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Greece's Atonement: Boris

I'm Boris the Bulgar, The Man With the Knife; The Pride of Sofia, The Taker of Life. Good gracious, how spacious And deep are the cuts, Of Boris the Bulgar, The Knifer-- "Now for it! Look at that!"

The barrages lift and the Greeks advance to meet the Bulgars. I never did hear just what it was that Boris was a knifer of, for at that juncture the two barrages--having respectively protected and harried to the best of their abilities the advancing wave of infantry down to within a hundred yards or so of the Greek trenches--"lifted" almost simultaneously on to "communications," and that lifting was the signal for the opening of the climacteric stage of the action. Without an instant's delay, a solid wave of Greeks in brown--lightly fringed in front with the figures of a few of the more active or impetuous who had outdistanced their comrades in the scramble over the top--rose up out of the earth and swept forward to meet the line of gray. The gust of their first great cheer rolled up to us above the thunder of the artillery. "Now for it!" repeated X--, focussing down his telescope and steadying himself with his elbows. "I think you'll find the show from now on worth all the trouble of coming up to see." The Bulgars break and retreat. I do not attempt to account for what happened now; I only record it. It may have been that the Allied artillery had wroaght more havoc in that advancing wave of men than had been apparent from a distance, or it may have been that the enemy artillery had done less to the entrenched defenders than it was expected to do; at any rate, the line of gray began to break at almost the first impact of the line of brown, and the great hand-to-hand fight that X--had promised me was transformed into a Marathon.

Greeks have always beaten the Bulgars. "As I expected," muttered my companion. "Boris' has no stomach for a fight to-day with the man who licked him vesterday, and will lick him to-morrow and go right on licking him to the end if they'll only give him a show. The Bulgar never has stood up to the Greek, and he never will." The Greek Staff is in a mountain valley.

Scarcity of nurses.

The Greek Staff shared a round bowl of a mountain valley, a few miles back from the front lines, with a clearing station. The equipment of the little hospital had mostly been provided by the British Red Cross, but the Venizelists had made a brave effort to furnish the staff themselves. There were two French-trained Greek surgeons, a Greek matron, Greek orderlies, and two Greek nurses. Since the attack began there had been work for a dozen of the latter, but--as it had been impossible for the women of most of the venizelist families to get away from Old Greece--no others were available. An English nurse, who had marched in the retreat of the Serbians, and a French nurse from a Saloniki hospital had volunteered to step into the breach, and these five women were courageously trying to make up in zeal what they lacked in numbers.