor lorries. It was a simple matter of skirmishing men, of good shoot- ing, 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 12 THE BULGAR ON THE HILL 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. CHAPTER II ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 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 army has made in all the country. Broad and smooth it sweeps onward and upward, threading the val- leys which lead at last to the Hortiack plateau. But when it comes to Kireckoj it is beaten alto- gether, 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 ^4 ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 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 be- tween 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 mid- career. 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 con- trive to get through the place I cannot imagine. It must be a far longer and more trying perform- ance 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 tele- phone 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 un- less it was certain that the way was clear. ^5 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 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 una- fraid. But there was that horrid little winding street, a silent witness to that hatred of free moye- ment 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 coricern. The only point of immediate importance is that their sym- bolical 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 be- hind 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. i6 ROADS AND THEIR MAKING 1 have written so much about Kireckoj, not because it is exceptional, but because it is so thor- oughly 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 character- istic. 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 con- sidered 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 vil- lages 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 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS 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 con- sidered, there are other problems, no less intri- cate 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 aflfection all the days of my life. When we came to the place and pitched our camp on the hills i8 ROADS AND THEIR MAKING above, nothing at all had been done. Probably some one at General Headquarters Ua-cl 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 com- petent men, studying the ground with quick, accus- tomed eyes. They studied the ground about the 19 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS river till they had decided on a line above w^hich 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 mak- ing one see the road as it would be — as indeed it is today — although one could not in the least under- stand 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 20 ROADS AND THEIR MAKING the chubby youth in charge of the operations re- marked airily that as soon as it was in good work- ing 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 sup- posed to understand such jobs as this and draws extra pay for doing so. The men were just ordin- ary — 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 chlor- inated 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 sorrow- ful 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 21 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS ■ " ' ■ ' ■ in the late afternoon. There is nothing at all to be said for Macedonian mutton. Day by day the quarrying went on, and in the meantime one of the engineers had dressed him- self carefully and gone in to Salonika to talk to people in authority. Presently he came back, and in his train came various interesting, useful things. Wagons began to roll up, carrying little trucks, lengths of rail, and more tools. By the time we had got a great pile of stone erected at the entrance to the quarry, another party was busy clearing a track down to the road half a mile away, fixing the rails to sleepers, cutting sidings, and generally making a most adequate little tramway. In less than a week the little trucks were running down the line filled with stone which was emptied into wagons at a cunningly contrived loading place and carted away north and south. The empty trucks were hauled back to the quarry by mules, and all day long the busy work went on, and the road took shape and form along the way which other toilers had prepared. We learned many interesting things about the qualities of the stone of Macedonia in those days, when we left the quarrying to others and proceeded to become road makers. But first we learnt how the surface must be prepared before the stone was put on it. With pick and shovel we attended to it, first marking out the straight run of the road, 22 ROADS AND THEIR MAKING then clearing off all the scrub and grass which might be in the way, and next digging down at each side and making a careful slope up the center so that the camber might be all that could be desired. Every few yards there were little drains to be cut so that the water might not lie under the surface of our road, and there was a ditch to be dug along each side of it. All the little gullies which crossed it had to be provided with drains — long wooden tunnels with big stones packed around them. For the protection of these drains it was necessary to build breakwaters across the gullies a couple of yards or so away, piling more big stones loosely together, so that when the storm sent a descending torrent some of the force of it would be broken and it would only be able to trickle gently through. Then, when all these preparations had been carried out, the road itself could be attended to and we wrestled with the piles of stone which the wagons had dumped by the side of it while the watchful engineers walked to and fro and saw that everything was done in the right way. First came a layer of large pieces of rock, com- fortable lumps as big very often as a man's head, till the whole surface was the most distressing processional way that any pilgrim of the past could have desired. The morning after a good stretch of that ferocious paving had been completed, we ^2 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS found, when we went down to draw tools for the day's work, that each of us was to be furnished with a hammer. Then was made clear the differ- ence between experience and inexperience. Those who were old at the game looked over the pile of hammers carefully, and chose little ones, stubbly little chaps with short, stumpy handles. Some of us, on the other hand, had enlarged ideas about our own strength, and a deal of sincere ignorance, and furnished ourselves with imple- ments with which Thor might have been con- tent. We had yet to learn that breaking stones is quite a scientific game, depending not at all on great muscles or mighty, smashing blows. We went down to our road and scattered our- selves along it, each man before a pile of the rock that was waiting by the side, and set to work. It was very early in the morning when we arrived, but as the sun climbed higher, tunics came off and sleeves were rolled up and the bronzed faces were wet and shining, while the clatter of the hammers never ceased. Then did we foolish ones with the big hammers realize that to the stone-breaker the wrist is more important than the biceps, and while the little ones went tapping merrily on the beat of our preposterous weapons grew slower and slower and our piles of broken stone seemed never to increase. Four hours of breaking stone with a big hammer is enough to put any man out of con- H ROADS AND THEIR MAKING ceit with his own strength and to set him devising all sorts of straps and bandages for his tormented wrist. But with a well-chosen little hammer it is a pleasant job, as I found later on. There is such satisfaction in the gradual increase of knowledge which teaches one at last the right place for the blow to fall and the exact amount of force required so that the stone shall be shattered into fragments of the required size ; it is so comforting to attack a great piece of rock with repeated little blows till all it^ joints are loosed so that one sharp stroke at the right moment sends it tumbling in all direc- tions. One can sit there, working away, dreaming of all sorts of remote and happy things. I know now why so many of those gnarled old men whom one used to find breaking stones by the roadside in England a quarter of a century ago were so placid and happy, looking out beyond the world with eyes that smiled. One can imagine many less secure refuges for a tortured heart and mind than a pile of stones by the wayside and a little hammer, with the high sun over all. Well, we broke our rocks into little pieces, and scattered them over the surface of our road till all those big foundation stones were covered three inches deep. Above them we scattered earth that it might work in with them and bind them to- gether, and the wagons began to pass to and fro ^5 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS along the way we had made. It may not have been road-making according to the best modern ideas, but there at least was a highway, apt and ade- quate for the service of either peace or war. 26 CHAPTER III THE SERES ROAD ONE road there is in Macedonia which dom- inates all the rest. It is so much more im- portant than the others — though many of them have great value and are indeed vital to the needs of the campaign — that it is frequently referred to v^ithout any mention of its name. So you may hear one man say to another, "Oh yes, that happened just by the twenty-fifth kilo." Everyone under- stands. To the uninitiated it might sound as if there was in all the country only one stone which marked twenty-five kilometers from Salonika, but every one who has been out for any length of time knows perfectly well that the Seres road is referred to, that long highway which runs from Salonika northeast to the Struma and then, after crossing the river, swings southward to Seres. That road has played a big part in the campaign, and will continue to do so to the end. A glance at the map will show the reason. It is the one way of approach to a very considerable portion of the Struma front. All the men engaged on that ^7 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS front must pass up the road to their work, and all their supplies of every kind must follow them along the same way. There is not a yard of rail- way available in this direction. It is true that men and material for the district commanding the mouth of the river can be taken round to Stavros by sea, but for the furnishing of the chief part of the line the Seres road is wholly responsible, and some knowledge of it is necessary to any clear understanding of the progress and difficulties of the whole adventure. Ignorance of the nature of the road has led to a great deal of misunderstand- ing in the past, and more has been expected of the Salonika armies than they could have accomplished. Very many soldiers are introduced to the road as soon as they land. There is the day of dis- embarkation down there at the edge of the bay, and the march through the evil-smelling, badly paved town. For two or three days they wait at the base camp, going for short marches, finding out all the customs of the country, and learning not to expect the appearance of a portable church every time the ringing of numerous unseen bells heralds the appearance of a flock of goats. Then, if their division is on the Struma, they march out one morning northwards past Lembet on the first stage of their fifty-mile journey. And if they are fresh troops just out from England and have arrived in the summer they do not enjoy it at all. 28 THE SERES ROAD They may get as far as Giivezne, fifteen miles out, in comparative comfort, but once they reach that spot and encounter the hills, their troubles begin. It is all so new, so strange, and so very uncom- fortable. There is the rising at painfully early hours in the morning so as to get well on the way before the heat becomes too fierce for marching.^ Then there is that terrible time in the middle of the day when one searches in weary despair for some kindly touch of shade, when the heat and the flies make sleep impossible, when the only thing with which thirst can be relieved is chlorin- ated water which seems, in those early days, to parch the throat and mouth. And in the evening, when it might seem possible to rest in the blessed relief of the cool twilight hours, there is the need to get up and press forward once again, coming in the darkness to camp in a strange place where no one can find the water supply, and the cooks take hours fumbling through the dark to prepare any kind of a meal. It needs an uncommonly stout heart to stand the strain of those initiatory days. The Seres road in summer can be very unkind even to seasoned troops accustomed to the country. For newcomers it is the most searching kind of test. I have seen them so often, new drafts fresh from England, toiling hopelessly up those unending steeps, choked and blinded by the dust of the lorries and ambulances which are racing to and fro all the 29 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS time. All that they are feeling is written so plainly on their faces. They are so far away from home and all the beloved, accustomed things. Enthusi- asm and love of adventure might have carried them triumphantly through some wild brief rush in France, but in this there is no adventure. Here is no glory, no swift conflict and immediate service. This is nothing but dull, unending toil, with all the pains of thirst and weariness in a strange and friendless land. Those are the hours when the weight of the pack becomes an intolerable burden to the young soldier, and the rifle seems a fiendish encumbrance devised with infinite skill to torment its owner. At that time everything tends to pro- voke a fierce, unreasoning anger. The shape of the head of the man in front appears to be utterly de- testable, the carriage of the man on the left is a torment. We all know that hour, we who have learned the obedience of war and have had to pass through that flaming test to find the indifference to bodily discomfort, the disregard of hardship and fatigue which are the gifts which his life does at last bestow on the soldier. But it is very hard to meet that hour and the Seres road at one and the same time. It is too much for some of them. They get permission to fall out, and their position is, if any- thing, rather worse than before. They are alone now, but still the journey must be completed. In 30 THE SERES ROAD the days of training in England, to fall out on a march often meant a lift from some friendly carter, or perhaps a drink at some cottage door or a few apples — but here there is nothing. The lorries are pounding by, but they are much too busy to stop and collect people who are merely tired. There is no sign of any water, nor of any habitation of men. There is only the long road winding up the eternal hills, and all the burdens still remain to be dragged after the vanishing column. And then, perhaps, the youngster realizes that he has been a fool. The others will have reached camp and food and drink and rest long before him. They will be taking their ease while he is still toil- ing on ; when he arrives there will be no sympathy, but those who endured to the end will sneer at him, and officers will be demanding explanations. ... I fancy that a great many men will put down the most painful hour of their lives to the account of the Seres road. Some of us, saved by strength or determination or sheer cross-grained temper, have managed always to keep our places jon the march, and so know nothing of the misery which must surely come to the man who falls out, but I fancy that even we give thanks that it is not possible to march up that road for the first time twice over. Those who have been there will know what I mean. But the Seres road is not content with torment- CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS ing newcomers and teaching them with exceptional severity that sharp lesson which every soldier must learn before he is a man made and approved. That is only one of its activities. It also contrives to be the greatest possible nuisance to people high in authority. Fifty miles of an English road, running smoothly over a fine surface, with none but gentle slopes, is not such a very serious matter. If, for instance, the Seres road were such as that great highway which runs from London to Aldershot, it would be almost as good as a railway — ^better in many respects. Supplies could be whirled up to the front without difficulty, and the wounded could be brought back without pain. The swift lorries could hurry to and fro all day long; there would be no discomfort for the marching men. Given transport enough, an army of almost any size could be provided with all the material of every kind which it required, without any peril of delay. But this road of ours is worse than anything that there is to be found in England. It would be hard to make a map on a scale large enough to do full justice to the difficulties which it has to encounter. The hills which lie in its way are the most resolute foes of traffic that any one could imagine. There is no simple matter of cHmbing up one long slope to the highest point at Lahana and then running pleasantly down on the far side. 3^ THE SERES ROAD It has to get across not one hill but an utterly mad tangle of hills. It climbs up and up, and then loses all it has gained in a wild dash downwards which brings it back almost to the level from whence it started, with all the work to be done over again. And this happens not once but, in seeming, endlessly, and almost the whole of its course is the most violent kind of switchback. Its hills would be alarming enough if its sur- face were good, but the surface of the Seres road is atrocious. There is nothing in the least won- derful in the fact, nor is any one to be blamed for it. Everybody knows how our roads in England have to be petted and pampered if they have to bear much fast, heavy motor traffic. The most perfect surface gives way sooner or later under the constant strain and suction of the whirling tires, and repairs are going on all the time. The Seres road had to start with a surface a good deal worse than that of the ordinary macadamized road. It was made very much in the fashion which I described in the last chapter ; indeed no other fashion was possible. It certainly existed before we came to Macedonia, but in those days most of it can have been no better than one of the ordinary native tracks of trodden earth. The army has labored over all the length of it and continues to labor, and will have to continue to do so, but what can you do with mere stones and 33 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS earth to defy the rushing wheels which cut and wrench and tear the surface as fast as it is laid down? It would take something made of ferro- concrete to stand the strain which that road must endure, week in and week out, all the time there is a gun on the Struma which has need of shells, or a man who must be supplied with food. The rulers of the Army Service Corps may know how many lorries go up and down that road every day. I cannot pretend to any such knowledge. I only know that it is never free from the grimy, lumbering monsters. I have camped beside it for days at a time, and they were thundering past all the while. Between the convoys there will come the lighter ambulances. Sometimes there will be a battalion marching up with the long train of its transport grinding on through the inches of dust or mud ; sometimes it will be a battery of artillery. All day long the road knows no rest; lights are flashing up and down it through all the night. In- evitably its surface is reduced to a condition which would drive an English motorist to suicide — and it is fifty miles long. So all those people who wonder why Seres and Demir Hissar and Fort Rupel were not taken last, summer must be referred to the Seres road for the^ answer. They must ask the drivers of the lorries ; they must inquire from the sick and wounded who endured that journey down in the ambulances. 