e most iron
discipline, but the French native troops appeared to be getting out of
hand and were not to be depended upon. To a man they had announced that
they wanted to go home. They had been through four and a half years of
war, they are tired and homesick, and they are more than willing to let
the Balkan peoples settle their own quarrels. They were weary of
fighting in a quarrel of which they knew little and about which they
cared less; they longed for a sight of the wives and the children they
had left behind them in Fez or Touggourt or Timbuktu. Because they had
been kept on duty in Europe, while the French white troops were being
rapidly demobilized and returned to their homes, the Africans were
sullen and resentful. This smoldering resentment suddenly burst into
flame, a day or so before we reached Salonika, when a Senegalese
sergeant, whose request to be sent home had been refused, ran amuck,
barricaded himself in a stone outhouse with a plentiful supply of rifles
and ammunition, and succeeded in killing four officers and half-a-dozen
soldiers before his career was ended by a well-aimed hand grenade. A few
days later a British officer was shot and killed in the camp outside the
city by a Ghurka sentinel. This was not due to mutiny, however, but, on
the contrary, to over-strict obedience to orders, the sentry having been
instructed that he was to permit no one to cross his post without
challenging. The officer, who was fresh from England and had had no
experience with the discipline of Indian troops, ignored the order to
halt--and the next day there was a military funeral.

Salonika is theoretically under Greek rule and there are pompous,
self-important little Greek policemen, perfect replicas of the British
M.P.'s in everything save physique and discipline, on duty at the street
crossings, but instead of regulating the enormous flow of traffic they
seem only to obstruct it. When the congestion becomes so great that it
threatens to hold up the unending stream of motor-lorries which rolls
through the city, day and night, between the great cantonments in the
outskirts and the port, a tall British military policeman suddenly
appears from nowhere, shoulders the Greek gendarme aside, and with a few
curt orders untangles the snarl into which the traffic has gotten itself
and sets it going again.

Picturesque though Salonika undeniably is, with its splendid mosques,
its beautiful Byzantine churches, its Roman triumphal