onalists aside or splashed
them with mud. It was intolerable. Had they stamped into a mosque in
their hobnailed boots, on account of their faulty religious training,
the Salonikans might have excused them. But that a man driving an
ambulance full of wounded should think he had the right to disturb a
conversation that was blocking the traffic of only the entire
water-front was a discourtesy no Salonikan could comprehend.

The wonder was that among so many mixed races the clashes were so few.
In one place seldom have people of so many different nationalities met,
and with interests so absolutely opposed. It was a situation that would
have been serious had it not been comic. For causing it, for permitting
it to continue, Greece was responsible. Her position was not happy. She
was between the Allies and the Kaiser. Than Greece, no country is more
vulnerable from an attack by sea; and if she offended the Allies, their
combined fleets at Malta and Lemnos could seize all her little islands
and seaports. If she offended the Kaiser, he would send the Bulgarians
into eastern Thrace and take Salonika, from which only two years before
Greece had dispossessed them. Her position was indeed most difficult. As
the barber at the Grande Bretange in Athens told me: "It makes me a
headache."

On many a better head than his it had the same effect. King Constantine,
because he believed it was best for Greece, wanted to keep his country
neutral. But after Venizelos had invited the Allies to make a
landing-place and a base for their armies at Salonika, Greece was no
longer neutral. If our government invited 170,000 German troops to land
at Portland, and through Maine invade Canada, our neutrality would be
lost. The neutrality of Greece was lost, but Constantine would not see
that. He hoped, although 170,000 fighting men are not easy to hide, that
the Kaiser also would not see it. It was a very forlorn hope. The Allies
also cherished a hope. It was that Constantine not only would look the
other way while they slipped across his country, but would cast off all
pretense of neutrality and join them. So, as far as was possible, they
avoided giving offense. They assisted him in his pretense of neutrality.
And that was what caused the situation. It was worthy of a comic opera.
Before the return of the allied troops to Salonika, there were on the
neutral soil of Greece, divided between Salonika and the front in
Serbia, 110,000 French soldiers and 60,