000 British. Of these, 100,000
were in Salonika. The advanced British base was at Doiran and the French
advanced base at Strumnitza railroad-station. In both places martial law
existed. But at the main base, at Salonika, both armies were under the
local authority of the Greeks. They submitted to the authority of the
Greeks because they wanted to keep up the superstition that Salonika was
a neutral port, when the mere fact that they were there proved she was
not. It was a situation almost unparalleled in military history. At the
base of a French and of a British army, numbering together 170,000 men,
the generals who commanded them possessed less local authority than one
Greek policeman. They were guests. They were invited guests of the
Greek, and they had no more right to object to his other guests or to
rearrange his house rules than would you have the right, when a guest in
a strange club, to reprimand the servants. The Allies had in the streets
military police; but they held authority over only soldiers of their own
country; they could not interfere with a Greek soldier, or with a
civilian of any nation, and even the provost guard sent out at night was
composed not alone of French and English but of an equal number of
Greeks. I often wondered in what language they issued commands. As an
instance of how strictly the Allies recognized the authority of the
neutral Greek, and how jealously he guarded it, there was the case of
the Entente Cafe. The proprietor of the Entente Cafe was a Greek. A
British soldier was ill-treated in his cafe, and by the British
commanding officer the place, so far as British soldiers and sailors
were concerned, was declared "out of bounds." A notice to that effect
was hung in the window. But it was a Greek policeman who placed it
there.

In matters much more important, the fact that the Allies were in a
neutral seaport greatly embarrassed them. They were not allowed to
censor news despatches nor to examine the passports of those who arrived
and departed. The question of the censorship was not so serious as it
might appear. General Sarrail explained to the correspondents what might
and what might not be sent, and though what we wrote was not read in
Salonika by a French or British censor, General Sarrail knew it would be
read by censors of the Allies at Malta, Rome, Paris, and London. Any
news despatch that, unscathed, ran that gantlet, while it might not help
the Allies certainly would not harm