ATHENS: THE ACROPOLIS AND (on the left) THE MODERN TOWN
WITHDRAWAL OF THE GREEK TROOPS FROM SALONIKA, DECEMBER 1915
'A GREEK GUARD ON THE BULGARIAN FRONTiER
MACHINE GUNS ON THE ACROPOLIS
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/letter-from-salonika-ftkwb2slq?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1832901
Letter from Salonika
We want plenty of warm clothing, especially as they say the cold weather does not really begin until January, but personally I am perfectly well and fit, and much prefer it to being boxed up in a trench in Flanders
December 16, 1915
The following letter was written by an officer in an English regiment now part of the Balkan Expeditionary Force: Orders having come for us to move on, we soon packed up and entrained, and spent two days and nights travelling through France and some magnificent scenery. We were very glad to get to our train journey end, as we had not much room to stretch. We then marched straight on towards our base, and for the next two days, it being very rough, I am afraid we all wished we were safely on dry land. But after that we had glorious weather, and altogether a most enjoyable voyage, and it was hard to believe that it was near the end of November, when we were glad to take advantage of every bit of shade on deck. The time was pleasantly passed, with boxing contests, and concerts and music from our band, to say nothing of the excitement of watching for submarines.
On arriving at Salonika we marched to our camping ground, about three miles out of the town on a side of a hill. Here we soon settled in, in our tents, but I must say we found a difference in the temperature, the nights being particularly cold. The weather in fact has not been of the best, for after two or three days’ rain the whole place was a mud swamp, so much so that provisions, &c, could only be brought to us by hand-carts for the last half-mile; then snow and frost set in, so that it looks more like a Polar expedition, and the men in their sheepskin coats add to the picture.
It is extraordinary when you think that we are in a neutral country. In the town you see men of all nationalities - Greeks, Turks, Jews, Bulgars, French, and British - and all sorts and conditions of uniforms and colours; it is a wonderful sight. The Greek Army is concentrated round here, and they are a very fine set of men, dressed in khaki and well equipped. It is a strange sight to see in the same street ancient carts drawn by a pair of buffaloes or yaks (great grey brutes) and numbers of the French and English motor lorries and dispatch riders, with boys selling an English newspaper called the Balkan News, which they also bring up to camp quite early in the morning. It is quite nice to be near a town once more, where one can get really hot baths and shampoos and buy anything one may want, although naturally the shopkeepers’ motto is to “make hay while the sun shines,” and they don’t forget to make one pay. It is no good to try and argue, it is take it or leave it.
There are a music-hall and picture palaces, also good cafes and hotels where you can get a good English dinner. The dining-room of the hotel is full of people of all nations - Ambassadors with their wives and families, Turks and Germans in civilian clothes, but the majority officers of all ranks and nations. The Greek officers are very smart, with gold epaulettes and swords, also senior Serbian officers covered in medals and lace and braid - fearful nuts! With already 10 or 12 degrees of frost and snow under foot: we want plenty of warm clothing, especially as they say the cold weather does not really begin until January, when we hope we shall be more acclimatized, but personally I am perfectly well and fit, and much prefer it to being boxed up in a trench in Flanders. Of course, we do not know how long we shall be in this camp, and we may perhaps spend our Christmas in dug-outs in the Serbian mountains.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-social-focus-of-salonika-wk59p3jct?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1832901
On arriving at Salonika we marched to our camping ground, about three miles out of the town on a side of a hill. Here we soon settled in, in our tents, but I must say we found a difference in the temperature, the nights being particularly cold. The weather in fact has not been of the best, for after two or three days’ rain the whole place was a mud swamp, so much so that provisions, &c, could only be brought to us by hand-carts for the last half-mile; then snow and frost set in, so that it looks more like a Polar expedition, and the men in their sheepskin coats add to the picture.
