Trechos de In Salonica With Our Army (1917), de Harold Lake.
Here 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 Salonica. [...] Right on the summit I found all that the birds and beasts and sun and storm of Macedonia had left of a man who must have fallen in one of the half-forgotten wars which have troubled the land. There were the scattered bones. Rags of clothing were embedded in the ground. Close at hand a couple of clips of cartridges proved that he had fallen in the midst of his fight. There was the merest remnant of his cap, and there was a button which showed him to have been a Bulgarian. His rifle had been taken away.
[...] It may not appear that there is any connexion between a dead Bulgarian on a little hill three thousand miles away and the war-time price of sugar in England, and yet the connexion exists.
- - -
There does not appear to be any end to the possibilities of Macedonia. Civilized nations spend millions in reclaiming land in far countries, in clearing it of swamps, mosquitoes and malaria, in perfecting systems of drainage and irrigation, and yet here is this rich land, in Europe itself, barren and desolate, given over to thistles and scrub, with the poison of fever haunting every valley, with miserable tracks instead of roads wasted altogether.
- - -
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.
[...] Even the wildest American millionaire would shrink from working out development schemes in a country compared with which the average South American republic is a model of stable and constitutional government. People have been fighting in and for and about Macedonia from the dawn of history, and so we have it as it is to-day.
- - -
And not food alone, but everything else which an army can possibly require. Guns and ammunition must be brought as a matter of course, but there must be also all clothing, every detail of equipment, tools for every imaginable purpose, materials for putting up wire entanglements there is not enough wood in the country to form the uprights and all sorts of hospital stores. Paper, pens and pencils, books, bacon, baths, soap, candles, tobacco, matches - all such things must be brought across the sea. Galvanized iron, wagons, mules, telephone wire, water buckets and bivouac sheets - every imaginable thing.
The relation between that dead Bulgar and the price of sugar in England is, perhaps, becoming apparent. Because so many ships are busy carrying things to the Salonica 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.
- - -
The Bulgar of to-day digs himself excellent trenches from which he must be shelled with heavy guns. To aid him he has all sorts of German guns, brought up along carefully prepared roads to the selected positions. For a defence he has the almost impassable country before him, so that he can deal at leisure with his enemies as they advance to the attack.
- - -
The only point of immediate importance is that their symbolical street is a confounded nuisance to soldiers who have a war to worry about. It was well enough, no doubt, in the days before artillery reigned on the battle-field and hiding carefully behind the corner of a house the soldier shot his less cautious enemy and advanced to the next corner. But it is not at all well now, as any gunner can testify who has tried to take a battery through that serpentine alley.
- - -
Those midday hours when the sun seems determined to burn up all Macedonia. Only the engineer remained behind to light the fuses, and the only victim of the explosions was a sorrowful sheep which seemed to have made a hermitage for itself just above the place where we had been working.
- - -
Supplies - that is the keynote of success for the modern army. As your transport is, so will your victory be. The highest skill; the greatest degree of valour, 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.
These statements are the merest commonplaces of war as it is waged to-day, 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.
- - -
Some day perhaps the full story of the road will be told. [...] Words alone would hardly be able to do it justice, so perhaps the cinematograph might be brought in to assist.
- - -
Last summer 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 offensive 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 trumpeting headlines.
- - -
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 contemptuously referred to as "peacetime 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 understand why they should not be allowed to get on with that interesting business.
- - -
If you want to appreciate even a third-rate brass band, go to Macedonia for a few months.
- - -
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.
- - -
There are quite a number of riddles to be solved when troops are moving about Macedonia, 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.
- - -
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 do terrible things to the stomach of the soldier and render him useless to the army for months. [...]
Most of us have been too near to dysentery at one time or another since we came to the country.
- - -
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 neighbours 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 Salonica armies would be quite happy about the fact that they actually do carry their houses on their backs, but they are adult and disillusioned 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 consisted simply of bivouac sheets, together with such sticks or other supports. [...] Many things which are supposed to be rainproof lose their reputations when they are exposed to Macedonian storms.
- - -
Going to the war in Macedonia is not an exciting business, because there is so much Macedonia and so little war. [...] "Just 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 shot while I'm sitting down having tea!"
- - -
In these and other ways we did our best to explain our deep conviction that the A.S.C. had nothing whatever to do with the war, that they were pampered aristocrats who dwelt in luxury and idleness 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.
- - -
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. There is so much squelching as the boot does its work.
- - -
It was not a stone at all, but a large and venerable tortoise who had burrowed under my blankets for a quiet nap.
