The troops themselves were remarkably ill-chosen. Most of those who were not Irish were flat-footed “brickees” from Middlesex, Essex and the dead-level east coast counties, so their own officers told me, where they never raise one ankle above the other. Now they were chosen to give imitations of chamois in these endless hills. Why not send an aviator to command a tank? Furthermore, the only guns were French 75’s and our eighteen-pounders and, I think, a French brigade of mountain artillery, when obviously howitzers were indicated. And there were no recuperators in those days. Put a quadrant angle of 28° and some minutes on an old pattern eighteen-pounder and see how long you stay in action,--with spare springs at a premium and the nearest workshops sixty miles away. My own belief is that a couple of handfuls of Gurkhas and French Tirailleurs would have cleaned up Serbia in a couple of months. As it was...-- The French gave us the right of the line from north-west of Valandovo to somewhere east of Kajali in the blue hills, over which, said the Staff, neither man nor beast could pass. We needn’t worry about our right, they said. Nature was doing that for us. But apparently Nature had allowed not less than eight Greek divisions to march comfortably over that impassable right flank of ours in the previous Græco-Bulgarian dust-up. Of course the Staff didn’t find it out till afterwards. It only cost us a few thousand dead and the Staff were all right in Salonica, so there was no great harm done! Till then the thing was a picnic. On fine mornings the Colonel and I rode down the pass to see Don battery, climbed the mountain to the stone sangar which was their O.P. and watched them shoot--they were a joyous unshaven crowd--went on down the other side to the French front line and reconnoitred the country for advanced positions and generally got the hang of things.