cemeteries in
Macedonia, and realize that we planted many thousands of our people
like seeds of a kind in this Grecian soil--that a flower of freedom
might grow. On a wind-blown moor, in sight of Mt. Olympus and the sea,
ranges one regular array of British crosses--now of wood, but presently
to be of marble, with a stone of remembrance in their midst. It will
be done well, in the British way. Even the dead might be pleased by
what is being done. But here is a strange phenomenon which seems to
make a mockery of our sacrifice. Around this wonderful burying ground
are growing up a miscellany of alien crosses, of all shapes and sizes,
stuck in ugly heaps of upturned earth. Every day a pit is dug and the
dead-cart arrives. There is no service, no ceremony. But forty or
fifty nearly naked bodies of women and children are shot into the pit
and covered over hastily and a cross put over them. They are Russians,
the so-called Russian Greeks evacuated from the Caucasus last year, now
stricken with typhus and almost famished to death, some 12,000 of them
in old army huts, living promiscuously together and attended by one
desperate doctor and a few devoted sisters. Europe is heaping her dead
around us.

This truly is not near Athens, but above the ruined ramshackle port of
Salonica, once a fair city, but now facing the sea with almost a mile
of fire-devastated streets. The refugees are confined to their huts,
and are under a sort of military control. All the people are
proletariat, and ought never to have been taken on board ships and
brought to Greece. A few would have been killed by Bolsheviks, but not
so many as will die here by disease. They cannot help Russia outside
of Russia, and it is beyond belief that little countries can look after
them indefinitely. It is pathetic to look into their huts, strung from
wall to wall with crusts of bread, the floors multitudinous with people
and especially with children; every serious person engaged in the
hopeless task of destroying the lice. Even if these people were at
once put on transports and taken to Russia half of their number would
be destined to death.

The Russian scenes and episodes in Greece foreshadow the immense
tragedy to be witnessed in Constantinople and on Gallipoli and at
Lemnos. What touches the heart at Athens will ravage the whole being
at Constantinople. But of that anon. An episode at Athens on the day
of arrival had a spice of novelty in it whi