The wonder was that among so many mixed races the clashes were so few. In one place seldom have people of so many different nationalities met, and with interests so absolutely opposed. It was a situation that would have been serious had it not been comic. For causing it, for permitting it to continue, Greece was responsible. Her position was not happy. She was between the Allies and the Kaiser. Than Greece, no country is more vulnerable from an attack by sea; and if she offended the Allies, their combined fleets at Malta and Lemnos could seize all her little islands and seaports. If she offended the Kaiser, he would send the Bulgarians into eastern Thrace and take Salonika, from which only two years before Greece had dispossessed them. Her position was indeed most difficult. As the barber at the Grande Bretange in Athens told me: "It makes me a headache."
On many a better head than his it had the same effect. King Constantine, because he believed it was best for Greece, wanted to keep his country neutral. But after Venizelos had invited the Allies to make a landing-place and a base for their armies at Salonika, Greece was no longer neutral. If our government invited 170,000 German troops to land at Portland, and through Maine invade Canada, our neutrality would be lost. The neutrality of Greece was lost, but Constantine would not see that. He hoped, although 170,000 fighting men are not easy to hide, that the Kaiser also would not see it. It was a very forlorn hope. The Allies also cherished a hope. It was that Constantine not only would look the other way while they slipped across his country, but would cast off all pretense of neutrality and join them. So, as far as was possible, they avoided giving offense. They assisted him in his pretense of neutrality. And that was what caused the situation. It was worthy of a comic opera. Before the return of the allied troops to Salonika, there were on the neutral soil of Greece, divided between Salonika and the front in Serbia, 110,000 French soldiers and 60,000 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 Café. The proprietor of the Entente Café was a Greek. A British soldier was ill-treated in his café, 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.