34 THE SERES ROAD More fortunate than many, I was on the other side of the country when my time came, and I went very comfortably down to the sea in a hospital train, but friends of mine were carried down the road in the Red Cross cars, and I know what it meant to them. The most careful driving and the best springs in the world cannot save a broken body when the way is full of holes and stubborn upstanding rocks. But the great point so far as operations on the Struma front are concerned is this, that in all your making of plans you are inexorably limited by the power of the road to bear your transport. Even if you had unlimited lorries at command, you could only get so m^any of them on to the road in a given time. The wear and tear, too, are frightful, and motors cannot last half as long as they would on an ordinary road. And of course the hills and the surface together cut down speed relentlessly, and the journey is a long, painful business. Bearing these facts in mind, consider how vast are the needs of an army which is operating on an extensive scale. There will be many batteries, and all of them must be kept supplied with shells. A battery can blaze away in minutes ammunition which it has taken hours to bring up, and once your lorries are empty they must go all the way back before they can be refilled. In Sir Douglas 35 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS Haig's report on the Somme offensive he told how hundreds of miles of railway had to be laid down in preparation for that great move. We have only fifty miles of a disastrous road and no railways at all. Supplies, supplies and again supplies — that^ is the keynote of success for the modern army. I As your transport is, so will your victory be. The highest skill, the greatest degree of valor, these will be useless unless the material you require is instantly ready to your hand. Deprive your battery of shells, and you had better destroy the guns before they fall into the hands of the enemy. Shells for your guns and food for your men — these things are essential. And there are count- less other articles almost as important. You must have barbed wire for your defences, and wood and galvanized iron and sandbags for your trenches. Bombs must be brought up and ammunition for the rifles. Tools of all sorts must be ready behind the line, and wherever the advance goes the sup- plies must follow it if you are to hold the positions you have gained. These statements are the merest commonplaces of war as it is waged today, but to appreciate the full force of them one needs to be sitting at the far end of the Seres road waiting for things to arrive. Very wonderful country that is, up there just beyond Lahana, where the whole of the Struma plain is spread below and the great hills stretch 36 THE SERES ROAD away to left and right, some clothed with trees, some bare and gray with the naked rock. If one could just sit and look at it, the prospect might appear to be altogether admirable, and one could find something of pleasure in the far prospect of Demir Hissar and the great mountains which rise beyond. But one has other business on hand. Down in that plain the Bulgar and the Hun are waiting, and we have to deal with them — and there are the miles of that atrocious, dominating road. Some day perhaps the full story of the road will be told. I think it would take a driver of the A.S.C. and one of the R.A.M.C. to do it properly, with, perhaps, a chapter from one of those un- happy infantrymen I was writing about just now. Words alone would hardly be able to do it justice, so perhaps the cinematograph might be brought in to assist, and in time the people of Britain might understand something of what is involved in this campaign, how much there has been to do and to endure, how great have been the difficulties, how stern are the limitations. Whether or not the peculiar features of the road were fully realized when the adventure was planned is a question on which the future may possibly throw some light. But it is at least necessary and only fair that they should be generally understood now. The nation should know what manner of task that is which its soldiers are performing, lest there be a ten- 37 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS dency to judge without knowledge and to condemn without the evidence for the defence. Last sum- mer the English newspapers were announcing the beginning of a great offensive on the Struma. It would have required several miracles and a few thousand magic carpets to have turned that offen- sive into anything like the mighty affair which it was to have been in the minds of the innocent and imaginative sub-editors who designed those trump- eting headlines. 3S CHAPTER IV 'peace-time soldiering" ACTIVE service from the soldier's point of view, is such a queer mixture of the real thing and of that other business which is contemptu- ously referred to as "peace-time soldiering." Our new armies are not fond of peace-time soldiering. The men put on khaki suits for the purpose of killing Germans, and they find it hard to under- stand why they should not be allowed to get on with that interesting business. Besides, it seems so very absurd to come across the sea to a place where war is actually going on and then to settle down to life in a camp where things are very much the same as they would be in England, except that minor luxuries are hard to come by and week-end leave is a thing of the past. There is probably less of this irritating life in Macedonia than anywhere in the areas of the war, just because the roads need so much attention. In the early days everybody who was not digging trenches was busy on the roads. There was so much to be done, and labor was so scarce that the 39 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS army was set to navvying as a matter of course. But as the more urgent tasks were accomplished the hated, necessary thing came back and in the camps all over the country men found themselves doing once more the things which they had hoped they might be allowed to forget. For an army has many of the qualities of steel, and if it is to be of the greatest possible value when the time for using it arrives it must be kept keen and bright by constant polishing. If it is allowed to relax and grow slack, there is a peril that it will fail when the time of testing comes — and something more than drill is learnt on the parade ground. One area there is in Macedonia where peace- time soldiering is specially possible and where it is carried out with a deal of energy. The troops which may happen to be stationed for a time on the Hortiack plateau have little to do in the way of road-making, and their commanders take good care that they shall have every chance of reviving the memory of the lessons learnt during the train- ing in England. Indeed it is a kind of polishing station where divisions can be sent in turn to be smartened up and reminded that even if they are on active service, the man who comes on parade unshaven is a very dreadful criminal. It is a good place for the beginning of one's experience of Macedonia. High above and to the east of Salonika Bay, the plateau rolls along for 40 ^'PEACETIME SOLDIERING'' miles to where Kotos, that excellent mountain, climbs into the sky. People who cherish dim memories of things learnt from geography books at school may be under the impression that a plateau ought to be flat, but there is nothing in the least flat about Hortiack. It consists of endless hills, and though they are not nearly so big as those which torment the Seres road, they are big enough to provide ample exercise for the men sta- tioned among them. On the infinite variety of their slopes the camps hide coyly away, and it is no small adventure to be sent to that area to find any particular battalion. You may find all the rest of the brigade to which it belongs and still fail to discover the object of your search. There are those concealing hills on every hand, and no- body seems to know the exact spot you are seek- ing. And even when you have been there a week or two the troubles are not entirely at an end, and it is not safe to be too confident in the power of your sense of direction. It is better to keep an eye on the sun and to study landmarks and bear- ings before you set out to explore those complicated valleys. Everywhere from end to end of the area one found the busy camps in the days when I knew the place. Remote though it might be from the actual fighting, there was plenty of the sound of war in the air. You see in those sudden little 41 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS valleys there is plenty of space for the more violent parts of training to be carried out without danger to other people, so a trench-mortar battery would be busy in one secluded dell, a grenade school in another, and a machine-gun class in a third. They would be banging away all day long as instructors toiled to perfect the pupils in the art of abolishing the King's enemies. And then, rounding a sudden bend you would come upon a broad, flat space where a battalion was drawn up on parade going through battalion drill just as it might have done in any park in England. We had a camp which was built on nearly as many hills as Rome, and to get from the officers' lines to the mess involved the descent of one steep little hill and the ascent of another, while the duties of the orderly officer took him up and down stiff, slippery slopes all day long. But it was a fine place, and it was very good to live there, and to be able to sit in the evening looking out over the smooth water of the bay to where Mount Olympus stood, a beautiful, ghostly shape, sixty miles away. And in the bay there were the ships which had left England only a little while ago, and one did not seem so far away from home. There were other advantages, too. Hortiack — its proper name is Hortackoj but we never rose to that pitch of accuracy — is only seven miles from Salonika, and it was possible to get out supplies for the mess, 42 ''PEACETIME SOLDIERING" so there was never any lack of those little lux- uries which do so much to make life bearable in distant lands. It was also possible to get into the town itself occasionally, though Salonika is not exactly the sort of place one would choose for a pleasure trip. Still it is a town, with shops and restaurants and crowds of people, and after a pro- longed course of Macedonia one is grateful for very little. There were times when we did not altogether appreciate our spell of peace-time soldiering. One day in particular will remain in the memories of some of us as long as we are capable of remem- bering anything. Some one in authority had evolved a tactical scheme on a large scale, and no one realized quite how large that scale was. We were quite accustomed to brigade operations which began at five in the morning and ended at eight, and we thought that customary program was to be carried out on this occasion and that we should all be back in time for breakfast. We were ordered to parade at 4:45 a.m., so we were busy getting up soon after four, and even in summer time getting up at that hour on those hills is rather a chilly business. Somehow we groped our way on to parade and marched off. It was about two hours later that we realized that some- thing very unlike the usual program was contemplated. 43 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS For we had marched and continued to march alto- gether in the wrong direction. There was no sign of a swinging round so that our faces might be turned towards home, and we began to wonder with a certain acute interest what time it would be when we got breakfast. So presently we came to the edge of the plateau and halted there, looking northwards over the quiet level of Lake Langaza to the tumult of the hills which lay between us and the Struma. We waited there for a long time, reflected that it was five hours since we had got out of bed, and remembered that in those latitudes no parades are supposed to take place in summer between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. It seemed reasonable to suppose that we should be sent home imme- diately, and that we must have completed our mys- terious share of the operations. But no one seemed inclined to send us home. Instead we were thrust out along the edge of a precipice and sent skirmishing back from it over large areas of Macedonia in its most untamed and riotous mood. It was blazing hot by this time, and most of us had got out of the habit of seeing that our water-bottles were always full. By the time we had reached and occupied the crest of a low hill looking towards our very distant home a number of men were sighing for a cosy corner in one of the trenches of France, and the rest were inventing suitable destinies for the general who 44 ^'PEACETIME SOLDIERING'' designed the scheme which we were carrying out. I heard a great many suggestions, but none of them were really adequate. After a little further baking on that ridge we moved forward again and occu- pied another hill. This time we were really getting nearer home, and things looked more hopeful, but the designer of the scheme was a thorough man, and he believed in doing things thoroughly. All at once we were switched oflf to take part in a wide flanking movement, which included the assault of three more hills, and then we were told that we might go. That last three miles back to camp nearly finished us. We reached the camp a little over ten hours after we left it, and there was hardly anyone who had had a mouthful to eat or drink since he l^pmbled out of bed. I am not putting this forward as the classic in- stance of endurance, to be recorded in all military manuals hereafter forever as a standard by which all future achievement shall be judged. It was, of course, a mere nothing from the soldier's point of view, and that is just why I have written about it. For it seems rather a good illustration of the ease with which all sorts of men have adapted themselves to the soldier's life in these days of the nation's necessity. It is the kind of thing which has been done over and over again since the war began by tens and hundreds of thousands of people who before the war would never have dreamt that 45 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS it was possible to get up and work hard with their bodies for ten hours without food or drink. If in the days of peace an employer of five thou- sand men had suggested that they should accom- plish such a feat and had ordered them to do it, there would have been a strike on a large scale, and the employer would have been accused of in- credible brutality. But there were many more than five thousand of us, and no one thought of accusing the responsible general of brutality, fervently though we cursed him at the time. We were in the army now and it was all in the day's work. We had learnt that we could do something which we had never thought of doing before ; we had gained some information about the power of these bodies of ours to do and to endure without disaster and, indeed, without overwhelming discomfort. As soon as we got into camp we proceeded to learn something about their power to appreciate good food and drink. I have to confess that my share of the performance in the mess consisted of an ordinary lunch — it came first, because it was ready and waiting for us — followed by a very complete breakfast. Somehow it seemed a pity to miss a meal. So our life went in those days at Hortiack. There was always plenty to do, and yet it was in its way a holiday. Also there were occasional amuse- ments, not the least of which was provided by the 46 ^PEACETIME SOLDIERING'' Greek muleteers. To drive some of the innumer- able mules required to cart the army's luggage about the hills of Macedonia a number of Greeks had been employed. In addition to becoming acquainted with the mules, they were supposed to learn some drill, and a number of unfortunate sergeants had been told off to drill them. Those sergeants did not enjoy life very much. The first thing to be done was to find some one in the squad who knew enough English to translate the words of command, but the sergeant who cannot work off his characteristic sarcasms on his pupils is not likely to be very happy. Besides, the Greeks seemed to have an eternal objection to marching in step. They would go strolling along, with the ser- geant bellowing his "Left, Right, Left," and the linguist of the squad making Greek noises to the same effect, but those muleteers took no notice. They did not even trouble to march in time. They sprawded over the ground with happy smiling faces and the most complete indifference to the noisy people who barked at them, and the Tommies stood round criticizing the performances while the ser- geants perspired in ineffectual rage. But there was a better thing than this: there was a band. How it came to be there no one seemed to know, but it lived somewhere among the little valleys, and it used to be sent round to give the various battalions a treat on rare, delight- 47 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS ful evenings. If you want to appreciate even a third-rate brass band, go to Macedonia for a few months. And this was quite a good band, and it played all sorts of tunes we knew and had been accustomed to hear at home in the days before there was a war, as well as some others which we were assured were the ktest favorites and would certainly greet us on our return. The whole battalion would be aware of the fact that the band was going to pay us a visit three days before it was to come, and everybody was waiting for it when it arrived. I remember the last of these excellent concerts which we had. It was in the hour before dinner, and the musicians had stationed themselves on the top of one of our numerous hills. Some one had sent over to the mess for some chairs, and there had come also a tray bearing bottles — sherry, ver- mouth, bitters and gin, those amiable liquids which do so excellently prepare the way for a meal. So we sat there and listened, and the men were all gathered round. Sometimes a familiar chorus would be taken up by a hundred voices ; sometimes there was only the deep, appreciative silence, while the music flowed on. For a little while v/e were home again. We did not regard the sea below or the evening sky, or the far shape of Olympus, or any of those things which surrounded us. We were back among familiar scenes, and faces we knew 4S ^'PEACETIME SOLDIERINC were shining at us. We moved in our own places and among our own people, and for a little while we were content. 