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Greece's Atonement: British

The Battle of "Rupel Pass." "The S--Division," "Rupel Pass." Instantly I recalled how a British General, over on the Struma a few days previously, had pointed out to me a steep range of serried snow-capped mountains towering against the skyline to the northwest, and told me that the feat of the Greeks in taking a division over it at a point where even the wary Bulgar had deemed it impossible was one of the finest exploits in the annals of mountain warfare. "The Italians have fought the Austrians at a greater altitude in a number of places in the Alps, and in our wars with the Himalayan tribesmen we have sent our Gurkhas twice as high. But all of that was after more or less preparation. Here, the Greeks simply started off and went over that range with only their rifles and the packs on their backs. I know of nothing to compare with it save the taking of Kaymakchalan by the Serbs last November in the operations which freed Monastir. Not many in Saloniki have had much good to say of the Greek as a soldier of late, but you may be sure that we can do with more men of the kind that crossed that mountain range, and there is no reason why Venizelos should not be able to bring them to us."

A favorable position for observation.

The hill from which we were to follow the action jutted out of the mountains into the plain like the bow of a battleship. So favorable was its position for observation--from its brow a wide expanse of mountain and valley was spread from twenty to sixty miles in three directions--that the British and French as well as the Greeks maintained posts there. We found the officers in both of the Allied "O. Pips" [signal corps talk for O. P., meaning observation post] highly enthusiastic over the work of the Greeks in their attack of the preceding day.

The evening bulletin.

We found two officers in the British Observation Post chuckling over the evening bulletin, which had just been delivered to them. "You have to read between the lines of Sarrail's 'Evening Hope' if you want to get at the real facts," said one of them. "It's what it fails to tell you, that you really want to know. Now, you might be able to gather from this that all the Balkan Allies have been doing quite a bit of attacking during the last day or two at various parts of the Front from Doiran west to Albania, but you have to go between the lines to find that our shifty Bulgar friend over there gave most of them as good or better than they gave him all the way. It's sad but true that in this, our 'Great Spring Offensive,' as the papers at home have talked of it, the whole lot of us--French, British, Russian, Italian, and even the Serb--have been fought to a standstill by the Bulgar. Far as I can see, the only gain we have to show for it is in the casualty lists." I failed to see just what there was to chuckle about in such an interpretation of the glowing lines of the evening bulletin, and said as much. Successes of the little Venizelist army. "It isn't funny in the least," was the reply, "and it would seem still less so if we could see at close range some of the things that are lying out on a hundred miles of these accursed mourtain sides as a consequence of what has happened. But what did strike us as a bit rich was the fact that, of all the Allies, this little piece of the Venizelist army, which we have held in leash all winter while we made up our minds as to whether it would be safe to slip or not, is the only one of the whole lot of us that has taken all the objectives set for it."

A sporting instinct and a grim sense of humor--the readiness to admire a brave foe and the ability to extract amusement from discomfiture--are the two things that have conspired to make the British soldier so uniformly successful in treating those "twin impostors," Triumph and Disaster, "just the same." The view across the Vardar.

The sky was lightening and throwing into ghostly silhouette the line of the mountain ridge across the Vardar by the time we had pushed on out along the communication trench to the Greek Observation Post on the extreme brow of the hill. Since midnight the enemy "heavies" had been coughing gruffly under the mist-blanket that overlaid the plain, dappling it with alternately flashing and fading blotches of light till it glowed fantastically like a lamp-shade of Carrara marble; starshells, fired with a low trajectory, popped up and dove out of sight again, throwing a fluttering green radiance over the white pall which swathed the battlefield.

The Bulgar preparing to go over the top.

The mist-mask must have fended the day-break from the plain long after it was light upon the hill from where we watched, for it was not until the range of serrated peaks to the east of Doiran was all aglow with the red and gold of sunrise that the higher-keyed crack of the enemy's field-guns came welling up to tell us that the Bulgar was getting ready to go over the top. The flame-spurts--paling from a hot red to faded lemon as the light grew stronger--splashed up against the mist-pall as the jet of an illuminated fountain rises and falls, and down where the battered first-line trenches faced each other the dust-geysers of the exploding shells rolled up in clouds to the surface of the thinning vapors as the mud of the bottom boils up through the waters of an agitated pool.

The Allied artillery opens.

For a minute or two the ragged line of the barrage wallowed forward through the outraged mist alone. Then, as a sudden flight of rockets spat forth from the Greek first line to warn that the enemy infantry was on the way, all the Allied artillery that could be brought to bear opened up and began dropping shells just behind where the murky mist-clouds marked the swath of the Bulgar barrage.

For the space of perhaps two or three minutes the fog-bank swirled and curled in swaying eddies as the shells came hurtling into it; then--whether it was from a sudden awakening of the wind or through the licking up of its vapors by the first rays of the now risen sun, I never knew--almost in the wave of a hand, it was gone, revealing a broad expanse of trench-creased plain with a long belt of gray figures moving across it in a cloud of dust and smoke. Lively hand-to-hand fighting.

A Bulgar song. "It isn't much of a barrage as barrages go on the western front," said Captain X--half apologetically. "Their artillery won't do much harm to us, and, I'm afraid, ours not much to them. And we'll hardly be having enough machine guns emplaced to sting them as they ought to be stung for swarming up in masses like that. But if it's only a second-class artillery show, I still think I can promise you--if only the Bulgar has the stomach for it--a livelier bit of hand-to-hand fighting than you might find in a whole summer of looking for it in France. Do you see those little winking flashes all along where the infantry are moving? Some of them are from bayonets, but most are from knives. A great man with the knife is the Bulgar. Did you ever hear that song about him they sang at a revue the British 'Tommies' had at Saloniki? It was a parody on some other song that was being sung in the halls in London, and went something like this: