All day long the
pinnaces, cutters, gigs, steam launches shoved and bumped against
the stone steps, marines came ashore for the mail, stewards for
fruit and fish, Red Cross nurses to shop, tiny midshipmen to visit
the movies, and the sailors and officers of the Russian, French,
British, Italian, and Greek war-ships to stretch their legs in the
park of the Tour Blanche, or to cramp them under a cafe table.
Sometimes the ambulances blocked the quay and the wounded and
frostbitten were lifted into the motorboats, and sometimes a squad
of marines lined the landing stage, and as a coffin under a French
or English flag was borne up the stone steps stood at salute. So
crowded was the harbor that the oars of the boatmen interlocked.
Close to the stone quay, stretched along the three-mile circle,
were the fishing smacks, beyond them, so near that the anchor
chains fouled, were the passenger ships with gigantic Greek flags
painted on their sides, and beyond them transports from
Marseilles, Malta, and Suvla Bay, black colliers, white hospital
ships, burning green electric lights, red-bellied tramps and
freighters, and, hemming them in, the grim, mouse-colored
destroyers, submarines, cruisers, dreadnaughts. At times, like a
wall, the cold fog rose between us and the harbor, and again the
curtain would suddenly be ripped asunder, and the sun would flash
on the brass work of the fleet, on the white wings of the
aeroplanes, on the snow-draped shoulders of Mount Olympus.
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