49 CHAPTER V MARCHING BY NIGHT IT is not good to march in the daytime during the Macedonian summer. At times, of course, it has to be done, but whenever possible marches are made by night. There came a day when a party of us were ordered to proceed from Hortiack to Ambarkoj, and we paraded at five in the after- noon, left the camp behind, and came in time to the edge of the plateau looking down once more on Lake Langaza. The sun was setting as we reached the top of the hill; the long shadows were falling across the still water, and darkness was gathering round Ajvatli, the village which stands, remote from the world, on the southern shore of the lake. Between us and the village there ran two miles of one of the steepest hills that even Macedonia can show. We proceeded cautiously down into the darkness which seemed to flow upward to receive and cover us. Presently all that plateau which had been our home for a little while was far above us and out of sight as we worked cautiously down to the level of the lake — for it is necessary to pro- 50 MARCHING BY NIGHT ceed with caution when marching by night in such a country, even when a road is provided. Newly-arrived troops often find that night marching extraordinarily difficult. They expect too much from our roads. They give them credit for being as the roads of England, and they are grieved when their feet come violently in contact with rocks, or sink into deep holes. Even if one knows the country and its ways it is an awkward business at first, but the human animal is wonderfully adaptable. How it happens I cannot tell, but in course of time one does learn the trick. The feet seem to develop an extra sense, and they find their way over all sorts of obstacles without disaster, so that in the end you can go adventuring over any kind of ground in safety. But however sure on their feet the men may be, you can never be altogether certain what the trans- port will do, and going down steep hills by night is a strain to find out all the weak places. Our particular defect asserted itself before we had got half-way down. It lay in the pole which connected one half-limber with the other, and without warn- ing it tore right out of its socket. Either the wood was faulty or it had been badly prepared. What- ever the reason, there was the crippled limber with half our stores on board, lying across the road, while its agitated mules were dancing the tango round it. A mule can always be trusted to 5^ CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS increase any unpleasantness which may arrive. The main body had gone on ahead in happy ig- norance of the disaster. I happened to be in com- mand of the rearguard, so I was intimately con- cerned with the trouble for if we could not get the limber on it would be necessary to stay with it all night. That is one of the beauties of life in the rearguard. It is your business to clear up all the litter as you go, and not to move on without it. By the time the mules had been dealt with and the extent of the damage ascertained, the position looked distinctly unpleasant. Limber poles do not grow on Macedonian hills. It might have been possible to send a man to steal one from a camp we had passed some four miles back, but that would have meant a delay of at least two hours and a half. But one does not need so very many weeks in Macedonia to learn the great, consoling lesson that the British Army will always see you through — always. Never yet have I known it to fail. Whatever the occasion, the man who can deal with it is there, and I knew that on this occasion, too, salvation must be somewhere handy. It came in the shape of a fiery little company- sergeant-major who had been a transport sergeant in France and knew all about limbers and every- thing else. He came bustling up and I subsided into a kind of lay figure whose sole business it was to stand and hold an electric torch in the required MARCHING BY NIGHT position while the little man obtained ropes from mysterious sources, performed strange deeds with them and the broken pole, and issued orders at the rate of fifty a minute to my command. He was the man of the moment, and I was quite content to hold the torch for him. You must never interfere with the army when it is getting you out of a tangle. If you do it may be flustered, or, worse still, offended. Just let it alone and wait till the work is done, and then events will resume their normal course. So at the end of ten violent minutes the little man jerked himself upright and saluted. "Ready to carry on, sir," he snapped, and the procession lumbered forward and downward once more. Ten minutes later we met a panic-stricken member of the main body who had come back to look for us. When you are in charge of all the stores of a com- pany, including the mess outfit, you are not likely to suffer from neglect. If you pass within half a mile of it and can see it only by the light of the stars, one village is very like another all the world over, and that, perhaps, is why I have an idea that Ajvatli must be a very nice place. It seemed that it might have been a village in England. It was very quiet, with happy little lights shining here and there. It was a place of homes, and since one could not see them one could forget for the moment that the people were Macedonian and of imcouth habits. I never saw the 53 C AMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS place again, so that dim picture remains, a very pleasant memory of our journey as we turned and made our way westward along the border of the lake. That was good travelling — night marching at its best. There was no attempt at a road, but we went smoothly forward over thick, close turf. Thorn bushes grew here and there, but there was no obstacle in our way. On the right lay the smooth black water of the lake, and on the left the ground sloped gently upward to the secret darkness where lay the hills from whence we had come. The air was full of the incessant shrilling of the tree- frogs, but the bull-frogs in the lake had absolutely nothing to say for themselves, which was a com- fort. There was once a man in the camp of some little detached post or other in Macedonia who was so pestered by the chanting of the bull-frogs in a pool close by that he arose at midnight and lobbed a Mills grenade into the middle of the concert. Most of the frogs were too dead to sing any more after that, but the camp was awake half the night trying to decide whether or not the remedy was worse than the complaint. Just by the end of the lake it seemed good to halt for a little food, for it was ten o'clock, and we had another five or six miles to travel. We had not been halted two minutes before the merry fires were dancing at the spot the cooks had selected for their MARCHING BY NIGHT operations, and by that sign you might have real- ized, had you been there and known the facts, that we were no new-comers in Macedonia. For Macedonia is a country in which the betting is against your finding fuel at any halting-place. It is true that there are forests here and there, but trees are generally very scarce. In some places there are bushes and scrub, but very often the camp must be pitched on an open plain which grows nothing more substantial than thistles. That is the time when novices suffer, and especially at night. They search miserably and with pain all over the place and find in the end no more than a few hand- fuls of poor, thin stuff which makes a little blaze and flickers out, leaving the water as cold as ever, and the prospects of tea as dismally remote. But the old hands know better than that. Every bit of wood they pass on the march is collected. You will see men with long, rough sticks tied to their rifles and two or three more in their hands. Sometimes almost every man of a platoon will be carrying fire- wood, and when the halt is reached it is all handed over to the cooks. And on this occasion we had done better than usual. The last camp we had passed on leaving the plateau must have been the home of a very fresh and incautious unit, for they had stacked close beside the road a whole pile of bits of packing cases, than which there is no better or more desirable firewood. The temptation had been too much for our 55 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS boys, and of course we had seen nothing of what hap- pened as we passed, and now their fuel was boiling the water of our tea at a splendid rate. There was only one drawback to our position on the edge of the lake. From the water, attracted by the flames, came millions of tiny gnats and midges. There were very few mosquitoes, but even so it was an uncomfortable business for anyone who is not fond of eating gnats with bread and jam or of swallowing them in tea. But then Macedonia is no place for peo- ple who are too particular. We went on again under the same quiet stars for mile after easy mile. There was no fatigue in that marching, nothing but a little reasonable weariness. The men did not sing. Indeed I heard very little sing- ing on the march anywhere in the country, and none at all from our battalion. But they swung along hap- pily enough, chatting and laughing ; there was none of that dour silence which tells that the limits of endur- ance are being strained. From the distance came the little sound of guns, but whether from the Struma or the Doiran front it was not easy to say. We were too far away, and hills play queer tricks with sound. At last the column halted. There did not seem to be any particular reason why it should halt. I think every one felt equal to a few miles more, but we had covered twenty from our starting-point and it was an order that we should rest. Some one who had come on ahead and arrived while daylight remained led the 5? MARCHING BY NIGHT different parties to their appointed camping grounds and told us where to find the water. Once again ex- perience bore witness to itself. With newcomers the settling down for the night in the dark is a terrible business, and people are rushing to and fro for hours, but there was no fuss or delay with our men. Quietly and very quickly they made their arrangements with no need of supervision. Little fires sprang up along their lines and one could catch glimpses of them as they lay, some huddled together, some separately, smoking a final cigarette. But for us the day was by no means over. There were only the five of us, officers of the one company, and the mess president, aided and abetted by the cook, had decreed that we should have dinner when we arrived. Already the cook was very busy with pots and pans round his fire, and one of the serv- ants was spreading a cloth on the ground and arrang- ing packs round it for us to sit on. The company commander was trying to write some report or other with the aid of an electric torch, and swearing dis- tressfully at the same time, when we became aware of an approaching radiance. It was another of the serv- ants, bringing up the lamp to which we had treated ourselves during that little spell of luxury at Hortiack. A beautiful oil lamp it was, with glass and globe com- plete, and we had been very proud of it. But we im- agined that it had been left behind. Glass chimneys and globes are not the sort of things to travel securely in limbers. 57 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALK ANS "Where on earth did you get that thing from?" asked our astonished commander. "We just brought it along, sir," repHed the man, and it took a whole string of questions to bring out the fact that one of the servants had carried the lamp, an- other the chimney and another the globe in their hands for the whole twenty miles. They had their rifles and all their equipment. They had also, you may be very sure, their share of the looted bits of packing cases, and yet they had brought these things all the way. The British Tommy is an incalculable person. Those three, it seemed, were as proud of that lamp as we had been. They wanted it to go shining vaingloriously over Macedonia and to fill the members of other messes with envy, so they "just brought it along," and they carried it afterwards over very many miles of that uneasy land, till misfortune and a thunderstorm met it at Lahana. The air was utterly still, and the lamp looked very pleasant burning there so brightly under the stars with our cutlery arranged on the cloth around it. I have had dinner at some curious hours, but I don't think I had ever had it at two in the morning before, yet it seemed more like the end of the day than near the beginning, such was the magic of that pleasant night. And it was a very excellent dinner, for we had some store of our little luxuries, so there were soup, fish (out of a tin), stewed steak, peaches and coffee, and we had some whiskey and a few bottles of Perrier. 58 MARC HING BY NIGHT It is possible to be quite comfortable in Macedonia so long as you are near any source of supplies. The trouble is that you are usually so far from anything of the kind that it is only possible to dream of the things you would like to eat and drink and smoke. But that was a special kind of night altogether, one of those happy times when all goes well. No one seemed in a hurry to go to bed, and when at last I lay wrapped in my blankets under the stars, it seemed almost a pity to go to sleep. The tree-frogs were riot- ing in an orchard of pomegranates, figs and apricots just behind me, but there was nothing unpleasant at that hour in their shrill calling. The North Star was lower in the sky than it had any business to be, but there was the sense of certainty that presenly I should reurn to my home and all those things from which I was parted for a little while. The distant guns were whispering through the air, but they only spoke of that day when peace shall surely come again to visit and dwell upon the earth. Far beyond me rose the line of the Seres road and there were the lights of the ambulances as they came rushing down with their burden of broken men. 59 CHAPTER VI CONCERNING WATER THERE are quite a number of riddles to be solved when troops are moving about Mace- donia, and the most constant of them all is that of the water supply. There is plenty of water in the land — in winter there is far too much — but it hides away in the most irritating fashion, and it has a habit of running in undesirable places. Water usually means mosquitoes, and it is necessary to avoid mosquitoes as far as possible if we are to have any army left in the country. ' In summer most of the rivers dry up. If they are really large and important rivers they may keep a little trickle of water running, but it is hardly more than a trickle. The Galika, for instance, is quite an impos- ing affair when rain is falling. Frequently it cannot be content with one channel but carves itself out two or three in addition to turning wide areas into swamp. But when summer comes it dries up to such an extent that only the scantiest driblet of water connects the little pools which remain to mark its course. There are, on the other hand, a few little streams among the 60 CONCERNING WATER mountains which flow fairly steadily all the time, but these are usually fed direct from springs. The springs themselves are curious. A geologist would probably find all sorts of interesting things in the country if he were to visit it, and work out the connection between all these little underground rivers. It is certain that there must be a whole series of such hidden streams. Over and over again one finds springs which well out of the rock, tumble into a little age- worn basin, and vanish. There is nowhere any trace of a stream. The water comes into the light of day for a moment and slips away out of sight. Very probably it comes flowing out from under another rock miles away, pretending that it comes from an entirely different spring. It would be interesting to go round the country with a few gallons of Condy's fluid, treat- ing these vanishing springs to a dash of color, and then watching to see where the decoration reappeared. Certainly this vanishing habit has made things very awkward for the army. Spring water, when it comes direct from the filtering rock, is usually pure and fit for drinking. Especially at times of stress and emer- gency, there would be a tendency to allow the drinking of such water without restrictions. But when it is realized that what appears to be a spring may be merely a mouth of a subterranean stream, it is another matter. Higher up in its course that same stream may have rippled through the filth of a Macedonian village. Its water may be loaded with micro-organisms which will 6i CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS do terrible things to the stomach of the soldier and render him useless to the army for months. When these things were realized the authorities began to take the water-supply of Macedonia very seriously indeed, and the various medical officers were told that they must be very careful about it. For that, if for no other reason, I should hate to be a Medical Officer. The battalion tramps into a new camp, hot and dusty from a long march and very, very thirsty. Theo- retically, a supply of guaranteed water should have been brought on from the last halt, but that theory breaks down sometimes. There are the crowds of ex- ceedingly thirsty men, and there is a beautiful, clean- looking spring. Between the two stands the M.O. with a nasty little case full of tubes and bottles and similar rubbish, and proceeds to make a test. That test takes half an hour to accomplish. Of course we know that it is necessary. Any man with any sense will admit as much, especially when he is not thirsty. We know that there m.ay be perils innumerable lurking in that innocent water, and most of us have been too near to dysentery at one time or another since we came to the country to desire any closer acquaintance. But one is apt to be unreason- able after twenty miles of Macedonia, if the sun has been shining most of the time. Egged on by the crav- ing body, the brain forgets its caution and hints that even if there is a bit of risk the odds are against