On November 26th General Sarrail called on General Petitti in the hospital at Salonica and informed him that the whole Italian expeditionary force was to be relieved on the Krusha Balkan by the British, and thence transferred to the Monastir area. This transfer gave yet another opportunity for realizing how badly organized was the inter-Allied G.H.Q. The British were sent into our area without the Italian Command having been warned, so that the Italian troops were not yet ready to leave; the arrangements for the movement of troops were extremely faulty, and the Italian Command and above all the _Intendenza_ were over-burdened with work necessary to make good deficiencies for which they were not themselves responsible. The march proved extremely arduous, above all owing to the lack of roads, the destruction of the villages and the floods, which, especially between Sarigöl and Naresh and between Topshin and Vertekop, had been very serious. For weeks our troops never had a dry resting place. Even the horse-drawn cavalry lorries could not proceed, and had to be substituted by the small battalion carts. An English journalist tells the story of a M.T. driver who was seen by his comrades buried up to the neck in mud, and while they were trying to extricate him from his difficulties, he said gaily: “I am all right, I am standing on the roof of my lorry!” During this period there were fears of an attack by the Greeks, and General Sarrail decided to send some troops to the south to defend the defiles from a possible Greek invasion from Thessaly. He therefore asked General Petitti to send the two brigades of the 35th Division, which had come from the Krusha Balkan, to Verria instead of to Veretekop. General Petitti consented, although the movement promised to be very difficult owing to the state of the roads. The information supplied by G.H.Q. in this connexion proved absolutely erroneous, and orders and counter-orders followed each other in quick succession. Finally, on December 12th, General Sarrail ordered the concentration of the whole division at Negochani, 15 km. east of Monastir, as news had been received of the arrival of a German division at Prilep and an enemy counter-attack was expected. The movement was carried out, and on the 18th Sarrail ordered our troops to relieve the French in the sector due north of Monastir.