t8 
LAND & WATER 
Notes from Salonika 
Bv H. CoUinson Owen (Editor of The Balkan News). 
July 12, 1917 
Inderwood and Lnderwoud. 
British Military Camp, with view of Salonika 
THIS is being written somewhere up on the Serres 
Road— that famous route to the Stmma which is 
as famiUar now to many thousands of Britons as 
the Strand. From the point where I am the guns 
can be heard but faintly, though at night their flashes play 
oil the clouds like summer lightning, but there are heavier 
explosions close at hand. That is where our engineers are at 
work on the hills in the neighbourhood quarrying the best stone 
tliey can find — which isn't saying much — so that this important 
supply line may be made to' carry, whether in the dust or in 
the rain, all that the needs of a large section of a big army 
demand of it. 
We found the Serres Road little more than a glorified track, 
although it has been an important military road ever since the 
dawn of history, and long before that. The engineers have 
for many montlis past been labouring to transform it into 
a first-class turnpike, aided by thousands of native labourers, 
men, women, and children, who break up the stone that is 
brought down from the quarries in slow-moving and creaking 
ox-carts, and who live in clean and well-organised camps 
and pass more contented lives under their British employers 
than they have ever known before. But it is a small part 
in the great war, although every day the road carries as much 
transport as would have sufficed for the whole of qne of those 
little frontier wars which used to occupy quite a respectable 
space in the newspapers. At almost any hour of the day that 
one looks across to the road there is a motor-lorry convoy 
passing — ten, twenty, thirty or more of them — each lorry 
surmounted by its own little aureole of dust cloud as it rumble^ 
sedately along at the pace appointed by the officer's motor-car 
ahead. 
.•\nd this goes on every day — and night — of the year. It 
enables one to begin to understand why campaigns in such 
difficult countries as this are not the dashing and dramatic 
triumphal marches demanded by the critics in the clubs. 
* • • • * 
I have mentioned that this particular stretch of the road 
is a considerable distance from the front, but my chief per- 
sonal interest- in it comes from the fact that it is even further 
from Salonika. It is difficult, sitting at the door of a tent 
in this wide and rolling countryside, to realise that at one end 
of the road lies dusty Salonika, with its crowded and noisy 
streets, and the groups of every nationality pressing just as 
usual round the newspaper notice boards in Venizelos Street. 
For a considerable stretch of time, which seems like an 
eternity, I have been producing every day one of the many 
newspapers which make of Salonika the most cosmopolitan 
centre of the Fourth Estate in the world. Tiiere are newspapers 
in French, Italian. Russian, (ireek, Serbian, Judae-Espagnol 
(the language of the Jews who were driven out of Spain 450 
years ago and settled down here) and— need we say it ? — a 
daily newspaper in English, which has recently given birth 
to a little weekly. Of daily newspapers in French alone there 
are five, of Greek four or five, of Serbian three — altogether 
there are close on a score. \A'here they all get their news from 
seems to be something of a mystery. 
At first one has the impression that most of the telegrams 
which appear in the local pres5 are merely ben trovato. I* 
seems hardly credible that the many items of news one may 
glean every day from a study of this Babel Press— news from 
Berne, Paris, London, Zurich, Amsterdam and all the other 
famous nursery grounds of newspaper telegrams — have 
really been despatched by human agency, and sent over a 
real "telegraph wire and received in a real post-office. But 
a little experience shows that Salonika really does sit at the. 
common banquet board of the nations, and that its helping 
of news, though not a full-sized ration, is genuine. In other 
words the telegrams are despatched " from Europe," as we 
say here, and not invented on the spot. 
* » * ♦ » 
One may read in one or other of these journals some striking 
item of information — such as that the Germans are training ia- 
telligent dogs to act as railway porters, or that the Kaiser 
has announced his intention of sending no more telegrams of 
congratulation during the duration of the war. Canard iS the 
word you breathe instinctively — but a httle later, when the. 
newspapers from Europe make their leisurely appearance, 
there sure enough are these same items of intelligence ; a 
little more detailed perhaps and embellished by grave comments 
from the experts who sit in watch in London and Paris, but 
otherwise just the same. And we must not forget that in 
spite of occasional difficulties in telegraphic communication, 
due as a rule to fluctuations in the political barometer at Athens, 
Salonika has one striking advantage which it owes to the 
cosmopolitan nature of its organs of public opinion. The 
art of taking in each others' washing is here practised on tlie 
most liberal scale. 
The British Wireless Service, for instance, the best of all our 
sources of information from the outside world, appears sooner 
or later in seven languages and five characters. And to 
paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, you may read some of the news- 
papers all the time, or all the newspapers part of the tirfie, but 
you cannflt possibly read all the newspapers all the time— - 
iao great harm is done. (To be quite truthful, although this 
is decidedly a city of polygots, I doubt if there is a single person 
who can read all the newspapers that appear, although I 
know one or two who approach very closely to this ideal.) 
And finally, in spite of this system of exchanging information, 
nearly every day one paper or another appears with an item 
of quite exclusive news, at which there is great rejoicing in 
that particular redaction. 
* * * * « . 
The chief mart for the exchange of news is the window 
of the cigarette shop at the comer of the Rue Venizelos and the 
Place de la Liberte. No sooner lias a newspaper received a 
telegram which is judged to be more than usually interesting 
than the burden of it is written out in large characters on a sheet 
of paper and an emissary — paste-pot in liand^ — rushes round 
to the censorship office at French Headquarters, and having 
obtained permission,- proudly pastes the bulletin on to the 
window of the cigarette shop. Here Tommies, poilus, Italians, 
Greeks, Serbs, Russians and the rest stand in a respectful semi- 
circle, and try to puzzle out the import of the message. That 
little patch of uneven cobblestones must have seen the strangest 