It is extraordinary when you think that we are in a neutral country. In the town you see men of all nationalities - Greeks, Turks, Jews, Bulgars, French, and British - and all sorts and conditions of uniforms and colours; it is a wonderful sight. The Greek Army is concentrated round here, and they are a very fine set of men, dressed in khaki and well equipped. It is a strange sight to see in the same street ancient carts drawn by a pair of buffaloes or yaks (great grey brutes) and numbers of the French and English motor lorries and dispatch riders, with boys selling an English newspaper called the Balkan News, which they also bring up to camp quite early in the morning. It is quite nice to be near a town once more, where one can get really hot baths and shampoos and buy anything one may want, although naturally the shopkeepers’ motto is to “make hay while the sun shines,” and they don’t forget to make one pay. It is no good to try and argue, it is take it or leave it.
There are a music-hall and picture palaces, also good cafes and hotels where you can get a good English dinner. The dining-room of the hotel is full of people of all nations - Ambassadors with their wives and families, Turks and Germans in civilian clothes, but the majority officers of all ranks and nations. The Greek officers are very smart, with gold epaulettes and swords, also senior Serbian officers covered in medals and lace and braid - fearful nuts! With already 10 or 12 degrees of frost and snow under foot: we want plenty of warm clothing, especially as they say the cold weather does not really begin until January, when we hope we shall be more acclimatized, but personally I am perfectly well and fit, and much prefer it to being boxed up in a trench in Flanders. Of course, we do not know how long we shall be in this camp, and we may perhaps spend our Christmas in dug-outs in the Serbian mountains.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-social-focus-of-salonika-wk59p3jct?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1832901
The social focus of Salonika
Greek waiters, of sinister aspect, only condescend to serve when their attention is attracted by a series of sharp handclaps or a penetrating “P-s-s-t,” both of them noises which self-conscious Englishmen find it hard, to make in public
March 15, 1916
If you came out here to look for an officer in the Salonika force, and knew neither his whereabouts nor the name of his unit, there would still remain one excellent chance of finding him - and that would be to go and sit in Floca’s till he came in, for Floca’s is the forum and trysting-place of the Allied Armies in the Balkans, their social focus, their common meeting-ground, and the resort of their leisure hours.
Floca’s in peacetime - as one knew it four years ago, for instance - was just a commonplace cafe, with no more than the modest distinction of being the best of such establishments in Salonika. Here on an ordinary weekday you would find a sprinkling of Levantine gentlemen of the more leisured commercial class. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, indeed, it became the scene of a certain animation, and was believed by untravelled Salonikans to resemble closely the gayest resorts of Parisian society. But never, on its most crowded spring Sunday, did Floca’s serve one-half the number of customers that you will find there now on any afternoon you choose.
For this its fortunate proprietor, who like so many others here is literally making a small fortune, has to thank two of the most cherished Allied institutions - the Frenchman’s heure de l’aperitif and the Englishman’s afternoon tea. From 4 o’clock till 8 Floca’s yard for yard, is more densely populated than any spot in Salonika. It is an epitome of the commissioned ranks of the Allied armies, officers at the base who have been at their desks all day, officers from the camps who have come to town to buy a stove for their wind-pierced tents, embarcation officers from the quays, Staff officers from AHQ, naval officers ashore for their afternoon walk, flying officers who were bombarding a Bulgarian camp before luncheon, French and English, Serbian and Greek, a varied collection of officers of every rank and corps. Here RNB assistant paymasters learn to recognize a general by the “crossed gadgets” on his shoulder- strap; here midshipmen smoke cigarettes and devour cream cakes with such set expressions of solemnity that the responsibility of the whole Balkans Expedition might seem to weigh on their unaided shoulders; a machine-gun officer confides his professional griefs to an ASC officer, who relates in turn an involved story of troubles connected with cases of bully-beef and “M M and V rations,” indents and way-bills; men who last saw one another as schoolboys meet again at Floca’s naval men who sleep in a cold iron lighter compare discomforts with Army men who sleep on a cold stone mountain. Rumour, unlike the clients of the establishment, circulates with freedom among the close-wedged tables.
