The Salonica Press was of some interest. Before the fire there were no less than eighteen daily papers, for a city of barely 200,000 inhabitants. Even after that catastrophe their numbers were only reduced to ten. Of these four were printed in French; one of them, _L’Indépendant_, was the organ of a group of local Jews and was, on the whole, the best written, while _La Tribune_ was a Greek paper published in French, opposed to the more extreme Chauvinism of the Greek people and anxious to bring about a good understanding with Italy. The other two, _L’Opinion_ and the _Echo de France_ were more or less organs of the French G.H.Q. and represented the political attitude of the Commander-in-Chief towards the different Allies. From a journalistic point of view, none of them ranked very high, while the two latter belonged to the class which Bismarck defined as the “reptile press.” The British had only one paper, _The Balkan News_, edited by Mr. Collinson Owen. It was purely a paper for the army, containing the news of the day and a few special articles, and was well written, bright, full of wholesome cheerfulness and wit, and wholly free from local political tendencies--unlike the French papers, it never tried to create bad feeling between the Allies. We also had only one paper, _La Voce d’Italia_; it was not badly edited, but was sometimes too violent and inclined to enter into polemics with other local papers, until the Italian Command undertook to censor it (a function which, for his sins, was entrusted to the present writer). There were five papers printed in Greek, all equally violent, tendentious and wholly free from scruples or respect for accuracy. The Serbs published three papers, and the Russians, until their collapse, two. One of the Serb papers printed long poems in the style of the Kossovo cycle almost daily; they were eagerly read by the Serb soldiers, and a Serb officer told me that his batman always cut them out and kept them when the paper was thrown into the waste paper basket. There were two papers in Hebrew-Spanish, of no particular character, and several small weeklies in different languages. There were always plenty of foreign papers, although they naturally arrived many days or even weeks late. The _Journal de Genève_, which, like all neutral papers, was banned in most other war zones, was obtainable in Salonica and much sought after, as it contained the enemy communiqués. The British G.H.Q. issued a daily bulletin of war news from all sources, including those of the enemy, which was distributed to Allied Commands and Staffs.