The G.H.Q. of the C.A.A. was of course at Salonica. It was, like other French Army Commands, divided into two main branches--the _État-major de l’Avant_ and the _Direction de l’Arrière_. The Chief of the General Staff under General Sarrail was first Colonel George and then General Michaud. The _Avant_ was divided into four bureaux: 1st, effectives and materials; 2nd, information (intelligence); 3rd, operations; 4th, supply and transport. Relations between the liaison officers and the Command and its bureaux were as a rule extremely cordial, and for my own part I shall always have the pleasantest remembrance of them, especially of my connexion with the _Deuxième Bureau_, to which we liaison officers were for a long time attached; its successive chiefs (these unfortunately were constantly changing) were regular, and usually very distinguished, officers of field rank, and the other members of it were reserve officers, some of them eminent men in different walks of life--university professors, archæologists, jurists, etc. With the 3rd bureau too, to which we were afterwards attached, I always got on well. But it should be added that with the French Command (advisedly, I call it French, although in theory it was inter-Allied) there was never that same _camaraderie_ that there was with the British. With the former we were welcome guests, whereas the latter treated us as brothers and hid nothing from us. Let me quote an instance of this difference with regard to the question of strength returns. It was very important for all the Allies to know each other’s respective strengths. We naturally communicated ours to the C.A.A. and the other Commands periodically and in the greatest detail. To learn the French strength required immense labour and ingenuity in collecting, collating and completing the figures; they were communicated to us unwillingly, in an incomplete form and with considerable delay--it was indeed far easier to learn what were the enemy’s effectives than those of the French. The British on the other hand placed their statistical returns at our disposal, showing the organic strength, the actual strength, the reinforcements asked for and those known to be on their way out, for each unit and specialty. Nor did the Serbs or Greeks have any objection to communicating their strengths to us. It was generally believed that the reason of this reticence on the part of the French was that, while they maintained the number of their units unchanged, their effective strength was greatly reduced, and that they feared that the Allies, especially the British, might avail themselves of this state of things as a pretext for refusing to recognize France’s right to the supreme command of operations in Macedonia. I do not know whether this was the real or only reason, but the fact in itself is undoubted, and it certainly rendered co-operation much more difficult than it ought to have been. [Illustration: TRANSPORT IN WINTER.]