Floca’s would hardly be a commercial success as a teashop if it were bodily transported to Bond-street. Its interior Is gloomy and often “fuggy”. Its entrance is beset by an importunate horde of ragged urchins attempting to thrust local news-sheets into your hand, or the London papers of three weeks ago at six times their native price; its Greek waiters, of sinister aspect, only condescend to serve when their attention is attracted by a series of sharp handclaps or a penetrating “P-s-s-t,” both of them noises which self-conscious Englishmen find it hard, to make in public. But in Salonika men account themselves lucky to find a table free at Floca’s, for to those who have lived for months on a barren mountainside with an exactly similar mountain side for their solitary outlook it is a shadowy and distant reproduction of the institutions at home.
While tea and microscopic eclairs at 3d each thus procure for the officer at Salonika a faint illusion of civilization; the men on their rare visits to town find the same solace in the kinematograph. In gratitude for their patronage the managements of these establishments make well-meaning efforts to render their programmes into English. The original text, which fills the whole of one side, is in Greek. A second version is provided in Jew-Spanish, which is Spanish written in Hebrew characters, as if to make it more difficult. Turn over the page and you have the same in French. This Iast side gives it you in English; but by the time the programme reaches this final edition it has been translated so many times as to have lost almost all intelligible meaning.
Nothing more cordial could be imagined than the relations of our men with the French. They meet each other more often here than they have the chance of doing in France, and so far as one can see each has the kindliest feeling for the other. The men of the two Armies who come into the town on leave fraternise in the cafes over glasses of washy beer. Each group addresses the other in its own language, speaking very loudly and distinctly and in simple terms, with a good deal of reiteration, but as the only words they have in common are the names of towns conversation is almost entirely restricted to geographic comparisons.
This is an example: FRENCHMAN: Vous avez passez par Marseille? Je dis est-ce-que vous connaissez Marseille? Marseille? ENGLISHMAN: Oh, Marseilles - yes. Oui Marseilles all right. Bong, Marseilles. (pause.) We come here from Rouong. Rouong, see? Nous come from Rouong, compris? FRENCHMAN: Mais naturellement, Rouen. Charmante ville. Qu’est-ce-que vous pensez de Salonique? ENGLISHMAN: Salonique? Oh, Salonika, you mean. Pas bong. Salonique, you mean. Rotten.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-implacable-sun-d6rcsf5ng?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1832901
Floca’s in peacetime - as one knew it four years ago, for instance - was just a commonplace cafe, with no more than the modest distinction of being the best of such establishments in Salonika. Here on an ordinary weekday you would find a sprinkling of Levantine gentlemen of the more leisured commercial class. On Saturday and Sunday afternoons, indeed, it became the scene of a certain animation, and was believed by untravelled Salonikans to resemble closely the gayest resorts of Parisian society. But never, on its most crowded spring Sunday, did Floca’s serve one-half the number of customers that you will find there now on any afternoon you choose.
For this its fortunate proprietor, who like so many others here is literally making a small fortune, has to thank two of the most cherished Allied institutions - the Frenchman’s heure de l’aperitif and the Englishman’s afternoon tea. From 4 o’clock till 8 Floca’s yard for yard, is more densely populated than any spot in Salonika. It is an epitome of the commissioned ranks of the Allied armies, officers at the base who have been at their desks all day, officers from the camps who have come to town to buy a stove for their wind-pierced tents, embarcation officers from the quays, Staff officers from AHQ, naval officers ashore for their afternoon walk, flying officers who were bombarding a Bulgarian camp before luncheon, French and English, Serbian and Greek, a varied collection of officers of every rank and corps. Here RNB assistant paymasters learn to recognize a general by the “crossed gadgets” on his shoulder- strap; here midshipmen smoke cigarettes and devour cream cakes with such set expressions of solemnity that the responsibility of the whole Balkans Expedition might seem to weigh on their unaided shoulders; a machine-gun officer confides his professional griefs to an ASC officer, who relates in turn an involved story of troubles connected with cases of bully-beef and “M M and V rations,” indents and way-bills; men who last saw one another as schoolboys meet again at Floca’s naval men who sleep in a cold iron lighter compare discomforts with Army men who sleep on a cold stone mountain. Rumour, unlike the clients of the establishment, circulates with freedom among the close-wedged tables.
