WITH THE GREEKS. 
509 
is a poor country and cannot afford a large expenditure on practice 
ammunition; but one battery thoroughly trained to fight is worth 
two which are only good for show “ when the guns begin to shoot.” 
I do not know what the expenditure of ammunition was, but, as the 
action lasted about seven hours and as the batteries were hard at work 
all the time, it must have been heavy. A field battery which had fought 
near Larissa and under General Smolenski at Velestino had fired just 
short of 1000 rounds ; it was, I think, in reserve at Domokos. One 
of the mountain batteries had fired 900 rounds before the battle. 
Looking back to it now, it seems as if there were a hundred points 
which should have been noted and inquired about by anyone with his 
wits about him; but the fact is that on a great day like this one for¬ 
gets one’s note-book and one’s science and one’s theories. There must 
always be something intensely dramatic about a combat in which 80,000 
men or more are in the field, but at Domokos the circumstances were 
quite exceptional. The scene looking down from the Greek position 
was magnificent, not even the famous knoll at Sedan, where the King 
and Bismarck and Yon Moltke surveyed the French collapse, can be 
compared to it. The situation was one quite out of the common ; it 
looked as if the hostile swarms coming at ns would end by shutting 
us in and forcing a surrender. There was something uncanny about 
the feeling that the enemy was working round our flank, and not know¬ 
ing how far he had got. And when officers gather round and vainly 
try to conceal their anxiety as they ask how the day is going, when a 
soldier with his foot shot off is carried by you shouting i( Zito Polemos,” 
when the guns are speaking, and when the Osmanlis sweep forward like 
a wave across the plain to break as a wave does when it feels the beach, 
tactics and text-books are te off,” only to be remembered again in the 
night watches as we defile—some fifty or sixty thousand of us, troops 
and terrified fugitives from abandoned villages—into the ravines of the 
Othrys mountains, thankful for the full-faced moon which lights us on 
our weary way. 
The Turkish gunners put in one most excellent bit of work, which, 
although I did not witness, I can fully appreciate from having care¬ 
fully observed the ground. During the night following that which the 
Crown Prince’s army passed in retreat to the Furka Pass the Turks 
somehow got two mountain guns on to some height which actually 
commanded the col. A Greek officer who was wounded at this time 
told me the effect of the appearance of this artillery at dawn was tre¬ 
mendous, as indeed it must have been. These two guns in themselves, 
owing to the way in which they must have imperilled the Greek retreat 
down the road as it zig-zags along the hillsides to the plain of Lamia, 
probably compelled the abandonment of the Othrys mountains. But 
only one outsider, the correspondent of the Daily News , witnessed the 
last few hours fighting of the war as far as I know, and I have never 
been able to form a very clear idea of what actually happened. 
The late campaign has been instructive chiefly in a negative sense. 
It teaches us what we ought not to do rather than what we ought to 
do, A bad army was beaten by another bad army which was a great 
