I do not attempt to account for what happened now; I only record it.  It may have been that the Allied artillery had wrought more havoc in that advancing wave of men than had been apparent from a distance, or it may have been that the enemy artillery had done less to the entrenched defenders than it was expected to do; at any rate, the line of gray began to break at almost the first impact of the line of brown, and the great hand-to-hand fight that X——­ had promised me was transformed into a Marathon.

[Sidenote:  Greeks have always beaten the Bulgars.]

“As I expected,” muttered my companion. “‘Boris’ has no stomach for a fight to-day with the man who licked him yesterday, and will lick him to-morrow and go right on licking him to the end if they’ll only give him a show.  The Bulgar never has stood up to the Greek, and he never will.”

[Sidenote:  The Greek Staff is in a mountain valley.]

[Sidenote:  Scarcity of nurses.]

The Greek Staff shared a round bowl of a mountain valley, a few miles back from the front lines, with a clearing station.  The equipment of the little hospital had mostly been provided by the British Red Cross, but the Venizelists had made a brave effort to furnish the staff themselves.  There were two French-trained Greek surgeons, a Greek matron, Greek orderlies, and two Greek nurses.  Since the attack began there had been work for a dozen of the latter, but—­as it had been impossible for the women of most of the Venizelist families to get away from Old Greece—­no others were available.  An English nurse, who had marched in the retreat of the Serbians, and a French nurse from a Saloniki hospital had volunteered to step into the breach, and these five women were courageously trying to make up in zeal what they lacked in numbers.

[Sidenote:  Working double hours.]

“We are not enough for a double shift since the fighting began,” Madame A——­, the matron, had said to me the night of my arrival; “so we are accomplishing the same end by working double hours.  We are working to atone for the dishonor our King has brought upon our country, just as our men are fighting to atone for it; and the harder we all work and fight the sooner it will come about.”

The last thing to catch my eye as I looked back from the rim of the valley when I rode away at midnight had been the flash of a bar of light on a white uniform, as a tired figure had drooped against the flap of a hospital tent for a breath of air.

[Sidenote:  Women nurses go without sleep.]

“If any one of those women has had a wink of sleep in the last three days,” Captain X——­ had said as we reined in to let a string of ambulances go by, “it must have been taken standing.  I have been up most of the time myself, and never once have I looked across to the clearing station but I saw some sign of a nurse on the move.”

[Sidenote:  Venizelos at the nurses’ mess.]