In the
afternoon of the 5th the Crown Prince withdrew from Pharsala to take
up a stronger position at
Domokos, and the Greeks under General
Smolenski, the military hero of the campaign, were forced to retreat,
and the Turks came in, and, according to their quaint custom, burned
the village and marched on to Volo. John Bass, the American
correspondent, and myself were keeping house in the village, in the
home of the mayor. He had fled from the town, as had nearly all the
villagers; and as we liked the appearance of his house, I gave Bass a
leg up over the wall around his garden, and Bass opened the gate, and
we climbed in through his front window. It was like the invasion of
the home of the Dusantes by Mrs. Lecks and Mrs. Aleshine, and, like
them, we were constantly making discoveries of fresh treasure-trove.
Sometimes it was in the form of a cake of soap or a tin of coffee,
and once it was the mayor's fluted petticoats, which we tried on, and
found very heavy. We could not discover what he did for pockets.
All of these things, and the house itself, were burned to ashes, we
were told, a few hours after we retreated, and we feel less troubled
now at having made such free use of them.
On the morning of the 4th we were awakened by the firing of cannon
from a hill just over our heads, and we met in the middle of the room
and solemnly shook hands. There was to be a battle, and we were the
only correspondents on the spot. As I represented the London Times,
Bass was the only representative of an American newspaper who saw
this fight from its beginning to its end.
We found all the hills to the left of the town topped with long lines
of men crouching in little trenches. There were four rows of hills.
If you had measured the distance from one hill-top to the next, they
would have been from one hundred to three hundred yards distant from
one another. In between the hills were gullies, or little valleys,
and the beds of streams that had dried up in the hot sun. These
valleys were filled with high grass that waved about in the breeze
and was occasionally torn up and tossed in the air by a shell. The
position of the Greek forces was very simple. On the top of each
hill was a trench two or three feet deep and some hundred yards long.
The earth that had been scooped out to make the trench was packed on
the edge facing the enemy, and on the top of that some of the men had
piled stones, through which they poked their rifles. When a shell
struck the ridge it would sometimes scatter these stones in among the
men, and they did quite as much damage as the shells.
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