any- thing happening, and anyhow the water looks per- 62 CONCERNING WATER fectly good — any one who has ever been in a similar position can imagine the course of that mental dis- turbance. So quite naturally there arises a hatred and scorn and loathing of the Medical Officer. He is seen to be a pedant of the worst type, a bigoted follower of the rule of thumb, a person without discernment or power of independent thought. Moreover he is not content with keeping us waiting. Not content with testing the water, he must needs be chlorinating it. His min- ions throw evil powders into it, so that the good sweet water becomes vile and an offence to the palate. We can even taste it in the tea, and we spend a hearty half- hour in reviling science, and above all, its nearest ex- ponent. Yes, I am quite sure that I do not want to be a Medical Officer. But even this chlorinating business is not the whole of the trouble. It does quite frequently happen that there are two springs to serve the camp, one near at hand and disreputable, and the other far away and tolerable. The doctor decides that the water from the far spring must be used, and immediately earns some more unpopularity. He is unpopular with the men who are told off to guard the forbidden spring and have to stay there all day long scaring thirsty peo- ple away. He is unpopular with the men in charge of the water mules who have to keep tramping to and fro for a mile, or it may be a mile and a half, to bring water for the varied needs of the battalion. And more than 63 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS ever is he unpopular with those who are told that they cannot have any water yet because the mules have not come up. Any man who goes looking for popularity is a fool, but a man who is compelled to attract such an amount of unpopularity is to be pitied, whatever his faults may be. Yet these things have to be done, that His Majesty's forces may deal the more effectually with His Majesty's enemies. When drinking water has been arranged for there still remains the business of washing, and this is fre- quently quite as difficult a question. Really there are times when one cannot understand how our men in Macedonia contrive to keep so clean. It is bad enough for an officer. Requiring a tub he sends his servant off to find some water. Having no more than two hands, the man cannot well contrive to bring more than two canvas buckets back with him, and quite possibly he has had to carry even that amount nearly a mile. With a couple of buckets of course one can do something. Even half a bucket will go quite a long way if you are careful with it, but there is no solid satisfaction in such a tub. At the best it is only a makeshift. But if the officer with his buckets finds the problem difficult, how does the soldier manage? He has no bucket. Most probably the only available water is in a mean little stream which he must share with a few hundreds of his comrades. With that meagre supply he must do all his washing and shaving, and also wash his clothes. Whether there is another army in the 64 CONCERNING WATER world which would keep clean under the circumstances I do not know ; probably most of them would not even try, but our men try, and succeed. Outside of Salonika I only found one place in Mace- donia where one could get a real bath. That was at the standing camp of Janes. Having a plentiful sup- ply of water, the officers of the camp decided to fix up a place for washing, and they did it well. There are big tubs in which one can wallow with extreme joy, and there are showerbaths as well. Places are provided for men as well as for officers, and there is a separate department for washing clothes. When in our wander- ings we halted by that camp for a time and were in- formed that we might use the baths the battalion nearly went mad with joy, and there was a waiting list for every bathing parade, while clothes were being washed all day long. Yet if proper baths were scarce, it was occasionally possible for people who were really interested in the matter to clean themselves thoroughly. It all depended on their power of using their opportunities to the best advantage. We came one day to a camp which was pitched in the middle of a hot, blistering plain. There we re- mained for five days. In the morning and the eve- ning we did short marches or a little drill, but through all the scalding hours of the middle of the day we could do nothing but lie in our bivouacs and gasp for breath. It happened that on our second day in the <5j CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS place I found a quiet little stream, and I mentioned the fact to one of the others who had been in the coun- try a few months longer. Without asking any more questions he sent his servant for a couple of shovels, and when they arrived, commanded me to lead him to the place. The stream ran in a bed which it had carved for itself at the foot of some tall cliffs. They were so high and followed such a course that the blazing sun could not reach that little rivulet of water, but it flowed very happily in the cool shadow. It v.^as quite a tiny affair, nowhere more than three inches deep, and at the widest it was not more than three feet across. But we had those shovels, and our own intense desire for a bath. It is as well to remember that, however small a stream may be, it is bringing down fresh water all the time and will eventually fill up any cavity it reaches and sweep away all the mud you may stir up. We set to work with those shovels and began to dig great holes right in the bed of our little stream. It made a vast commotion. We were throwing gravel and mud and stones to left and right. All the little minnows swam away in terror, and a crab which we disinterred made frantic attempts to hide itself under a rock, but we went on scooping and scraping and excavating, always with a careful eye on our own dimensions. If you buy a ready-made house you have to be content with the baths which the builder has 66 CONCERNING WATER installed, unless you are very rich and can afford to have them replaced by your own size in baths. But if you make your own bath you can make it to fit your- self. You can make it long and broad and deep enough, and to prevent mistakes you can try it on while it is being made. So we dug our baths, and the stream brought us down an incessant supply of fresh water. A very few minutes after we had finished our scraping and shovel- ling we had each a great, clear pool, and we proceeded to enjoy ourselves. It is a great experience to sit in water up to your neck when for months you have had to make shift with a sponge. And the experience is more wonderful still when you know that outside your little patch of shade there is the tormenting heat of the sun at noon. We sat there for hours, revelling in the caress of the cool water, jumping out now and then to bask in the sun, and returning once more to the touch of the running stream. When at last we returned to the camp it was with the consciousness that we were thoroughly and effectually clean, and we felt very superior to all the unfortunate people who had not known what it was to steep themselves in real water for months. Our superiority was short-lived, of course. Others found that secret little stream, and we had no copy- right in the bath-digging idea. Two days later the stream v/as a series of holes and in every hole a soldier splashed and soaked and smiled. The only advantage 67 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS that we gained was that, being the first on the scene, we were allowed to keep our places at the head of the stream and so were not obliged to wallow in the mud and soap-suds sent down by other people. But if you want a hot bath in Macedonia there is only one thing to do. You must contrive to get so ill or so badly hurt that you are sent into hospital. 68 CHAPTER VII OUR HOUSES AND TIN WHEN one is young the snail often appears to be an enviable beast. It seems such a jolly- idea to wear your house on your back, and to be able to move without difficulty into the next street every time the neighbors start disliking you. It is a pity that we have to grow up and put away childish things. If they only retained that youthful envy of the snail the soldiers of the Salonika armies would be quite happy about the fact that they actually do carry their houses on their backs, but they are adult and dis- illusioned men, and I did not meet one who was really glad to have realized that dream. To be sure our houses had little in common with the snug, weather-proof residence of the snail. They con- sisted simply of bivouac sheets, together with such sticks or other supports as we could manage to acquire in the course of our wanderings. A bivouac sheet is a piece of material furnished with eyelet holes, button- holes and buttons, and it is theoretically rainproof. Many things which are supposed to be rainproof lose their reputations when they are exposed to Macedonian 69 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS storms, and anyhow our sheets had seen plenty of active service and they were getting tired of it. They were not even showerproof. Each man carries a sheet, and when a new camp is reached he conspires with a comrade to make a house. Architecture is a simple matter. Two uprights are driven into the ground and a cross-bar lashed to the top of them. Over this the two sheets are flung but- toned together so as to make one long sheet. The free ends are pegged to the ground, and the result is a little triangular canvas tunnel in which two men may lie side by side or one, if he is very careful, may sit up- right. If the two try to sit upright at the same time the house usually falls down. The edifice is, of course, open at each end unless they are very short men who can afford to leave enough to lap over and join at one end, when the place becomes a cave instead of a tun- nel. Old soldiers learn in time the trick of acquiring an extra sheet, and with three sheets between two men a very tolerable little place can be made, but there is the disadvantage that some one has to carry the extra sheet. The officer is, of course, a little better off. He is not compelled to share his tunnel with anybody else, and the number of sheets which he owns is only lim- ited by the ingenuity of his servant or the weight of his kit. Also he does not have to construct the house himself — though many officers find it necessary to lend a hand, for the really good servant is a rare bird. But 70 OUR HOUSES AND TIN in all other respects he is on terms of perfect equality with the men, and if a storm arrives he is as thorough- ly soaked as any of them. He, too, has to solve the problem of turning over in bed without wrecking his home. He, too, must abandon dignity when he wants to go indoors and enter crawling warily on hands and knees. And when the occasional whirlwind approaches, he, too, must cling to his dwelling, and hold on with might and main lest the whole affair go dancing over the crest of the local mountain to hide in some remote valley. For a real house rock is, of course, an admirable foundation, but it is quite another matter when you are trying to raise an erection of canvas and sticks, and the fact that Macedonia is largely composed of rocks is not the least of the troubles of the bivouac builder. The uprights and the pegs cannot be driven into the ground. There may be a thin layer of soil, but it is not enough to hold them if it begins to blow, and you are painfully conscious that the whole affair is ready to collapse at the first opportunity. You go round it, tenderly and lovingly, seeking to strengthen it where you may, but when all is done the thing is as frail as a card castle. But the ingenuity of the British soldier is unfailing. Once in the days of my ignor- ance I had been putting up my bivouac by myself and striving valiantly to drive home-made pegs into marble of superior quality. My servant had been delayed, but when I was perspiring irritably and trying to think 71 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS of appropriate things to say, he appeared and took charge of the situation. Instead of trying to drive pegs into the ground, he organized a system of anchors. The uprights were stayed by cords fastened round great lumps of rock. More lumps of rock took the place of pegs, until the whole was made generously secure, and he went about the task of arranging the furniture with an honest endeavor to hide his opinion that I was a foolish person who should never have been allowed so far away from home. I left him to it, and went away to watch where the shells were bursting along the ridge of a little hill just by Doiran. When I returned the place was ready for me to take posses- sion. Camp furniture in Macedonia is rudimentary. In England the newly-gazetted subaltern buys many beau- tiful things made of wood and Willesden canvas. If he is wise he leaves them in England; if he carries them as far as Salonika he will have to leave them there. Camp beds, baths, tables and chairs are pleas- ant things to own, but there is not enough transport to carry them round the country. He will be firmly discouraged if he tries to take with him anything but a canvas bucket. Even so, a great deal can be done to make a bivouac look like a home ; it all depends on the sort of servant you find. Mine was a very wonderful person. He would set out the shaving tackle, the two or three books, and the other scanty odds awd ends, all ar- 72 OUR HOUSES AND TIN ranged on boxes which he always seemed able to find. Somehow (one does not inquire into these matters) he acquired a big piece of canvas and stitched it up into a long bag which he stuffed with dry grass and made into a most admirable mattress. And also, wherever we went, he had a knack of discovering sheets of corrugated iron wherewith to enlarge and strengthen the sides of the house. That is the final proof of the expert in Macedonia — the power to find corrugated iron when no one else can find any. It is the most desirable substance. If you can find enough of it, you can make yourself a dwelling into which the rain cannot enter, which the wind will not greatly disturb. You can make a little palace for the mess and arrange shelter for the cook-house so that the weather will not disturb the due order of the meals. Given enough corrugated iron — known throughout the country and in all the rest of this book as "tin," you can make yourself really comfortable. In the beginning I suppose the tin came to Salonika addressed either to the Engineers or to the Army Serv- ice Corps (to whom the good things of life do habitu- ally and automatically address themselves). Probably it was sent out by trustful people in official positions who imagined that it would all be used for holding up the sides of trenches, aiding in the construction of bomb-proof shelters, or building stores for perishable goods and, perhaps, little huts for favored brigadiers. But when the army started housekeeping on those hills 73 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS M" ■»»-»«-»iSt'^«'«'-««'-«~»» ■■■-■'■ ■■I — I.I.— ..!■ I J I, and found that there were to be no tents because they were too heavy to be carried about, it began to realize the possibiHties of tin. Ever since then the Engineers and other people who have some sort of official right to the stuff have been finding themselves compelled to send for more, and yet more of it, for their stocks do so consistently and mysteriously vanish. You cannot hide a store of tin from battalions who have been long enough in the land to learn the value of it. Some one will ferret out the secret, and those precious sheets will vanish. Once we were camping among the hills, far enough from everywhere and every one for three weeks. Soon after our arrival we dis- covered three miles away a little hut which seemed to have been put up at some time or other as a signal station. All we were concerned about was that no one had been left to take care of it, and a couple of limbers very quickly transferred it to our camp where it was re-erected and made a very superior mess for our com- pany. At the end of three weeks we had to go off on trek, on another spirited attempt to find the war. We knew that we should only be gone a little while, so we took the hut to pieces and hid the sheets, as we thought, quite cleverly. We were gone just a week, and when we returned every strip of tin had vanished, but down in a valley a mile away the officers of a de- tachment of pioneers offered us hospitality in a hut whose roof and walls were entirely familiar. It is a little difficult to accuse your hosts of stealing your 7i OUR HOUSES AND TIN house, especially when you stole it yourself in the first place. The only remedy open to us was to find and annex another stack of the precious sheets. The result of this blending of tin and bivouac sheets is to give the average camp a terribly disreputable ap- pearance. I reached the land from England by way of Egypt. In Eg^/pt we had had all the tents we needed, and our camps looked very nice out there on the edge of the desert. It had not occurred to us that you could have a camp without tents. They were as much a matter of course as the adjutant or the bat- talion postman. But when I reached the camp among the Macedonian mountains there was a revelation wait- ing for me. Not one tent was to be seen anywhere. There were only the rows of the tiny bivouacs, and the orderly room and the mess and all the other important places were just huts built of rusty corrugated iron, looking for all the world as if they had strayed out of a patch of allotment gardens at home. The whole affair looked so shabby that one wanted to go off and apologize to somebody for it. But presently bugles were calling down the lines and the men came out, and presently the battalion was on parade. They stood there in shirt-sleeves and khaki shorts, the summer drill order of the Salonika armies. Their arms and their bare knees were burned as brown as their faces, and their equipment was frayed and worn but easy-fitting, and worn with an accustomed air. When they marched off they went with the care- 75 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS less, confident swing of men who have learnt to dis- regard the miles, who have learnt and are masters of their trade. And one realized that the peculiar ap- pearance of the camp had nothing whatever to do with the business, that this curious cross-bred product of a gipsy caravan and a market garden was the home of real soldiers. Later one learnt how swiftly those curious camps of ours could be struck and pitched again. Pitching a camp in England was always such a long, laborious business. The lines had to be marked out with in- finite care, and the tents could only be raised with the aid of all sorts of sergeant-majors and similarly au- thoritative persons. But with these queer little can- vas houses and these perfectly trained men, there was no confusion, no delay. Ordered to move oflf, each man packed his share of his dwelling in his valise with the rest of his goods. Ordered to halt and encamp, the bivouacs rose as by magic in neat, comely ranks and their inhabitants proceeded to make themselves at home. Of course it often happened that we reached the camping ground too late, or were to stay there too short a while to put up bivouacs, and then every one slept in the open with only the sky for a roof. It is a very excellent way of sleeping, but there are just two drawbacks. In the first place, the sun does occasion- ally get up before the soldier needs to rise, and he awakens all the myriad insects of the land which in 7^ OUR HOUSES AND TIN their turn proceed to arouse every sleeper within their radius. And in the second place it does sometimes begin to rain in the night, and a man who can sleep with drops of rain pattering on his face is a bit of a curiosity among such a roof-sheltered race as ours. In winter, of course, things are very different, but then in winter the troops are not moved about the country with the apparently aimless gaiety which is the rule in summer. They stay long enough in one place to make more enduring habitations, and there is a great digging and building as dug-outs and shelters are prepared. On the line between SalamanH and Dudular there are some wonderful dwellings to be seen, carved into the side of a cliff, and fitted with doors and windows, and photographs of these and similar luxuries have appeared in the papers from time to time. But I have never yet seen a photograph to illustrate the accident which befell a friend of mine down by Jerakaru. His dug-out had been constructed without sufficient study of the habits of the local flood?. It was a nice dug-out, with a good, high sleeping shelf, and he was very proud of it. But there came a night of rain, and in the morning when he awoke he found that he had the option of staying in bed till the flood subsided or taking a plunge into about four feet of icy water in which all his possessions were swimming disconsolately round his home. That is the kind of thing which is liable to happen to any one stationed on low-lying ground in the rainy months, and to be flooded 77 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS out of your camp is just a part of the routine. If it does nothing else it adds to the appreciation of the rum ration. 