this was the first chance he had had to pay it back.
The Kid suggested it was strange that so many of his college chums
should at the same moment turn up, dead broke, in Salonika, and that
half of them should be women.

John smiled disarmingly. "It was a large college," he explained, "and
coeducational." There were other Americans; Red Cross doctors and
nurses just escaped through the snow from the Bulgars, and hyphenated
Americans who said they had taken out their first papers. They thought
hyphenated citizens were so popular with us, that we would pay their
passage to New York. In Salonika they were transients. They had no
local standing. They had no local lying-down place, either, or place
to eat, or to wash, although they did not look as though that worried
them, or place to change their clothes. Or clothes to change. It was
because we had clothes to change, and a hotel bedroom, instead of a
bench in a cafe, that we were ranked as residents and from the Greek
police held a "permission to sojourn." Our American colony was a very
close corporation. We were only six Americans against 300,000 British,
French, Greek, and Servian soldiers, and 120,000 civilian Turks,
Spanish Jews, Armenians, Persians, Egyptians, Albanians, and Arabs, and
some twenty more other races that are not listed. We had arrived in
Salonika before the rush, and at the Hotel Hermes on the water-front
had secured a vast room. The edge of the stone quay was not forty feet
from us, the only landing steps directly opposite our balcony.
Everybody who arrived on the Greek passenger boats from Naples or the
Piraeus, or who had shore leave from a man-of-war, transport, or
hospital ship, was raked by our cameras. There were four windows--one
for each of us and his work table. It was not easy to work. What was
the use? The pictures and stories outside the windows fascinated us,
but 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
frost-bitten were lifted int