Those years the cholera came the people abandoned the seaport and lived
on the plains north of Salonika, in tents. If the cholera spared them,
the city was swept by fire; if there was no fire, there came a great
frost. Salonika is on the same latitude as Naples, Madrid, and New York;
and New York is not unacquainted with blizzards. Since the seventeenth
century, last winter was said to be the coldest Salonika has ever known.
I was not there in the seventeenth century, but am willing to believe
that last winter was the coldest since then; not only to believe it,
but to swear to it. Of the frost in 1657 the Salonikans boast the cold
was so severe that to get wood the people destroyed their houses. This
December, when on the English and French front in Serbia, I saw soldiers
using the same kind of fire-wood. They knew a mud house that is held
together with beams and rafters can be rebuilt, but that you cannot
rebuild frozen toes and fingers.

In thrusting history upon Salonika, the last few years have been
especially busy. They gave her a fire that destroyed a great part
of the city, and between 1911 and 1914 two cholera epidemics, the
Italian-Turkish War, which, as Salonika was then Turkish, robbed her of
hundreds of her best men, the Balkan-Turkish War, and the Second Balkan
War. In this Salonika was part of the spoils, and Greece and Bulgaria
fought to possess her. The Greeks won, and during one year she was at
peace. Then, in 1914, the Great War came, and Serbia sent out an S. O.
S. call to her Allies. At the Dardanelles, not eighteen hours away, the
French and English heard the call. But to reach Serbia by the shortest
route they must disembark at Salonika, a port belonging to Greece, a
neutral power; and in moving north from Salonika into Serbia they must
pass over fifty miles of neutral Greek territory. Venizelos, prime
minister of Greece, gave them permission. King Constantine, to preserve
his neutrality, disavowed the act of his representative, and Venizelos
resigned. From the point of view of the Allies, the disavowal came too
late. As soon as they had received permission from the recognized Greek
Government, they started, and, leaving the King and Venizelos to fight
it out between them, landed at Salonika. The inhabitants received them
calmly. The Greek officials, the colonel commanding the Greek troops,
the Greek captain of the port, and the Greek collector of customs may
have been upset; but the people of Salo