Floca’s would hardly be a commercial success as a teashop if it were bodily transported to Bond-street. Its interior Is gloomy and often “fuggy”. Its entrance is beset by an importunate horde of ragged urchins attempting to thrust local news-sheets into your hand, or the London papers of three weeks ago at six times their native price; its Greek waiters, of sinister aspect, only condescend to serve when their attention is attracted by a series of sharp handclaps or a penetrating “P-s-s-t,” both of them noises which self-conscious Englishmen find it hard, to make in public. But in Salonika men account themselves lucky to find a table free at Floca’s, for to those who have lived for months on a barren mountainside with an exactly similar mountain side for their solitary outlook it is a shadowy and distant reproduction of the institutions at home.
While tea and microscopic eclairs at 3d each thus procure for the officer at Salonika a faint illusion of civilization; the men on their rare visits to town find the same solace in the kinematograph. In gratitude for their patronage the managements of these establishments make well-meaning efforts to render their programmes into English. The original text, which fills the whole of one side, is in Greek. A second version is provided in Jew-Spanish, which is Spanish written in Hebrew characters, as if to make it more difficult. Turn over the page and you have the same in French. This Iast side gives it you in English; but by the time the programme reaches this final edition it has been translated so many times as to have lost almost all intelligible meaning.
Nothing more cordial could be imagined than the relations of our men with the French. They meet each other more often here than they have the chance of doing in France, and so far as one can see each has the kindliest feeling for the other. The men of the two Armies who come into the town on leave fraternise in the cafes over glasses of washy beer. Each group addresses the other in its own language, speaking very loudly and distinctly and in simple terms, with a good deal of reiteration, but as the only words they have in common are the names of towns conversation is almost entirely restricted to geographic comparisons.
This is an example: FRENCHMAN: Vous avez passez par Marseille? Je dis est-ce-que vous connaissez Marseille? Marseille? ENGLISHMAN: Oh, Marseilles - yes. Oui Marseilles all right. Bong, Marseilles. (pause.) We come here from Rouong. Rouong, see? Nous come from Rouong, compris? FRENCHMAN: Mais naturellement, Rouen. Charmante ville. Qu’est-ce-que vous pensez de Salonique? ENGLISHMAN: Salonique? Oh, Salonika, you mean. Pas bong. Salonique, you mean. Rotten.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-implacable-sun-d6rcsf5ng?CMP=TNLEmail_118918_1832901
The implacable sun
Water is almost unobtainable anywhere; at the camp we have to go a mile and all there is is a tiny trickle which has to be fished out with a cup and then heated chemically; boiling won’t do
July 26, 1916
The following is from a letter written by an officer who is serving with the Cyclist Section at Salonika: The last 10 days have seemed like a hot inconsequent nightmare. I have a confused remembrance of long boiling days, long exhausting rides through a road four inches thick with sand and dust, finished by a troubled sleep and a constant fight with mosquitoes. We have arrived at a temporary halt - where, I cannot tell you, but it is known to be one of the loneliest places in the world. The road by which we came was before the war absolutely unknown to all but about three archaeologists; it is an old road and some of the most perfect and invaluable things have been found there since this Army came. Its natural desolation is almost incredible; there is no existing map which is more than approximately accurate even with regard to its main features. It winds over mountains, past lakes, and through gorges with imperturbable patience, never quite disappearing and never quite asserting itself.