7* CHAPTER VIII RATIONS AND THE DUMP GOING to the war in Macedonia is not an ex- citing business, because there is so much Macedonia and so little war. There are not many of the quick alarms which are supposed to haunt the soldier day and night. It is true that the guns keep pounding away, but there is so much room for the shells to fall and burst without hurting any one. Even on patrol actions, those nocturnal amusements of the people on the Struma, the man ■who gets hit is usually more astonished than any- thing else. A party of our men had been out doing some searching of the ground on the other side of the river one day last summer. They had had a few shots fired at them, but no one had been touched, and they returned at last to their de- fences and the officer in charge of them found his company commander haying tea at the door of his dug-out. He sat down, with his back towards the river, to have a cup and to make his report. Suddenly he rose to his feet. "I'm hit," he said quietly, and walked off to the dressing station, 79 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS while the others stared. But it was quite true. Some enterprising Bulgar far away on the other side of the river had fired a shot at random, high in the air ; it had caught him in the back, and gone clean through his body, and when I went to see him in hospital he was still puzzling over it. "J^st think of it !" he said. "I was through some of the hottest of the shows in France in the first year and never got a scratch, and now I get plugged while I'm sitting down having tea! What can you call such rotten luck as that?" Whatever else you may call it, it does not seem much like war as we have known it on the Western front. It is just the kind of irritating thing which does happen in Macedonia, and it is hard to say anything else about it. He had not even the con- solation of being hit in the ordinary course of duty, and he was intensely annoyed. And that mood of intense annoyance is one which becomes very familiar after a few months in the country. It seems so desperately futile. There is the war to be attended to. One joined the army and learnt numerous strange lessons in the hope of being allowed to help to attend to it. One came to this exceedingly uncouth land in great joy, feeling that at last the chance had come and that all the many months of training were to have their fulfilment. Also one is in the presence of the enemy. It is possible to sit, as I have sat many a day, on the 80 RATIONS AND THE DUMP hills above the Struma and look at Bulgars through field-glasses. Those are the people whom it is one's business to vex, to harass, and destroy. Back in the camp are the keen-eyed, eager men with their carefully tended rifles and their sure, steady hands and their constant burden of ammunition, and they, too, are annoyed, for nothing is given them to do but to make roads, to dig trenches, and to put up barbed w^ire in places which it does not seem humanly possible that the enemy can ever reach. We all appear to be as remote from the task we wanted to undertake as when we were still in England, and perhaps our annoyance is not to be wondered at. Swords may not have been beaten into ploughshares in Macedonia last summer, but bayonets were pretty generally put aside for pick- axes, to the intense disgust of their owners. Of course we knew nothing of the plans of the higher commanders. We could only see the things within the circle of our own horizon ; we could only note what happened to us from time to time and draw our own conclusions from those happenings. Every now and then some order w^ould come which seemed to indicate that at last we were going to fight, and we would forget to be annoyed for a little while. But in a very few minutes some pes- simist would come along with the remark which we learned to hate and to dread more than any other arrangement of words — "The A.S.C. say that 8i CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS if we do advance, they can't feed us/' That sen- tence was the passing-bell of our hopes over and over -^jain, and when we read in papers sent out from home that we were sure to do something be- fore long, we used to say it to ourselves once more, and subside into blasphemous silence. In every matter save that of food and ammuni- tion we were, I suppose, as mobile a force as any leader could desire. The Salonika armies un- derstand moving about with the least possible delay. Trained to the country, accustomed to march as well by night as by day, carrying our houses on our backs, we needed only to be fed and to be supplied with ammunition. But that v/as the difficulty, and the conclusion of the whole matter. Wherever he goes the soldier takes with him his emergency ration, the little tin of meat, the other little tin which contains tea and sugar, and the handful of biscuits. He carries these things about with him, but he does not eat them. Some- where or other in my kit is a much-traveled tin of bully beef that has been to see all sorts of queer places in Egypt, has wandered over most of the map of Macedonia, and visited quite a number of hospitals on the way home, and that is the proper way to treat an emergency ration. All the time you have it you know that you are assured against starvation, so you must keep it and never eat it, under pain of dreadful penalties, for it is only de- 8s RATIONS AND THE DUMP signed to last for one day, and when that is over you are finished altogether. If some one could invent a new kind of soldier who could carry with him a week's supply of food in addition to all his other tackle, we should have a new kind of war immediately, but as it is, the \ man must be within reasonable distance of his supplies. And that means that wherever he goes there must be a dump somewhere fairly close be- hind him. If you are told to proceed to any new place, the first question is always "Where is the dump?" Water can always be found somewhere or other, and you have the doctor with his box of tubes and powders to make it fit for you to drink. Fire and shelter you can provide for yourself out of what you may find and the burdens w^hich you carr}^, but unless you can find a dump you will be lost. For as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter, it is not possible for an army to live on the land in Macedonia. A dump, as its name more or less indicates, is a place where things are dumped. It consists, to the outward eye, of a collection of tents and mar- quees which live in a constant whirling confusion of motor lorries and limbers. In the marquees and around them are mountainous piles of packing cases and other matters which are constantly being built up and do as constantly melt away and vanish, while between them agitated men run to and fro CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS with little note-books, pencils and bits of carbon paper. You might not think as you stood watch- ing their frenzied evolutions that they were en- gaged in winning the war, but that is very literally and exactly their business in life, and they are doing their best to carry it out. Really it is time that people stopped throwing bricks at the Army Service Corps, and I say so with the more sincerity because I have thrown a few myself in my time. It is true that they always have the best kind of jam in their messes, and that they never run short of Ideal milk. It is true that they usually manage to keep them- selves supplied v/ith fresh meat, that their teeth are unaccustomed to wrestle with biscuits while there is a loaf of bread in the land, and that ration rum reaches them in generous measure — but is there one among us all who would not take similar care of himself if he had half a chance? When I was in the ranks we used to sing insulting ballads to A.S.C. men whenever they appeared, such as — "With the Middlesex in the firing line And the Queen's in support behind them, But when we look for the A.S.C. I'm hanged if we can find them." In these and other ways we did our best to ex- plain our deep conviction that the A.S.C. had noth- 84 RATIONS AND THE DUMP ing whatever to do with the war, that they were pampered aristocrats who dwelt in luxury and idle- ness among the jam tins far behind the line, and did nothing all day long but conspire together to rob the poor soldier of his rations. But no one who has been in Macedonia for any length of time is likely to perpetuate those insults, even in jest. We are more likely to give thanks that it was not our fate to get into their ranks, and to pay them a very honest tribute of admiration and gratitude. This is a digression, but it was necessary. And now it might be as well to return to the dump, and to explain just what those agitated men have to do. Obviously it would be a complicated business to send out motors from Salonika every day with the stores for the separate units which have to be supplied. It is much easier to send out the stuff in bulk and to distribute it as close to the line as possible, and for that purpose the dump is estab- lished. A place is chosen which has to satisfy three con- ditions. The first is that it must be connected with Salonika by the best available road, so that there may be the least possible delay in keeping it supplied with stores. The second condition is that it must be as close as possible to the advanced line of troops, and the third that it must be in a posi- tion which can be reached easily and safely by the units which it is to supply. When such a spot S5 CAMPAIGNIN G IN THE BALKANS has been found the preparations are made and the tents and marquees are put up. Lorries come trundling over the skyline laden with all those things which go to make up the meals of the soldier on active service, together with the food for the innumerable mules and for the occasional horse. As it comes up each lorry hurls out its load of packing cases or sacks or bales, and they are received by busy, grimy men and piled in the positions ordained for them while the lorries trundle back for more. There rises a mountain of the meat which journeys to the front in tins. Close by will be arranged a pile of huge sections of dead animals decorously arrayed in sackcloth, while sacks of onions and potatoes close at hand suggest the army's aifection for stew. A little further on will be the cases of condensed milk, tea, sugar and jam, and all the time bread will be arriving from those excellent bakeries which are hidden in the little valleys round Salonika. Scattered among the chief mountains will be the lesser mounds of those various small delicacies which are given to us from time to time for the greater comfort of our bodies and the increased valor of our souls. Having got all these nice things so nicely ar- ranged, and having written a great deal about them, in his little books, you might think that the A.S.C. man deserved to be allowed to sit down and admire the result for a little while, but he is not permitted 86 RATIONS AND THE DUMP such luxury. A dump is not a museum. Before the last lorry has got rid of its load, the empty limbers are rattling down from the opposite direc- tion, bringing with them men armed with docu- ments and desires. They come from the big camps, and from remote secret places where little detached parties are busy. They come on behalf of the men in the front line trenches, and of those others who are stealthily constructing works on distant, hidden hillsides. The documents support their claim to rations for so many men and animals. They are checks which must be cashed in meat and bread and fodder. There are printed works on the subject of ra- tions. In those works you may learn exactly what the soldier has a right to receive, what must be given to his mule, and what are the demands of a charger of over sixteen hands. If you gave me all those works and a pencil and a great many sheets of paper and left me alone for half an hour, I might be able to tell you at the end of the time what should be given to a man who demanded, say, sustenance for a hundred and fifty men and seventy mules. But the A.S.C. man is a profes- sional. He has been at the job a long time and he knows the answer to all the sums, nor does he need to work them out. He glances at the document which each man brings and gives his orders, and the cases fiy into the empty limbers 87 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS till they are subdued and sluggish under the weight, and crawl thoughtfully out on the way home. It is a dizzy, bewildering business watching a dump when everything is going at full pressure. There will be a string of motor lorries for some big, distant camp, threading through the mounds of stuff and taking toll from each. Mixed with them will be the limbers, the puzzled, rebellious mules, and the men whose uneasy business it is to control the mules. Everyone is working very feverishly and the whole looks like unreasonable confusion. But as a matter of fact there is no confusion ; it is all going quite smoothly, and every- body knows what he is doing. For wise battalions — and most battalions ac- quire wisdom after a little time in Macedonia — do not send novices to the dump. The novices certainly get the things they were sent for, be- cause they hand in their documents and the A.S.C. men do the rest, but men accustomed to the job sometimes get better stuff. If, for instance, there is only a limited supply of fresh meat, and the rest of the day's issue must be bully beef, the old hand can frequently throw in a word which will obtain the fresh meat for his unit. Undisturbed by the tumult, knowing exactly what he wants and what he is entitled to have, he makes his way round the marquees and does obtain, within the limits, the pick of the available stuff. 88 RATIONS AND THE DUMP Satisfied at last the limbers go rolling and bumping back through the valleys and over the hills to their homes where the load they carry must be shared out, so much to each company, so much to the transport, so much to the officers. It is quite certain, of course, that everyone will grumble. The army always grumbles, but it is so much a habit that no feelings are hurt and the injured expressions do not reveal any genuine or deep-rooted discontent. And really there is not often much to grumble about. It is all very simple, of course, and there are the times when the day's rations will consist of very little but a tin of bully, biscuits, tea and sugar, but even then there may be jam, and there is a deal of excitement to be gained out of the business of eating one of those biscuits with jam unless your teeth are in absolutely first-class order. One learns in a very little while to regard the absence of butter with indifference, and I fancy that quite a number of our men will come back protesting against the milk which comes direct from the cow and demanding instead those brands w^hich come from the grocer's in tins. The one thing which we did miss and urgently desire was sauce — all kinds of sauce. If you can treat bully beef to a dash of Worcester or something of that kind it goes down so much better, and this is a hint which anyone with friends or relations in the Salonika 89 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS » »--..««~^i.......i..i-«,....«r.«»,»„««,i,.. ^ 1 M,i, ^ -«»»■— ,1^ forces may take. If you are making up parcels, include something which will give a zest to plain fare, sauces, relishes, pickles — all such articles will be more than welcome. 