- - -
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 recommended. 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 conflict and peril and the worth of individual superiority.
- - -
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 information and wakes up the artillery, so there is the fierce, quiet struggle in the dark, till the survivors of one side or the other realize that there is nothing for it but to slip away among the shadows.
- - -
There were of course shops in the villages where liquids prejudicial to discipline could be obtained. On the counter of nearly every Macedonian shop you will find three bottles containing Vin Samos, mastic, and cognac.
- - -
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.
- - -
If you see, as I have seen, an entirely illiterate Irishman poring over the Saturday Review 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.
- - -
To go hunting hares with a revolver is quite amusing [...]. 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, 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 improved.
- - -
The letter j in Macedonian names has the force and qualities of y. [...]
No arrangement of letters would do justice to the noises they [people from villages] produce.
- - -
He [average inhabitant of Macedonia] may stand upright for a time to watch the passing of our men, but soon he bends once more to his toil as though the matter did not concern him.
We are in his country well, that is our affair. It is nothing to do with him and he will have nothing to do with us, unless we damage his crops. [...] Of course a certain number of the men of the country have been enrolled in labour battalions or hired to act as muleteers.
- - -
I remember one old woman. Not for a moment did she cease her business of threading tobacco leaves on a piece of string, but all the time she was glaring at us with the deadliest hate, the ugliest, bitterest fury seamed across her old, brown face. She might have been the mother of the man [spy] we sought.
- - -
Every day the companies are lined up and marched off to the doctor's headquarters. There the men pass in single file, and receive each of them five grains of quinine, with a drink of water to wash it down.
- - -
Occasionally the form of it is varied a little and people ask "What are we doing in Salonica?" but the spirit of it is the same. This country is vaguely aware that we have a considerable army at work in Macedonia.
- - -
Mountain warfare is a fascinating game, but when it is carried out - as on active service it must be - under the burden of full equipment with the weight of ammunition and the emergency ration thrown in, it is apt to be exhausting.
- - -
Our troops arrived at Salonica in the autumn in 1915 in time to push up into Serbia and to take part in the retreat of the Serbian army.
- - -
I do not want to ask whether Macedonia should be returned to Greece or left in the hands of some other Power. I have no suggestions to make about boundary lines or treaties after the war.
Mais:
http://www.souvenir-francais-92.org/article-les-jardiniers-de-salonique-69683379.html
http://blog.cwgc.org/discoversalonika/gardenersofsalonika
http://www.amazon.com/Gardeners-Salonika-Macedonian-Campaign-1915/dp/0233957480
[...] It may not appear that there is any connexion between a dead Bulgarian on a little hill three thousand miles away and the war-time price of sugar in England, and yet the connexion exists.
- - -
There does not appear to be any end to the possibilities of Macedonia. Civilized nations spend millions in reclaiming land in far countries, in clearing it of swamps, mosquitoes and malaria, in perfecting systems of drainage and irrigation, and yet here is this rich land, in Europe itself, barren and desolate, given over to thistles and scrub, with the poison of fever haunting every valley, with miserable tracks instead of roads wasted altogether.
- - -
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.
[...] Even the wildest American millionaire would shrink from working out development schemes in a country compared with which the average South American republic is a model of stable and constitutional government. People have been fighting in and for and about Macedonia from the dawn of history, and so we have it as it is to-day.
- - -
And not food alone, but everything else which an army can possibly require. Guns and ammunition must be brought as a matter of course, but there must be also all clothing, every detail of equipment, tools for every imaginable purpose, materials for putting up wire entanglements there is not enough wood in the country to form the uprights and all sorts of hospital stores. Paper, pens and pencils, books, bacon, baths, soap, candles, tobacco, matches - all such things must be brought across the sea. Galvanized iron, wagons, mules, telephone wire, water buckets and bivouac sheets - every imaginable thing.
The relation between that dead Bulgar and the price of sugar in England is, perhaps, becoming apparent. Because so many ships are busy carrying things to the Salonica 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.
- - -
The Bulgar of to-day digs himself excellent trenches from which he must be shelled with heavy guns. To aid him he has all sorts of German guns, brought up along carefully prepared roads to the selected positions. For a defence he has the almost impassable country before him, so that he can deal at leisure with his enemies as they advance to the attack.
- - -
The only point of immediate importance is that their symbolical street is a confounded nuisance to soldiers who have a war to worry about. It was well enough, no doubt, in the days before artillery reigned on the battle-field and hiding carefully behind the corner of a house the soldier shot his less cautious enemy and advanced to the next corner. But it is not at all well now, as any gunner can testify who has tried to take a battery through that serpentine alley.
