“You see,” he said, “these tender hearts are skipping out of Salonica because they are afraid they will be obliged to enlist if Venizelos organizes an army. They are, as we say, brave, but not rash! They don’t go into French territory because they think they might be called back, whereas in a neutral country they will be perfectly safe. I don’t know whether the ancient Greeks were as brave as the historians say, but those of to-day look to me like heroes, in the sense that they love to see others fighting.” During the trip from Salonica to Malta we actually met some patrol-boats off the coast by Matapan; the rest of the time--search me! I wonder why there are people who ask what good it does for us to be at Salonica. Such idiots ought to go down there and see how, if we had no one there to keep Constantine’s mouth shut, Sophie’s husband would have handed his country over to the Boches long since and opened all his ports to their submarines. And that would be a pretty business! Now that the submarines are already hard at it--no matter what people say or don’t say--you can see what it would be like if they could make use of the Greek ports and islands. There would no longer be any way of getting through down there; the route to Egypt and India would be cut and we should practically give the Boches all that side of the map. At Malta we arrived in the nick of time, but as the English don’t like to have their ports too crowded, they told the French Mission to get the _Pamir_ out of the way at once. As no one knew what to do with us, they sent us to Bizerta where they said that perhaps we might find orders. We left after one night in port, still empty, but the public pays the bill. There was one woman-passenger who arrived with a Gladstone at the last minute and begged us to take her. She was the wife of a lieutenant in the Navy, and as he had been with his ship, she had not seen him since August, 1914. Talk about adventures. Just listen to this: Ever since the beginning of the war the cruiser of the little lady’s husband had rolled around, to Syria, Egypt, in the Indian Ocean, and other places, and she had remained with her family in a village in the Jura where she suffered acute anxiety to think of her husband so far away. She is the daughter of a ship inspector, who knows as little of navigation as I do of theology; on a boat she is like a fish out of water. By every mail her husband wrote to her to wait, that his cruiser would come nearer to France some day, and then he would let her know. The first of March she received a telegram from Port Said: “Going Malta ten days repairs come immediately.”