90 CHAPTER IX HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS WHEN the war is over and those of us who are left come back once more and meet to- gether and talk over our experiences there is likely to be some comparing of hardships and discom- forts endured. For my own part I think that it is possible that those who were through the first winter in France and the first year of the campaign in Mesopotamia really had the worst of it. But we have known a little about discomfort in Mace- donia too. There is a place called Giivezne. . . . Giivezne is a village, but for army purposes it gives its name to a considerable tract of country round — country which is not far from being the most detestable in the whole land. It is a wide plain lying between the hills that rise behind Salonika and those others which the Seres road has to cross on its way to the Struma. The road runs across this plain for a distance of several kilometers, and as one marches up the views to left and right — and especially to the right — are discouraging. All that one can see in summer is 91 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS the expanse of parched, unhappy ground sweeping away to the distant hills. There are no trees, nor is there any kind of shelter from the blazing heat of the sun. The ground bears a little wretched grass, and a great many thistles, and nothing else at all, unless one counts the myriad lizards as a kind of secondary crop. It is all as bleached and dry and desolate as the dust-deep road itself. There is water to be found at some little distance from the road, but it runs out of sight in a deep cleft in the earth; it cannot give even one gracious touch of green to break that searing monotony of light and quivering heat. I have never seen a stretch of land that insisted more furiously upon being a desert. How it is I cannot say, but in Egypt one does not get the same effect of desperate desolation. The enormous spaces of the sand are terrible, not horrible. They are barren with a calm and as it were eternal con- tent, and with majesty. But here is no majesty, only a mean and squalid futility. The sand has no choice but to be barren, but this land might be laughing with flowers and singing with the little whispering song of the wind among the corn. It is that perhaps which makes it horrible and a place of torment for the body and the soul. As this plain is horrible, so is its heat horrible. Again it is different from other heat. There is the scorching fury of the blast that drives and burns 92 HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS across the sand, and there is the demoralizing, langorous heat that soaks into every fibre of the being in such a town as Alexandria, but the heat of Giivezne is not like either of these. There is something sullen and savage about it, something poisonous. It happened to me to camp on that plain for two periods of a week and I would sooner have a month of the worst that the African desert can do than spend a third week there. It is better to be burnt up than stifled by foul, stale air from which all life-giving qualities have been drained away. We came to the place by night, had our meal, and slept for a few hours under the stars. We awoke very early with a distinct impression that all the flies of Macedonia had gathered round our camp to welcome us. By eight in the morning it was uncomfortably hot, accustomed though we were to the climate. Bivouacs were put up with- out delay, for it was obvious that shade would be badly needed soon, and no shade or shelter from the sun could we have unless we made it ourselves. Two hours later we were lying in those bivouacs wondering what we had done to deserve ii, and reflecting with uneasy minds that it was only ten o'clock. A bivouac can be quite a good shelter if it is fortified a little. If you can cut a lot of scrub and pile above it, and if you turn its mouth to the pre- 93 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS vailing breeze — if any — your little canvas cave is at least tolerable during those hours v^hen the heat compels people to remain still and under cover. But this wilderness had not even scrub to give us, and there v^as not even the faintest suggestion of a breeze. There v^as only the dead, unmoving air, and the sun v^hich blazed through the thin canvas sheets with so little mitigation of his fury. We proceeded to spread blankets over the tops of our houses, and to wonder what more we could take off our bodies. But when your clothing consists of nothing but shirt, shorts, socks, puttees and boots, it is very difficult to know what you can remove without presenting large areas of your un- happy body to the exploring feet of the flies. For as our misery increased so did the swarms' of insects grow happier. They liked the heat. They revelled in the foul, smothering air; the wil- derness was their chosen and beloved home, and they appreciated it thoroughly. Also they seemed to have an idea that we had come there on purpose to play with them and they meant to make the most of it. It is bad enough to be baked and smothered and poisoned, but when in addition you are invited to become the playmate of a few thousand flies, ants, spiders and grasshoppers, life seems rather too much of a burden. There may be other countries as densely popu- lated with insects as Macedonia, but it is a little 94 HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS hard to believe that there are. Certainly the flies are a far worse plague than they ever were in Egypt. Wherever we went they were swarming. If we camped on a spot where no troops had been before and thought that we had escaped them, they were round us in millions within twenty-four hours. This ground at Giivezne had been used for camping before, and they were all ready for us. If we never see any more flies for all the rest of our lives we, who spent those two weeks on the detestable plain, shall have seen our share. And the flies form only one of the tribes which infest the land. Everywhere the ground is alive with grasshoppers of all sorts and sizes which keep up a continual chirping all the day, to be succeeded by the tree-frogs which keep the night alive with sound. Also there are innumerable ants, and in many areas it does not seem possible to pitch a bivouac without having one or two of their holes within the boundaries of one's dwelling. Ants, however, do not give much trouble, and they are tidy little beasts. As you go on with the weary massacre of flies which is the chief business of the day, they wait on the floor to collect and carry oflF the dead bodies. They seem to find them useful. Then there are numerous spiders, including one most objectionable variety, a large and heavy creature with a weakness for walking across one's 95 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS face in the middle of the night. It is not pleasant to wake up in the middle of that promenade ; it is still less pleasant to wake and find that a mas- sive centipede three inches long is doing the same thing. Those centipedes are perhaps the most loathsome of all. They are so big, so fond of "going to sleep in one's bed, and they look so venomous. Probably they are perfectly harmless, but one instinctively believes the worst of such creatures without waiting for investigations. Also one kills them at sight and that in itself is a hor- rible business. There is so much squelching as the boot does its work. When you get away from the insects the small live things of the land are rather entertaining. Lizards are everywhere^ and they are lively, friendly little beasts. It is a pity that they feel so much like snakes in the dark, and newcomers are apt to be a little disturbed at first, but they soon get used to the small, bright-eyed animal that insists on a share of bivouac or hut. But of course the chief entertainer of the Salonika armies is the tortoise, the tortoise who stalks or occasionally gallops round the country, waving his head from side to side, inquiring into everything, carrying on all his most private affairs in the most shameless publicity, and upon occasion consenting to run races with others of his kind for the benefit of his owners and sundry amateur bookmakers. 96 HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS If you have only known the tortoise sleeping in a corner of a conservatory or sluggishly wander- ing round some suburban garden, you cannot im- agine hov^ gay and alert a beast he can be. Also he is resourceful and given to helping his com- panions in distress. I went one day to my bivouac, tired with a long spell of road-making, and sprawled on the bed for a rest. Very much to my disgust I found a large, hard lump beneath me, and cursing my servant for spreading the bed on top of such a rock, I set to work to fish it out. It was not a stone at all, but a large and venerable tortoise who had burrowed under my blankets for a quiet nap. I did not appreciate his enterprise and I was annoyed, so I put him outside the door on his back, and a big tortoise on his back is one of the most helpless things in the world. I lay there, watching his frantic efforts to turn over, when suddenly another tortoise appeared. There was a little intelligent pushing and butting, and my cap- tive was right side up once more, and hurrying off with his recuer to a place of safety. You may be wondering why I should have begun this chapter w^ith a large number of complaints about heat and a place called Giivezne, and then rambled off into a dissertation on tortoises. It is really quite simple, and the two things are not so far apart as they may seem to be. You see in those purgatorial days we had to get through the 97 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS time somehow, and all these flying and crawling and creeping things helped us to do it. In a country so empty of occupation as Macedonia at noon, it is something to have even a tortoise to watch; there is a little distraction in waiting to see what will be the next move of the lizard which is peering so inquiringly into the entrance of the bivouac. So when one begins to think of those days of torrid unhappiness, one thinks also of all those little animals which were our companions at the time, either as unendurable plagues, or as centers of a little interest on which the mind might fix for a while and forget the slow passing of the hours. One thinks of them and of one thing beside — of thirst. There is the thirst which comes from marching or from long labor, but it is a sheer pleasure compared with that thirst that comes from lying still and being smothered by the life- less burning air. You can come in fro«m your march, drink a pint of anything that may be avail- able, and get a space of sheer happiness and con- tent. But when you are just waiting for the smoldering hours to pass there does not seem to be anything at all that will relieve the parched throat, and the mouth is always dry. Besides, there is usually nothing to drink but water that is chlorinated and warm. To a genuine, toil-born thirst, that would seem good enough, but it is only an insult to the feverish craving that 98 HEAT AND SOME ANIMALS comes from lying still and being hot. It seems to cake on the mouth and throat, so that the misery after drinking it is greater than the misery which went before. One can only lie there and dream of real drinks, cold drinks, drinks with none of that filthy taste in them. The long day drags to its close, and with the evening comes the return of life. There is that much at least of gain in the business. When the sun is almost on the western hills one does taste something of the absolute joy of living. By the time tea is over — and scalding hot tea is a fine thing for that wretched thirst — the world appears to be a different place. That is the time when people who own guns go valiantly forth to look for hares, when one remembers letters that should be written, and has heart to discuss the chances of really finding the war at some time or other. It is possible then to take an interest in the prospect for dinner, and to go on excursions in search of eggs and tomatoes. The sunset is per- ceived to be glorious, and even the thistle-grown plain is not quite such a wilderness as formerly it had appeared to be. There is the comfortable assurance that life will be quite tolerable for a matter of fourteen hours, and that the flies will go to sleep. Of course they prefer to go to sleep inside the bivouac if they can, and if you let them do that they are quite sure 99 CAMPAIGNING I N THE BALKANS to awaken you at sunrise. The best thing to do is to wait till they have settled down cosily for the night, so that most of the roof is black with them, and then get to work with, a towel and beat and drive them out. They always seem too sleepy to lind their way back and then when you go to bed you can drape mosquito netting over the entrance, and there will be no trouble about sleeping in the morning till you are officially awakened to get through another day of sun and sorrow. lOO CHAPTER X SUNDAYS AT THE WAR WE left Giivezne and marched away up the Seres road to Lahana, which stands just below the highest point which the road reaches on its journey from Salonika to the Struma. What we did there is a question of no importance, but we took three weeks over doing it, and on the Sundays we used to go to the war, because Sunday was a holiday and we could do what we liked. It was possible to start quite early in the morning because we had left the padre with the rest of the battalion lower down the road, so there were no church parades to hinder us. The cook was inclined to be grieved because he had to get up at unconscionable hours to give us breakfast, but that could not be helped. We had to make the most of the holiday. It is quite easy to get to the war from Lahana. All that you have to do is to stop the first motor that comes along — so long as it is not a Red Cross car — and go as far as it will take you. If it is one of those modest, retiring motors that does not like lOI CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS to push itself forward too far, you can always jump off when it stops and board one which is going further. Those lorries have to go fairly close to the trouble. They have shells to take to the batteries, and food for the men in the front line. Of course they don't go up to the front line, but there are times when they find themselves under fire. At the period of which I am writing, the Bulgar was in the habit of dropping an occa- sional shell on the road. His attentions did not make the road much worse than it was before, but they served to put a spice of adventure into our journeying. The proper thing to do first of all was to go and call on a battery. There was always sure to be one about somewhere, if only you could find it. Locating batteries is not the easiest job in the world, even when they are on your own side and you are free to move where you will in search of them, and it is more difficult than usual in Macedonia be- cause the country is so very complex. But one learns in time to track the guns to their hiding place in some secret valley or other, and there they are, sending little messengers out across the river and the plain to some village which is suspected of concealing the enemy. There is at least one thing to be said in favor of our war in Macedonia — it is possible to look at it. There is no question of sitting dismally in : 102 SUNDAYS AT THE WAR a trench and squinting round corners through a periscope. When you are up with a battery, you can generally watch the shells arrive at their jour- ney's end, which is much more satisfactory than being informed through a telephone that some in- visible target has been hit. It is possible to sit on a hill above the guns and see quite plainly what they are doing. You may watch a village being literally taken to pieces. It is all rather curious. One cannot feel much sympathy for the average Macedonian village. It does not look as if anybody loved it; if one had the dreadful misfortune to be born in such a place one would, I think, desire most urgently to forget the fact. But even so it is not possible to forget that it was once the habitation of men, and that children played round those ugly little houses be- fore war came and sent the bullock wagons creak- ing down the road. It all seems rather a pity. . . . But presently interest gets the better of emotion, and one watches with an increasing pride the careful, accurate work of the men at the guns, as bit by bit the village jumps into the air amid a cloud of dust and vanishes. How such accuracy is achieved one cannot tell, but there it is, and it is a fascinating thing to watch. Observed under those conditions, war becomes almost impersonal. Instead of being a thing of passion and emotion, it is a cold-blooded game of 103 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS skill, in which all the players, down to one's very self, arc just pawns. Possibly the enemy is trying to find and silence the battery, and his exploring shells are bursting at varying distances around. It docs not matter. There may be a consciousness that if one shell landed at one's feet the conse- quences would be disastrous, but then it seems — and is — so very unlikely that any shell would land in so inconvenient a spot, that the question of per- sonal peril simply does not arise. So, too, if the glasses show little figures flying from the village below, and some of them crumple up and fall — it does not feel as if the final catastrophe had overtaken some human beings; it is simply that some pawns have been removed from the board. It is all in the game, the fate of those little distant figures, the fate of the men one knows, one's own fate. Those shells bursting around do not stand for the menace of pain and death so much as for tokens of the enemy's failure to be as clever as our men. The gunner is more of a scientist than a warrior, and the emotions he gets out of war are not unlike those which you find in golf or cricket, or any game of skill. If you wish to get down to the stark realities of war, outpost and patrol work can be recom- mended. Charging trenches or other positions is all very well for war-frenzy, but the night work is the thing to drive home the sheer facts of con- 104 SUNDAYS AT THE WAR flict and peril and the worth of individual supe- riority. Sometimes if you go down from the batteries to call on the men in the front line they will let you lend a hand if anything is going to happen. It is necessary of course, to be careful how you invite yourself, and to avoid attracting the attention of commanding officers and adjutants. It is not altogether that they want the whole affair to themselves. They arc not so much greedy over the war, as concerned about what might happen to them if by chance you were killed while on their hands, and they were called upon to ex- plain why you were there. I am not aware of any regulation forbidding one to go and study the war at close quarters, but there are so many regu- lations in army life that one is always apt to think that anything out of the ordinary must be in diso- bedience of an order which one has for the moment forgotten. Going as a member of an outpost company in unfamiliar country at night is always a good adventure. The men fall in so quietly on the dim parade-ground, wherever and whatever it may be, and the business begins to be interesting at once. It grows still more interesting when, with only a whispered word of command they begin to move oflF and vanish, so that when your turn comes and you follow, it is only possible to see the few who are immediately in front of you, and all the ^05 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS rest are folded away in the darkness. That is the time to test a man's power of marching at night. If the battalion is without experience of the game that progress will be slow, very uneasy, and very noisy. But the old hands go very softly and quickly onward. They avoid obstacles at whose existence they can scarcely guess; they choose the surest way by instinct, and never do they commit