However, Christmas was upon us so we descended upon the town with cook’s carts and visited the Base cashier. Salonica was a modern Babel. The cobbles of the Rue Venizelos rang with every tongue in the world,--Turkish, Russian, Yiddish, Serbian, Spanish, Levantine, Arabic, English, French, Italian, Greek and even German. Little tin swords clattered everywhere and the place was a riot of colour, the Jew women with green pearl-sewn headdresses, the Greek peasants in their floppy-seated trousers elbowing enormous Russian soldiers in loose blouses and jack boots who in turn elbowed small-waisted Greek highlanders in kilts with puffballs on their curly-toed shoes. There were black-robed priests with long beards and high hats, young men in red fezzes, civilians in bowlers, old hags who gobbled like turkeys and snatched cigarette ends, all mixed up in a kaleidoscopic jumble with officers of every country and exuding a smell of garlic, fried fish, decaying vegetable matter, and those aromatic eastern dishes which fall into no known category of perfume. Fling into this chaos numbers of street urchins of untold dirt chasing turkeys and chickens between one’s legs and you get a slight idea of what sort of place we came to to do our Christmas shopping. The best known language among the shopkeepers was Spanish, but French was useful and after hours of struggling one forced a passage out of the crowd with barrels of beer, turkey, geese, pigs, fruit and cigarettes for the men, and cigars and chocolates, whisky, Grand Marnier and Cointreau for the mess. Some fund or other had decided that every man was to have a plum pudding, and these we had drawn from the A.S.C. on Christmas Eve. In Egypt letters had taken thirteen days to arrive. Here they took from fifteen to seventeen, sometimes twenty-one. Christmas Day, however, was one of the occasions when nothing came at all and we cursed the unfortunate post office in chorus. I suppose it’s the streak of childhood in every man of us that makes us want our letters _on_ the day. So the morning was a little chilly and lonely until we went round to see that the men’s dinner was all right. It was, with lashings of beer. This second Christmas on active service was a tremendous contrast to the first. Then there was the service in the barn followed by that depressing lonely day in the fog and flat filth of Flanders. Now there was a clear sunny air and a gorgeous view of purple mountains with a glimpse of sea far off below.