SALONIKA FIRMLY HELD

Southland Times, Issue 17658, 16 February 1916, Page 2

SALONIKA FIRMLY HELD

VISIT TO ALLIES’ LINES. SOME. INVISIBLE TRENCHES. WELL PLACED MACHINE GUNS. We are now securely established in our defensive positions around Salonika and across the head of the Chalcidick Peninsula, wrote the special correspondent of the London Morning Post from the British base on December 2S. The work upon them is already so far advanced that it needs only a visit to the front lines to make clear what advantage we have gained in withdrawing from our former position beyond the Greek frontier.

Driving out from Salonika to our trenches along the Lembat road, you have a simultaneous object-lesson before your eyes of how war both makes a wilderness and at the same time repopulates the waste. Down the road come padding those foot-weary, wretched strings of refugees that are part of the picture of every Balkan campaign. They are the inhabitants of some of the muddy frontier villages, people who know all the signs of war, and realise that the massing of armies on each side of them is a •warning to quit that they must not neglect. So up go the shabby bales, red blankets, and parti-coloured rugs on to the crazy lop-wheeled cart, the famished, sore-backed horse is hitched in, the dirty, sallow-skinned babies, tightly wrapped up, are bolster on the top, with a parchment-faced grandmother to hold them there, and the whole stubbly-bearded, unhappy, hopeless-look-ing throng sets out, the yalone know whither. These you meet as you make your way along the road. Their carts stick helplessly in the ruts, their donkeys shy off into the surrounding mud at the sound of a motor-car. They wait in crowds to show their passes to the military policemen at the bridges. They are the flotsam and jetsam of this organised tide of war. GREEKS MAKING ROADS. But the refugees are only the smallest part of the tx - affic that congests the Lembat road, stretching on down its long perspective of camps on either side. Interminable strings of supply carts jog up and down behind their teams of mules or horses, generals on horseback, motorcycles, motor-lorries, marching detachments, and these long caravans of Greek labourers marshalled under their own headmen, beneficiaries these instead of sufferers by the tvar, for a day’s wage is waiting for everyone, from boys of thirteen to greybeards of sixty, who can shovel mud and lay stones to make the roads which the Allied army needs. A STOUT STRONGHOLD. Our trenches guard the northern, slope of one of the- lines of hills that rib the plain. Our principal trenches lie deep, well sand-bagged, and invisible from the front. Three hundred yards after you have passed them, and look back, there is nothing but the blue smoko of camp fires behind them, mingling with the mists that rise from the clayey soil to mark the line on which they lie. Further on across the brown flats that stretch in unbroken treeless monotony to where the next hill hidge rises, six or seven miles away, there are more earthworks, outposts, and advanced posts, covering possible lines of approach along the folds of ground, with machine-guns and trenches buried so flush with the surface that even the sun cannot find enough disturbance in the earth to cast a shadow'. It is a most shelterless plain, but its very flatness and absence of cover make it a stout stronghold to maintain on the defensive. “I only wish they would come," says an adjutant, looking contentedly along the new-turn-ed brown earth-line of his defensive works. “We sweep the road here with our machine-guns, as you see; or of they try slinking up that nullah over there the other company gets them, and supposing they debouched from that further gully,' the y would absolutely run right into it.”