that major crime of showing them- selves on the skyline. Outpost work in Macedonia is so fascinating because the country varies so incessantly and so greatly. There is a different problem to solve every time. You have to choose the line which, in your opinion, can be held, and then you have to make your arrangements for holding it, and that in a country of innumerable hills and valleys. There come to the mind all sorts of crowding pictures. The golf enthusiast goes about the country planning imaginary links across each fresh landscape ; the soldier, if he is just an ordinary infantryman, is more likely to be arranging outpost schemes. And when it is night, and the tangle of hills is suggested rather than seen, and roving bands of the enemy may be anywhere in the darkness, the game be- comes really worth playing. Sitting now in quiet security and looking back, one sees how good a game it was. One night there was a sharp little rock strewn 1 06 SUNDAYS AT THE WAR hill to climb, and the ridge of it had to be crossed somehow. Luckily the ridge itself was covered with great boulders and we threaded and crawled through them till we were safely established on the far slope. Then, just as we were about to make our dispositions a messenger came back from the scouts who were pushing on ahead. A party of the enemy was crossing our front. There was a quick, whispered word, and our men sank out of sight among the rocks, and no sound gave warning of our presence. But very soon there were sounds which told of the coming of the others, and they came and passed, not twenty yards away. Their strength was about equal to our own, and, taking them by surprise, we should have had all the advantage, but it was not our business to advertise our presence, and so long as they did not turn towards our camp in the rear, they must go unharmed and in ignorance. In ignorance they went, turning back to their own place, and pres- ently the sound of their passing died away, and we could get on with our own work. Encounters of that kind have been frequent on the Struma front, and most men who have been down there for any length of time could tell of something of the sort happening to them when they have been out on patrol duty. Sometimes, of course, it is necessary or advisable to fight. (Rather I should say it is permissible. There is CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS no waiting for necessity, and the patrol commander who, acting on strict orders, forbids an encounter is rather more unhappy than the men under him.) Those are the occasions when the bayonet does some of its deadliest work. Shooting is usually to be avoided, since it gives away so much in- formation and wakes up the artillery, so there is the fierce, quiet struggle in the dark, till the sur- vivors of one side or the other realize that there is nothing for it but to slip away among the shadows. In these affairs, as in all the Operations of war, the tricks of chance are unaccountable. One man I knew had a piece of bad luck quite equal to that of the man who got a bullet through his body while he was sitting at tea. This other had been out with a patrol. They had had a highly successful trip and were returning unharmed and jubilant. They were close to our lines when some distant Bulgar loosed off another of those random shots at the sky. In its downward flight the bullet took my friend's right eye out almost as neatly as a sur- geon could have done. He felt, so he says, very little pain either at the time or at any time after- wards, but his disgust was tragic. Later on I found him, still fuming, in a hospital in Salonika, roaming round the wards in pajamas and a dressing gown, because he had nothing else to wear. His kit had vanished. When he was hit he had only io8 SUNDAYS AT THE WAR been wearing a shirt and shorts, and he had been waiting for some clothes for a fortnight, waiting for them to come so that he might sail for home. He seemed to consider that luck had deserted him completely. But on the whole the Struma valley would be quite a happy place if it were not for the mosqui- toes. The trouble about Macedonia is that you have so many things to fight. There is the land- scape to be conquered, and the water to be kept in order, and malaria to be opposed, and all these things must be done before you can pay any seri- out attention to the Hun and his companions. So on the Struma the real weapons are mosquito nets and quinine, and the real enemy is that deplorable insect which sits on the side of the bivouac hang- ing its head so sheepishly in the morning when it has spent all the night in taking blood out of one's body and putting poison in. In spite of mosquitoes, however, we always looked forward to those Sundays. It is true that the work we were doing was important and even necessary, but it was very dull, and it was not a bit like war. lOQ CHAPTER XI PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA PLAYTIME is really a serious problem in Macedonia. While we remained at Lahana and could have those Sunday excursions we were quite happy, but there were only three such Sun- days, and then we returned to the old, familiar condition of having plenty of time to spare and absolutely nothing to do with it. I should think there never was a country so empty of the means of entertainment. Since our transport usually consisted of pack mules, we could carry nothing with us that was not absolutely essential. The weight of our kit was constantly being checked, and if it exceeded the standard of the moment something had to be left behind, and our track was marked by abandoned articles of clothing and other personal tackle. Under those conditions the utmost that one could carry in the way of appar- atus for recreation was a pack of cards, and curi- ously, few of us had packs of cards to carry. Even if we had them, they were hardly ever used. During the whole of the time I was in the country no PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA I only played bridge twice, till I went into hospital. It did not seem to occur to us to play games. There were no collective amusements at all. It is possible that there were in the land battalions who possessed concert parties of their own and had regular entertainments, but I did not come in con- tact with them. It is a little difficult to have con- certs without a piano, and the army is not encour- aged to carry pianos about Macedonia. There was one in the Y.M.C.A. tent in the old base camp at Karaissi, but I did not see another until I was on the boat which took me away, nor did I see another of the tents of the Y.M.C.A. Very likely there are units which excel in camp-fire concerts, but we had no gifts in that direction. It did not occur to us to sing, just as it did not occur to us to play cards, or, indeed, any other games. I suppose we might have played football if we had owned a ball, but we had nothing of the sort, and no one felt the lack of it badly enough to send for one. The various units stationed in and about Salonika used to play match- es at times, but we up-country people had nothing to do with those festivities, nor any chance to take part in them. Some units took more pains to amuse themselves than we did. I have heard of at least one battery of the artillery which owned a gramophone and took it all round the country, but of course in the artil- lery there is a chance to carry such things. And CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS one day, upon those hills north-east of Ambarkoj, I discovered evidence that at least one member of the Salonika armies had a desire for collective amusements, for the wind brought to me across the tangle of the evergreen oak a sheet of paper which I found to be a copy of a seventeenth-century mad- rigal. It seemed a curious thing to find there, on those lonely, distant hills, so far from all those choral societies and glee clubs and the like with which we noise-making people delight ourselves. It is not possible to understand why a man should have brought such a thing so far unless he had with him companions who would help to sing it, and one imagines that there is, somewhere in Macedonia, a battalion accustomed to music. It would have been a happy thing to have found that cheerful camp, but all the country round was bare of troops, and the madrigal itself was so weather-worn that it must have been blowing to and fro on those hills for a long time. I put it in my pocket and I have it still, a curious relic of the army and of the country where for so long our men have had to face the dif- ficult task of keeping out of mischief. For of course the natural thing to do if you have time to spare and no occupation is to get into mis- chief, and if we had been living under those condi- tions in any ordinary country it is possible that there would have been a great deal of trouble. But the country is so far from ordinary that there 112 PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA was very little trouble indeed. There were of course shops in the villages where liquids preju- dicial to discipline could be obtained. On the counter of nearly every Macedonian shop you will find three bottles containing Vin Samos, mastic, and cognac, and it did happen from time to time that some unlucky private would be taken with a terrible thirst, contrive to get past the mihtary police into the nearest village, and proceed to empty bottles of cognac. Then he would return to the camp in a condition of valiant frenzy which would lead him to the guard-room and first-hand knowledge of Field Punishment No. 1. But such incidents were very rare. Most of the villages are so small that it is quite easy to keep the thirsty souls out of them, and our men behaved wonder- fully well. Their conduct was the more creditable because it frequently happened that for weeks at a time it was impossible to organize anything in the shape of a canteen. When the camp was pitched away among the hills where neither beer nor any other stores could be obtained, the canteen ceased to exist until we moved to some happier spot, where day by day the little bullock carts would come rumbling and creaking with the barrels, and there would be tinned fruit, sardines, cigarettes and other luxuries on sale, and time v/ould not hang quite »o heavily on their hands. 1^3 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS But even when the canteen was in working order it could not occupy more than a little of the spare time, and it was always rather hard to dis- cover just what the men did with themselves. Of course most of the leisure hours in the hot weather came in the middle of the day when the heat is too great for any kind of exertion. During those hours they would lie in their bivouacs, and sleep or talk. They were great talkers, those lads of ours, and they would go on, hour after hour. What they found to talk about I cannot say, but it is the same all through the army; and you will never find a camp that is not humming with talk through every idle hour. So they would talk, and attend to their clothes and kit, and do their washing. There are no laun- dries in Macedonia, and the ladies of the land have not realized that they could make a very good living by taking in washing. Their general ap- pearance forces one to the conclusion that they are unaccustomed to the idea of washing their own clothes, so probably they would be intensely aston- ished if they realized we should be quite prepared to pay them to wash our things. But if he can- not find any one to do it for him, the soldier is thoroughly capable of doing his own washing, and usually he does it very well. Disdaining the slip- shod habit of using cold water, you may see them building tiny fires and boiling the water in their 114 PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA mess tins, and soaping and scrubbing the clothes with skilful energy. One of our men actually owned a little flat-iron, and it was as hard-working a piece of metal as I have ever known. It was constantly being borrowed by the dandies, who sought to increase the beauty of their shirts or to give a finer finish to their socks. And I know that my washing was done as I have rarely had it done by any laundry at home. The soldier has the trick of doing thoroughly all the infinitely varied jobs which he may have to undertake. It is possible that many men will bring back hobbies from Salonika. It was quite interesting to notice on hospital ships and in hospitals on the way home how many owned those little pocket chess boards and sets of pieces which can be folded into the shape and size of a note case. Then there were others who had taken up sketching, and some who had carried round little volumes of poetry and read them till they knew every line by heart. There is, of course, nothing to read in the up- country camps except the Balkan News, and such books and papers as may be sent from home. There can be no camp libraries, nor are there any of those distributions of papers and magazines which brighten the life of our men in France. In conse- quence everyone reads everything that comes from cover to cover, and advertisements get an amount of attention which would make the fortune of the ^^5 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS advertisers if only their shops were not so far away. Papers and magazines and books are passed from hand to hand while they will hold together, and nobody minds what he gets hold of so long as it is some print which he can read. If you see, as I have seen, an entirely illiterate Irishman poring over the Saturday Reznezu it does not mean that ours is the most intellectual army the world has ever known. It only means that he is very bored with the cycle of his thoughts and that printed words, incomprehensible though they may be, are giving him a little blessed relief. I have known what it is to be profoundly charmed and affected by the information, gleaned from the columns of a local weekly, that Mrs. Smith of Smith Villa, requires a house-parlormaid, that there arc three in the family, that two other servants are kept, that the wages offered are £18, and that an abstainer is desired. If I had not been soaking up those details I might have been listening to some one who would say, **But the A.S.C. say that if we do advance they can't feed us. . . ." Everybody knows that people whose working hours are full of the most violent physical exer- tions do quite commonly seek more exertions when playtime comes, and so it was with us. Every now and then the entire camp would seem to be taken with a mania for hurling large stones about. You ii6 PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA would see men standing in rows and throwing great pieces of rock in the fashion laid down for the throwing of bombs, and they might keep it up for half an hour in a valiant contest. Our bomb- ing expert was usually in the thick of these out- bursts of energy, improving the occasion with a few words of advice. He was one of those en- thusiasts who believe utterly that the war can only be won with the aid of their own special line, and nothing would have pleased him more than to have had a whole battalion of bombers. One other amusement we had which called for plenty of exertion, and was occasionally profitable to the mess. We used to get our revolvers and go out looking for hares. Macedonia is simply alive with game in certain areas. It seems impossible to walk a couple of hundred yards without putting up a covey of partridges or a great, galloping hare. To go hunting hares with a revolver is quite amus- ing, though of course it is not regarded with favor by those aristocrats who have shot guns and treat themselves seriously as purveyors of game. But if you have no gun, and are very weary of seeing large quantities of desirable food escaping from you it is soothing to take your Wcblcy for a walk round the hills. Of course it is more a matter of luck than anything else. A service revolver is a wonderful weapon with a great range, but it takes a crack shot to put a bullet into a retreating hare, 117 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS and so to hit it, moreover, that the animal shall not be reduced to a shapeless mash of fur and flesh and splinters of bone. But if by some fluke the bullet just chips the head, the prospect for to- morrow's dinner is suddenly and wonderfully im- proved, and there is ample recompense for three hours of scrambling over rocks and through thick- ets of brambles. The evening was the time when we went on those excursions, and the evenings of Macedonia do very much to atone for the rest of the day. And it was good to come back to the camp, and to sit on a bank outside the bivouac watching the pageant of the west, listening to the guns as they grew busy with the evening performance. That was the time when the mess president would send for the jealously guarded bottles and we would sit through that half-hour before dinner, quite cheer- fully discussing the things we had discussed half a hundred times already, having recovered from the weariness and irritation of the day, being at peace with the world. That was, perhaps, our only real recreation, the only game we played consistently — just that game of sitting and talking in the delicate evening air when all the work was done and our bodies were tired enough to get the full flavor of enjoyment out of rest. Probably they were very monotonous con- versations, but indeed they do not seem so in ii8 PLAYTIME IN MACEDONIA retrospect. The memory of those hours is very pleasant. And there was always something to watch, if it was only the shifting of color on land and sky or the slow departure of the light. We learned that it is not necessary to be amused. I fancy that many of those who return will find that a gulf has established itself between them and the friends who have remained at home. When at last I was set free to be with my own people for a little while it was with an actual sense of sur- prise that I realized that it was considered usual to go out in the evening to theaters and music halls and concerts, to dine at restaurants, to play games, and generally to avail one's self of the elaborate machinery of entertainment. That ma- chinery seemed to have lost all purpose and value. It did not appear that there was anything of worth in the activities of the professional entertainers ; it seemed so much better to sit still, to talk a little from time to time, to revel in that little space of rest and dear companionship. I suppose there is something which tends to simplicity in such a life as that which we were leading — a simplicity which is not of the surface, but deeper. We did not acquire scorn of pleasant food, of good clothes and comfortable beds, but our minds, unwearied by the complexities of mod- ern civilization, did not require such labored amuse- ment. They were content with a little dreaming lip CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS as the flames of the camp tires went stabbing