when we sketched them or
wrote about them, they only proved us inadequate. All day long the
pinnaces, cutters, gigs, steam launches shoved and bumped against
the stone steps, marines came ashore for the mail, stewards for
fruit and fish, Red Cross nurses to shop, tiny midshipmen to visit
the movies, and the sailors and officers of the Russian, French,
British, Italian, and Greek war-ships to stretch their legs in the
park of the Tour Blanche, or to cramp them under a cafe table.
Sometimes the ambulances blocked the quay and the wounded and
frostbitten were lifted into the motorboats, and sometimes a squad
of marines lined the landing stage, and as a coffin under a French
or English flag was borne up the stone steps stood at salute. So
crowded was the harbor that the oars of the boatmen interlocked.

Close to the stone quay, stretched along the three-mile circle,
were the fishing smacks, beyond them, so near that the anchor
chains fouled, were the passenger ships with gigantic Greek flags
painted on their sides, and beyond them transports from
Marseilles, Malta, and Suvla Bay, black colliers, white hospital
ships, burning green electric lights, red-bellied tramps and
freighters, and, hemming them in, the grim, mouse-colored
destroyers, submarines, cruisers, dreadnaughts. At times, like a
wall, the cold fog rose between us and the harbor, and again the
curtain would suddenly be ripped asunder, and the sun would flash
on the brass work of the fleet, on the white wings of the
aeroplanes, on the snow-draped shoulders of Mount Olympus. We
often speculated as to how in the early days the gods and
goddesses, dressed as they were, or as they were not, survived the
snows of Mount Olympus. Or was it only their resort for the
summer?

It got about that we had a vast room to ourselves, where one might
obtain a drink, or a sofa for the night, or even money to cable
for money. So, we had many strange visitors, some half starved,
half frozen, with terrible tales of the Albanian trail, of the
Austrian prisoners fallen by the wayside, of the mountain passes
heaped with dead, of the doctors and nurses wading waist-high in
snowdrifts and for food killing the ponies. Some of our visitors
wanted to get their names in the American papers so that the folks
at home would know they were still alive, others wanted us to keep
their names out of the papers, hoping the police would think them
dead; another, convinced it was of pressing news valu