- - -
Those midday hours when the sun seems determined to burn up all Macedonia. Only the engineer remained behind to light the fuses, and the only victim of the explosions was a sorrowful sheep which seemed to have made a hermitage for itself just above the place where we had been working.
- - -
Supplies - that is the keynote of success for the modern army. As your transport is, so will your victory be. The highest skill; the greatest degree of valour, 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.
These statements are the merest commonplaces of war as it is waged to-day, 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.
- - -
Some day perhaps the full story of the road will be told. [...] Words alone would hardly be able to do it justice, so perhaps the cinematograph might be brought in to assist.
- - -
Last summer 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 offensive 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 trumpeting headlines.
- - -
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 contemptuously referred to as "peacetime 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 understand why they should not be allowed to get on with that interesting business.
- - -
If you want to appreciate even a third-rate brass band, go to Macedonia for a few months.
- - -
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.
- - -
There are quite a number of riddles to be solved when troops are moving about Macedonia, 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.
- - -
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 do terrible things to the stomach of the soldier and render him useless to the army for months. [...]
Most of us have been too near to dysentery at one time or another since we came to the country.
- - -
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 neighbours 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 Salonica armies would be quite happy about the fact that they actually do carry their houses on their backs, but they are adult and disillusioned 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 consisted simply of bivouac sheets, together with such sticks or other supports. [...] Many things which are supposed to be rainproof lose their reputations when they are exposed to Macedonian storms.
- - -
Going to the war in Macedonia is not an exciting business, because there is so much Macedonia and so little war. [...] "Just 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 shot while I'm sitting down having tea!"
- - -
In these and other ways we did our best to explain our deep conviction that the A.S.C. had nothing whatever to do with the war, that they were pampered aristocrats who dwelt in luxury and idleness 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.
- - -
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. There is so much squelching as the boot does its work.
- - -
It was not a stone at all, but a large and venerable tortoise who had burrowed under my blankets for a quiet nap.
- - -
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 recommended. 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 conflict and peril and the worth of individual superiority.
- - -
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 information and wakes up the artillery, so there is the fierce, quiet struggle in the dark, till the survivors of one side or the other realize that there is nothing for it but to slip away among the shadows.
- - -
There were of course shops in the villages where liquids prejudicial to discipline could be obtained. On the counter of nearly every Macedonian shop you will find three bottles containing Vin Samos, mastic, and cognac.
- - -
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.
- - -
If you see, as I have seen, an entirely illiterate Irishman poring over the Saturday Review 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.
- - -
To go hunting hares with a revolver is quite amusing [...]. 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, 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 improved.
- - -
The letter j in Macedonian names has the force and qualities of y. [...]
No arrangement of letters would do justice to the noises they [people from villages] produce.
- - -
He [average inhabitant of Macedonia] may stand upright for a time to watch the passing of our men, but soon he bends once more to his toil as though the matter did not concern him.
We are in his country well, that is our affair. It is nothing to do with him and he will have nothing to do with us, unless we damage his crops. [...] Of course a certain number of the men of the country have been enrolled in labour battalions or hired to act as muleteers.
- - -
I remember one old woman. Not for a moment did she cease her business of threading tobacco leaves on a piece of string, but all the time she was glaring at us with the deadliest hate, the ugliest, bitterest fury seamed across her old, brown face. She might have been the mother of the man [spy] we sought.
- - -
Every day the companies are lined up and marched off to the doctor's headquarters. There the men pass in single file, and receive each of them five grains of quinine, with a drink of water to wash it down.
- - -
Occasionally the form of it is varied a little and people ask "What are we doing in Salonica?" but the spirit of it is the same. This country is vaguely aware that we have a considerable army at work in Macedonia.
- - -
Mountain warfare is a fascinating game, but when it is carried out - as on active service it must be - under the burden of full equipment with the weight of ammunition and the emergency ration thrown in, it is apt to be exhausting.
- - -
Our troops arrived at Salonica in the autumn in 1915 in time to push up into Serbia and to take part in the retreat of the Serbian army.
- - -
I do not want to ask whether Macedonia should be returned to Greece or left in the hands of some other Power. I have no suggestions to make about boundary lines or treaties after the war.
Mais:
http://www.souvenir-francais-92.org/article-les-jardiniers-de-salonique-69683379.html
http://blog.cwgc.org/discoversalonika/gardenersofsalonika
http://www.amazon.com/Gardeners-Salonika-Macedonian-Campaign-1915/dp/0233957480