up- wards; for long enough to come we shall find a sufficient splendor in sitting at the close of day by our own hearths swathed in the secure com- forts of peace. ISO CHAPTER XII HOW WE WENT TO JANES TO US at Lahana there came orders to pack up our traps and depart in haste to a place called Janes, on the other side of the country. It may be as well to remark that it is not customary to pro- nounce this name as if it was the plural of Jane. It is more usual to make the sound Yanesh, with the accent on the -esh. The letter j in Macedonian names has the force and qualities of y, and if this is remembered there will be no difficulty with them. It is true that even so the pronunciation will not be exactly that of the people who live in the villages, but no arrangement of letters would do justice to the noises they produce, and they always understand when we speak the names in our own fashion. So much for the name. Janes, as the map will show, is a place which lies behind the Doiran front. It was the pleasure of the authorities to send us from time to time to sit down behind different portions of the front, to listen to other people busy with the war. We never knew why we were 121 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS sent. It did not appear that anybody ever wanted us, nor did anybody seem glad to see us. But it was an order, so we tramped to and fro across the country, gaining much knowledge of hill and valley and mountain track, and hoping eternally that at the end of each journey we should really find the war. There is something very cheering about the tidings that the battalion is ordered to make haste to a distant place. It sounds as if something is really going to happen at last, and that thought is enough to banish all weariness. In this instance the orders came at eight in the evening after a hard day's work, and it was stated that we were to be ready to march out at ten. Nothing but the prospect of a fight at the end of the journey could make troops cheerful under such conditions. To be told to pull down your house and pack it up just when you are thinking of crawl- ing indoors and going to sleep is depressing. But rumors help one round some awkward corn- ers in the army. Within an hour the camp had been swept away and folded up. Down in the transport lines mules were entering their usual protests against pack saddles, and little groups of officers were poring over maps by the light of the dancing flames of candles. We knew those maps by heart, but we could never resist the temp- tation to stare at them on such occasions. It was as though we hoped to discover something that 122 HOW WE WENT TO JANES would improve our chances of getting into the fir- ing Hne, as though they held the secret of our fate concealed among their innumerable contours. And as we traced the way we talked, eagerly and happily, and for a long time no one thought to quote that classic saying of the A.S.C. which had killed so many of our dreams. So it came to be ten o'clock, and under the light of the stars we scrambled across a mile of furiously broken country to our old friend the Seres road. The length of time which a battalion requires to get under way at night depends very exactly on its experience. If it is a new, half- trained unit there are delays which spoil tempers, and the adjutant rides up and down the line with fury increasing in his heart. But there are no such troubles when you have old hands to deal with. Everything slips into its place swiftly and easily. The transport does not go wandering off across country in the opposite direction, and the ammuni- tion mules are ready behind their companies. Far away in England we had objected to night opera- tions, but in Macedonia we realized what we gained through having been trained and drilled in the dark. In a very little while we were moving off down the road. Somewhere between Likovan and Giivezne — its exact position is a matter of no importance — there exists a rest camp, established for the use of CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS troops whose business it is to move on the road. Why it was pitched in the particular position which it occupies I do not know; it is possible that no- body knows. To be sure there is a convenient water supply, but there is nothing else to recom- mend it. It is arranged on a series of sharp little ridges, with deep ditches and gullies crossing it in all directions. When the marching men come to the gate of it they are met by others bearing lanterns who proceed to conduct them through the perilous gloom. In most places it is necessary to go in single file, and for a battalion to pass a point in that fashion takes some time. More of the lan- tern-bearers take charge of the transport, and lead it off to another place, so that you are effectually divorced from your kit and stores. The ground reserved for officers appears, in the darkness, to be so cleverly fortified by ditches that no one could possibly reach it unless he had spent his life in studying the arrangements. By the time you get to that high bank, and see below you the little lights which mark the lines where the men are resting, and a dim, distant confusion which con- ceals the transport and all your blankets, you are apt to be out of love with Macedonia. It was my fate to come twice to that camp, each time on a dark night. In the morning it looks rather pretty and there is a good view, but nothing can persuade me that it is a nice camp, or that 124 HOW WE WENT TO JANES the man who chose such a position for it has a kind heart. On this occasion we reached it be- tween one and two in the morning, and the fact that we had been there before did not make things any easier for us. It was nearly an hour and a half before the tangle was straightened out and the blankets appeared, so that wq could roll our- selves up and sleep for a brief two hours. We left the place soon after five, and marched off down the road once more, on the second stage of our journey. If you look at a small map of Macedonia you may wonder why we were going down the Seres road to get from Lahana to Janes. It will seem that the more direct way would have been across country by Rahmanli and Kukus, but if you study a really large map you will see why we had to work back towards Salonika first. Lahana stands on its hill-top in the heart of a great tangle of hills. To travel direct from there to Kukus would mean an endless swarming up high places, an end- less scrambling down into sudden valleys. A very few strong and well-practised men might make the journey in the time we took over the detour, but it would be impossible for a battalion with its transport to travel that way without the most serious loss of time. The vSeres road is indescrib- ably bad, but it is the only way across those hills which is in the least practicable. There is no other ^^5 CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS way of getting to Lahana which an army could use. Five miles away on either side of the road you might dwell remote and inaccesible, untroubled by the motions of the world. The hills run up from a point just north of Salonika in a fairly well defined range which parts the valley of the Galika and the plain to the west of it from the valley of the Kurudere and the plain which holds Giivezne. To the north of Ambarkoj the hills spread out fanwise, and go piling up in heaped confusion all the way to the Struma valley. The only way of getting from the Struma to the Doiran front is to travel down almost to Giivezne and then to strike westwards and across the hills at Ambarkoj by way of Salihli. That route is prac- ticable in summer, if you have nothing very heavy to drag with you, but in all rainy weather it is quite impossible, for then the dry beds of streams become fierce torrents with power to sweep a man's feet from under him. Either you must make bridges, or you must go round by some other way where bridges are already in existence. But though summer had passed into autumn the rains had not yet come, so we went to Giivezne, rested there on that unhappy plain through the heat of the day, and turned our faces to the west in the evening. Being as it is the gate between the two fronts with which our men are concerned, I suppose nearly every unit in the Salonika force 1^6 HOW WE WENT TO JANES has passed that way at one time or another, and has known the relief of climbing from the plain where the flies make a constant cloud about man and beast to the hills where they drop away and leave one in peace. Certainly the people of Salihli are quite accustomed to the passing of the army, and they have learnt more of our ways and desires than most of the villagers ever trouble to learn. Directly the column appears in sight there is a mighty searching and ransacking of all the places where the fowls do commonly lay the eggs, and then the population lines up by the roadside ready to do business. The Macedonian egg is not cheap. Almost everywhere a drachma — which is tenpence — is charged for four, but eggs are much to be desired, and though some may object, every one pays. The right thing to do when you are entering Salihli is to work towards the head of the column and do your shopping before the others come up, or all the eggs will be sold, and the natives will only have tomatoes and woolly-hearted melons to offer. We reached our camping ground above Am- barkoj at eight in the evening, having covered twenty-four miles in twenty-two hours. That would be little enough in a civilized country, but in Macedonia it is rather more than it sounds, and we were weary people. But, high on those hills, there was enough light remaining for the arrange- CAMPAIGNING IN THE BALKANS ments for the night to be made properly, and for the cooking to be done. There was a comfortable meal for everyone, and when it was over we sat, very many of us, looking towards the hills which fence Lake Dorian, watching for the flash of the bursting shells, full of the contented weariness which is the great reward of such campaigning as ours. We slept late the next morning. Our orders were to reach Janes in the evening, and it did not seem necessary to arrive earlier. We breakfasted at ease between nine and ten, and proceeded to pack once more, taking our time about it, refusing to be disturbed. We moved out of the camp in leisurely fashion at 1 p.m., breaking for the first time that rule which forbids marching in the middle of the day. We were whole-hearted admirers of the rule by the time we had finished the journey. Every soldier can remember one march which stands out as the worst of all his experience. Usu- ally it occurs in the course of his training, while he is being broken to the burden of his new life, but it does occasionally, through force of circum- stances or by reason of the malice of the enemy, come later. That march from Ambarkoj to Janes was the most abominable I have ever known, and I suppose if I live to be an old man with lots of small people round me who want to know what I did in the great war, I shall bore them to death with accounts of it. 128 HOW WE WENT TO JANES The personal side of the matter is utterly unim- portant, but that small experience does stand as a very fair specimen of the kind of thing our men have had to put up with in Macedonia. Many people seem to imagine that our life in that irri- tating land has been one long picnic, remote from the perils of war. It is not, however, our fault or our choice that we had so little actual fighting, and the only sort of picnic which our experiences could be said to resemble would be one in which the picnic basket had been left behind and half of the party were more or less ill all the time. So far I have said little about malaria, the greatest of our foes in Macedonia. It will be necessary to say something about it later on, but for the present it is enough to record the fact that a touch of the fever came upon me just as that march was beginning, and remained with me for four out of the five hours which the journey occupied. Add to this the facts that through some misunderstand- ing about the water supply, hardly anyone had a drop of water in his bottle, that the sun was blaz- ing over head, and that our way was deep in dust where it did not lie among scorched, ensnaring herbage, and you will realize that the conditions were not the most favorable that could be im- agined. But our men have had to march under those con- ditions very many times. They have had to endure 12^ CAMPAIGNINCl TN Till- HALKANS the heal and the ckist and the nKiddcMiinj:: thirst of their fever-shaken hodies. and all that hideous tor- ment of the brain which at such hours can find no rest in even \]\c di'arcst and most sacred of memories, hul sees Iheni as thin,u^s distorted and terrible. At such a time one can only keep up- right nhile inovinj,^''. At every halt it is necessary to lie down (piickly, till the moment comes to move forward aj;ain. Vo sit on a horse would be im- possible; there is nothin^c: to do but to go stagger- ing on. There are visions of all cool springs and dear, cold water which come to cheat and baflle and mock, together with recollections of all the tleleclable driidvs in the world. At one time I was dreaming of the driidc called John C\)llins which they compound so admirably in tlu> Kliedival Club in Alexandria; at another there was the nietnory of the lager beer which comes to one in tall glasses at the Cafe Royal; again it was a vision of an imi 1 know in Derbyshire where the good beer is brought in great earthenware mugs. And all the time there w(Te si)nie wt)i(ls from the Mass run- ning a hopeless, meaningless rac<' through my useless brain — (jid vos [^rd'crsscrKfit cum s'ujno fidci ct (Jorniiiinl in soduio I'Ui'is. It was a tlioronj^hly un- pleasant business, and 1 could not for the life of me understand why the Romans foimd it necessary to have two words for "sleep." I want to insist that T am n(>t writing of this 1MM\' \V !■• \V ]•■ NT TO 1 A NFS _ — -> i'xpci icnrc .»•; a li.nil'.lup wliuli 1 siillcicd ahuic. I have no hard rase to i)i(S(Mit lor synM'*^^''*'^'^' atten- tion, llinuhcds and thc^nsands of onr men have cMidutcd as nnnh and mni<- in lliat lotniliv, and loi" llial reason only tln^ thnij; is nnnlioncd. riu'ir snfVcrini^ th and thin}'s must be written if justice is to he done. 'There is a j^reat teiulencv to rrj^ard the wounded ni.in as bein}";^ on a far hijdier plane tli.in the man who met' Empire! MY ADVENTURES AS A GERMAN SECRET AGENT By CAPTAIN HORST VON DER GOLTZ With i6 pages of illustrations. $1.^0 net. Postage 15 cents. FOR ten years Captain von der Goltz was a secret agent of Imperial Germany. In this remarkable book he tells the story of his career, from the time he was plunged into the whirlpool of secret diplomacy until the day in 1916 when he was released from a British prison and sent to testify in the trials of various German con- spirators against the United States. There are twelve chapters, each one filled with incidents as dramatic as any in romance, some of them thrilling, some amusing, many of them momentous, but all of them full of the fascination of real adventure. What This Book Tells Ten years of German intrigue in the United States. How the German Government betrayed the German Americans. The real reason why Germany made trouble in Mexico. The German Spy System in the United States and how to cope with it. Other startling revelations of the secret history of today. Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York "NOTHING OF MPORTANCr By BERNARD ADAMS 334 pages. With maps. $1.50 net. 4 4^TOTHING of Importance" say the I ^y communiques when there is no big action to report. Lieut. Adams has taken this phrase as a title for the series of swift, vivid impressions which compose his book; his chapters, with their glimpses of scenes in billets, in the trenches, of snipers, working parties and patrols, bring the reader more clearly in touch with the reality of war- fare than do many more spectacular books. "Few, very few books have come out of the war more real in their message or more poignant in their appeal." — The Cleveland Plain Dealer. "Of the scores of books which are pushing their way into print nowadays as part of the war propaganda, none more truthfully and satisfactorily fulfills its mission than 'Nothing of Importance'." — The Springfield Union. Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York The Red Battle Flyer By CAPTAIN MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN 12 mo. Illustrated. $1.25 net. Postage extra. At all Bookstores By Captain Manfred von Richthofen THE most famous of German aviators was Freiherr von Richthofen who was killed in action in April of this year, after being credited with eighty aerial victories. This book is the story of this German's ex- ploits and adventures told in his own words. It is the story of countless thrilling battles in the air, of raids, and of acts of daring by the flying men of both sides. "Richthofen's Flying Circus" has become fa- mous in the annals of aerial warfare. This book tells how the "Circus" was formed and of the ad- ventures in which its members participated. "The Red Battle Flyer" is offered to the Ameri- can public, not as a glorification of German achieve- ments in the war, but as a record of air fighting which, because of its authorship and of the in- sight it gives into the enemy airman's mind, will prove of interest and value to our own flyers as well as to readers generally. Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York WILHELM HOHENZOLLERN & CO. By EDWARD LYELL FOX ^27 pages. Illustrated. $1.50 net, A striking account of Germany as it is today, by a former war-correspondent, now Captain of Field Artillery in the National Army. "It appears to me that you have been strikingly fair and just in your estimation of Germany's case and have put your finger upon the real issue, namely, her system of government with its false ideals .... your book is interesting at this time and should be illuminating to all serious minded people." Major General Joseph E. Kuhn, Military Attache to Germany, 1915-16, formerly President of the Army War College. HISTORICAL BACKGROUNDS OF THE GREAT WAR By FRANK J. ADKINS 2p2 pages. $1.25 net, A study of the origins and causes of the Euro- pean war. "The book as a whole is a singularly just presen- tation of the sweep of the main currents of Euro- pean history for practically one thousand years, and it is written in a style that draws one on in his reading from page to page." — Philadelphia Record. THE STORY OF YPRES By HUGH B. C. POLLARD 118 pages. Illustrated, y^c. net. The heroic story of Ypres, storm-center of the Western Front. Publishers, Robert M. McBride & Co., New York ^^^ THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE STAMPED BELOW AN INITIAL FINE OF 25 CENTS WILL BE ASSESSED FOR FAILURE TO RETURN THIS BOOK ON THE DATE DUE. THE PENALTY WILL INCREASE TO SO CENTS ON THE FOURTH DAY AND TO $1,00 ON THE SEVENTH DAY OVERDUE. rb ?liib4 I