papers. They thought hyphenated citizens were so popular with us,
that we would pay their passage to New York. In Salonika they were
transients. They had no local standing. They had no local
lying-down place, either, or place to eat, or to wash, although
they did not look as though that worried them, or place to change
their clothes. Or clothes to change. It was because we had clothes
to change, and a hotel bedroom, instead of a bench in a café, that
we were ranked as residents and from the Greek police held a
"permission to sojourn." Our American colony was a very close
corporation. We were only six Americans against 300,000 British,
French, Greek, and Servian soldiers, and 120,000 civilian Turks,
Spanish Jews, Armenians, Persians, Egyptians, Albanians, and
Arabs, and some twenty more other faces that are not listed. We
had arrived in Salonika before the rush, and at the Hotel Hermes
on the water-front had secured a vast room. The edge of the stone
quay was not forty feet from us, the only landing steps directly
opposite our balcony. Everybody who arrived on the Greek passenger
boats from Naples or the Piræus, or who had shore leave from a *
man-of-war, transport, or hospital ship, was raked by our cameras.
There were four windows--one for each of us and his worktable. It
was not easy to work. What was the use? The pictures and stories
outside the windows fascinated us, but when we sketched them or
wrote about them, they only proved us inadequate. All day long the
pinnaces, cutters, gigs, steam launches shoved and bumped against
the stone steps, marines came ashore for the mail, stewards for
fruit and fish, Red Cross nurses to shop, tiny midshipmen to visit
the movies, and the sailors and officers of the Russian, French,
British, Italian, and Greek war-ships to stretch their legs in the
park of the Tour Blanche, or to cramp them under a café table.
Sometimes the ambulances blocked the quay and the wounded and