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Its narrow, winding, cobble-paved streets, shaded by canopies of grapevines and bordered by rows of squat, red-tiled houses, their plastered walls tinted pale blue, bright pink or yellow, and the amazingly picturesque costumes of its inhabitants slender, stately Montenegrin women in long coats of turquoise-colored broad-cloth piped with crimson, Bosnians in skin-tight breeches covered with arabesques of braid and jackets heavy with embroidery, Albanians wearing the starched and pleated skirts of linen known as fustanellas and comitadjis with cartridge-filled bandoliers slung across their chests and their sashes bristling with assorted weapons, priests of the Orthodox Church with uncut hair and beards, wearing hats that look like inverted stovepipes, hook-nosed, white-bearded, patriarchal-looking Turks in flowing robes and snowy turbans, fierce-faced, keen-eyed mountain herdsmen in fur caps and coats of sheepskin all these combined to make me feel that I had intruded upon the stage of a theater during a musical comedy performance, and that I must find the exit and escape before I was discovered by the stage-manager.
By nine o'clock the Bulgarian garrison of Salonica, deprived of its arms, was safely stowed in the holds of Greek ships bound for Crete. The casualty list was as follows: Bulgarians prisoners: 11 officers, 1,241 men; 11 men wounded; 51 men killed; comitadjis, 4 wounded, 11 killed.
'I can speak freely, I said, 'for I am speaking to a soldier of Germany. There is no love lost between Enver and those I serve. I need not tell you that. This Rasta thought he had found a chance of delaying us, so he invents this trash about spies. Those Comitadjis have spies on the brain ... Especially he hates Frau von Einem. He jumped at the name.
All the morning of the 1st of July the Greek troops were busy rounding up Bulgarian comitadjis and collecting hidden explosives, but at 4 P.M. the Second Division marched out of the town. King Constantine, who had arrived in the small hours of the morning, had given the order for a general advance of his army. Greek patience was expended, and no wonder.
One of them, so I was told, was the head of the local anti-Serbian faction; the other, a human arsenal with weapons sprouting from his person like leaves from an artichoke, was the chief of a notorious band of comitadjis, as the Balkan guerrillas are called.
We were assured that there were no roads in the interior of the country or that such roads as existed were quite impassable for anything save ox-carts; that the country had been devastated by the fighting armies and that it would be impossible to get food en route; that the mountains we must cross were frequented by bandits and comitadjis and that we would be exposed to attack and capture; that, though the Italians might see us across Albania, the Serbian and Greek frontier guards would not permit us to enter Macedonia, and, as a final argument against the undertaking, we were warned that the whole country reeked with fever.
I will have a word to say to General von Oesterzee, and many to this fellow who flouts the Committee. And he strode away like an impudent boy. The harassed commandant grinned. 'You've offended his Lordship, and he is a bad enemy. All those damned Comitadjis are. You would be well advised not to go on to Constantinople. 'And have that blighter in the red hat loot the trucks on the road?
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