The first night we left we expected an easy 15 miles mostly downhill. Instead we climbed straight off 1,000ft, making us 3,000ft up. The road was a mere ribbon of deep sand, out of which rocks peeped viciously. Imagine pushing a bike through that in a dying but still potent sun! I sweated till you could have squeezed a bucketful out of my garments. It was then dark, and we had to come down to sea level. We started by trying to ride. In a few seconds there was chaos, the gradient was terrific, and with the big weight on them the bikes could hardly be controlled. Men were collapsing into the ditch in all directions, and every now and then the road was missing or a mere “water course” of huge rocks. So we had to walk, and walk we did for three more solid hours, holding back the bikes. All the time we were dropping into a stifling, airless valley. We eventually camped at 3am, absolutely dead beat. The transport made terribly heavy progress behind us, broke down several times, and got in about 5. 12 hours for 18 miles!
We flung ourselves down and went to sleep, but almost at once that grim implacable devil, the sun came up and burnt us up again, and brought the flies with him. So we washed and ate and ran for shade, and slept a half sleep till lunch, tried to do the same after lunch, failed, and at 5.30 were off again. I started a cold that day; the others had sun heads and were irritable. We had a fairly easy ride that day, and found a fairly good camp near the lake, the home of hundreds of tortoises, and of every insect ever created. All the next day we lay in the lake, which was glorious; the shade temperature was 110. After two more long boiling days and long hot, but not bad, rides we came to a certain place. About 2 in the morning I was wakened by an annoying and peculiar hammering noise. I looked out and on all four sides of us lightning was cutting down in the most terrific sky. The noise was the men silently and feverishly hammering in their bivouac pegs. It was macabre to a degree.
Yesterday I biked 30 miles on a reconnaissance, going consecutively from 4.40 til 11.30 and from 1 till 4. Over that I will draw a veil. A hardened tough, who went with me, said it was the stiffest day of his life. I didn’t stick it so badly, but the sun after 8am is simply stunning. The quaintness, desolation and ferocity of the valley are marvellous. At one place we lost our way and went up a side track to a village for water. (Water is almost unobtainable anywhere; at the camp we have to go a mile and all there is is a tiny trickle which has to be fished out with a cup and then heated chemically; boiling won’t do!) The people in the fields either ran from us or at us. They have never heard of a cycle before. The water in my bottle actually got too hot to drink. Eventually an old Greek, armed to the teeth and with a face like a young Moses, showed us a well. Up on the hillside was a little heap of stones and out of the stones came a tiny trickle which saved our lives, and one tree, which helped also. Round the well were a series of Biblical figures with asses resting; below on the road a string of camels went by in a haze of heat and sand. Across the reeds and the river glared the most desolate, scorched brown plain, on which the half dozen trees which adorned it stood out in piercing relief. Splendid chaotic mountains ran down to it at every possible angle. Over all was the humming, drowsy silence of great heat, It was a picture I shall never forget - marvelously paintable, I imagine. It was the spirit of the place, the visualized spirit of this invincible, inhospitable land. We set our teeth and sweated the 18 miles back.
We get no news here, but a mail once a week, and the ironest rations. So if anyone remarks that the inactivity of the Balkan Army is extraordinary tell them that perhaps there are a few difficulties in the country they may not have thought of. You ought to see the insects here. As you walk a cloud of crickets, some four inches long and bright scarlet, rises up before you. Every butterfly I ever heard of skims around, and every tree and bush is full of insects, half-moth, half-cricket, which strum and whirr and grind out weird choruses. We caught two freaks, one the Buffalo cricket, the size of a rat, but much fatter and with a great curved horn, like a scorpion’s, for a tail. It is dark, but shines old gold in some lights; the Egyptians worship it, I believe. The other lives in a curious green yellow bush, the flowers of which it exactly imitates, its neck is a hard, yellow stalk, and its wings are leaves to all intents and purposes. You cannot distinguish it four inches away. A bug collector would go mad with joy here. My bed is always full of crickets, black ants, bees, and flies. The temperature is about 100 all day, but there is a breeze in the afternoon, and bathing in the evening in warm seawater.
The first night we left we expected an easy 15 miles mostly downhill. Instead we climbed straight off 1,000ft, making us 3,000ft up. The road was a mere ribbon of deep sand, out of which rocks peeped viciously. Imagine pushing a bike through that in a dying but still potent sun! I sweated till you could have squeezed a bucketful out of my garments. It was then dark, and we had to come down to sea level. We started by trying to ride. In a few seconds there was chaos, the gradient was terrific, and with the big weight on them the bikes could hardly be controlled. Men were collapsing into the ditch in all directions, and every now and then the road was missing or a mere “water course” of huge rocks. So we had to walk, and walk we did for three more solid hours, holding back the bikes. All the time we were dropping into a stifling, airless valley. We eventually camped at 3am, absolutely dead beat. The transport made terribly heavy progress behind us, broke down several times, and got in about 5. 12 hours for 18 miles!
We flung ourselves down and went to sleep, but almost at once that grim implacable devil, the sun came up and burnt us up again, and brought the flies with him. So we washed and ate and ran for shade, and slept a half sleep till lunch, tried to do the same after lunch, failed, and at 5.30 were off again. I started a cold that day; the others had sun heads and were irritable. We had a fairly easy ride that day, and found a fairly good camp near the lake, the home of hundreds of tortoises, and of every insect ever created. All the next day we lay in the lake, which was glorious; the shade temperature was 110. After two more long boiling days and long hot, but not bad, rides we came to a certain place. About 2 in the morning I was wakened by an annoying and peculiar hammering noise. I looked out and on all four sides of us lightning was cutting down in the most terrific sky. The noise was the men silently and feverishly hammering in their bivouac pegs. It was macabre to a degree.
Yesterday I biked 30 miles on a reconnaissance, going consecutively from 4.40 til 11.30 and from 1 till 4. Over that I will draw a veil. A hardened tough, who went with me, said it was the stiffest day of his life. I didn’t stick it so badly, but the sun after 8am is simply stunning. The quaintness, desolation and ferocity of the valley are marvellous. At one place we lost our way and went up a side track to a village for water. (Water is almost unobtainable anywhere; at the camp we have to go a mile and all there is is a tiny trickle which has to be fished out with a cup and then heated chemically; boiling won’t do!) The people in the fields either ran from us or at us. They have never heard of a cycle before. The water in my bottle actually got too hot to drink. Eventually an old Greek, armed to the teeth and with a face like a young Moses, showed us a well. Up on the hillside was a little heap of stones and out of the stones came a tiny trickle which saved our lives, and one tree, which helped also. Round the well were a series of Biblical figures with asses resting; below on the road a string of camels went by in a haze of heat and sand. Across the reeds and the river glared the most desolate, scorched brown plain, on which the half dozen trees which adorned it stood out in piercing relief. Splendid chaotic mountains ran down to it at every possible angle. Over all was the humming, drowsy silence of great heat, It was a picture I shall never forget - marvelously paintable, I imagine. It was the spirit of the place, the visualized spirit of this invincible, inhospitable land. We set our teeth and sweated the 18 miles back.
We get no news here, but a mail once a week, and the ironest rations. So if anyone remarks that the inactivity of the Balkan Army is extraordinary tell them that perhaps there are a few difficulties in the country they may not have thought of. You ought to see the insects here. As you walk a cloud of crickets, some four inches long and bright scarlet, rises up before you. Every butterfly I ever heard of skims around, and every tree and bush is full of insects, half-moth, half-cricket, which strum and whirr and grind out weird choruses. We caught two freaks, one the Buffalo cricket, the size of a rat, but much fatter and with a great curved horn, like a scorpion’s, for a tail. It is dark, but shines old gold in some lights; the Egyptians worship it, I believe. The other lives in a curious green yellow bush, the flowers of which it exactly imitates, its neck is a hard, yellow stalk, and its wings are leaves to all intents and purposes. You cannot distinguish it four inches away. A bug collector would go mad with joy here. My bed is always full of crickets, black ants, bees, and flies. The temperature is about 100 all day, but there is a breeze in the afternoon, and bathing in the evening in warm seawater.
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