Distractions were neither very numerous nor particularly edifying. The hotels were bad and dear; before the fire there were some good but expensive restaurants, and after the fire a few of them were resuscitated. The local Cercle de Thessalonique was quite attractive before the fire, but afterwards it was transferred to smaller and more modest quarters. Naturally, during the war, the military element was absolutely predominant. Six armies were represented in the town, of whom three--the French, the British and the Serb--by very large contingents. The Italians were less numerous, and the Russians still fewer at first, ended by disappearing altogether, save for some derelict officers, whose behaviour was not exactly exemplary. The masters of the house--the Greeks--in the early days of the war, kept very much to themselves, being suspected by the Allies; then, after the arrival of Venizelos, they made themselves more conspicuous, and finally, when Greece was again united and the army reconstituted, they spread all over the place. Never in any other city did one see such a collection of different uniforms as at Salonica during the war years. British khaki, Highland kilts, French _bleu horizon_, Italian _grigio-verde_, the Serbs in grey, the Greeks in uniforms combining features of all the others, Russians who invented their own, Colonials of various kinds--coal-black Sudanese, swarthy Algerians, yellow Tonkinese and Annamites, dignified Indians in imposing turbans. Of these various armies the French, the British, the Serbs, and afterwards the Greeks, had their respective G.H.Q.’s at Salonica, which to the outside observer meant chiefly innumerable officers and swift Staff cars. The French occupied a large, ugly, inconvenient building near the port; afterwards, while retaining that one for their Q services, they removed the _Etat Major de l’Avant_ to a row of villas in the residential quarter, one of them the ex-Bulgarian Consulate. The British were scattered all over the town, but most of the offices of the General Staff, which had at first been spread over three or four villas, were concentrated in a huge building, formerly a hospital and orphanage, popularly known as the “War Office,” far more commodious than the French quarters. The Serbs were modestly housed in the ex-Austrian Consulate and one or two other buildings, and the Greeks mostly in the large ex-Turkish barracks in the Place d’Armes. We were close to the Greeks in a group of small buildings, some of them constructed for the purpose by Italian soldiers. The Russians were in the Russian Consulate.