With the French in France and SalonikaDavis, Richard Harding
History
With the French in France and Salonika
Davis, Richard Harding
World War, 1914-1918 -- Personal narratives
"There will always," replied Dinwiddie, "be a pony in Corea for
Dinwiddie." It became a famous saying. When the alarmist tells you all
the rooms in all the hotels are engaged; that people are sleeping on
cots and billiard-tables; that there are no front-row seats for the
Follies, no berths in any cabin of any steamer, remind yourself that
there is always a pony in Corea for Dinwiddie. The rule is that the
hotel clerk discovers a vacant room, a ticket speculator disgorges a
front-row seat, and the ship's doctor sells you a berth in the sick bay.
But in Salonika the rule failed. As already explained, Salonika always
is overcrowded. Suddenly, added to her 120,000 peoples, came 110,000
Greek soldiers, their officers, and with many of them their families,
60,000 British soldiers and sailors, 110,000 French soldiers and
sailors, and no one knows how many thousand Serbian soldiers and
refugees, both the rich and the destitute. The population was
quadrupled; and four into one you can't. Four men cannot with comfort
occupy a cot built for one, four men at the same time cannot sit on the
same chair in a restaurant, four men cannot stand on that spot in the
street where previously there was not room enough for one. Still less
possible is it for three military motor-trucks to occupy the space in
the street originally intended for one small donkey. Of Salonika, a
local French author has written: "When one enters the city he is
conscious of a cry, continuous and piercing. A cry unique and
monotonous, always resembling itself. It is the clamor of Salonika."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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