The Toronto Daily Star–October 20, 1922
“Adrianople.– In a never-ending , staggering march, The Christian population of Eastern Thrace is jamming the roads towards Macedonia. The main column crossing tbe Maritza River at Adrianople is twenty miles long. Twenty miles of carts drawn by cows, bullocks and muddy-flanked water buffalo, with exhausted, staggering men, women and children, blankets over their heads, walking blindly along in the rain beside their wordly goods. The main stream is being swelled from all the back country. They don’t know where they are going. They left their farms, villages and ripe brown fields and joined the main stream of refugees when they heard the Turk was coming. Now they can only keep their places in the ghastly procession while mud-splashed Greek cavalry herd them along like cow-punchers driving steers. It is a silent procession. Nobody even grunts. It is all they can do to keep moving. Their brilliant peasant costumes are soaked and draggled. Chickens dangle by their feet from the carts. Calves nuzzle at the draught cattle wherever a jam halts the stream. An old man marches bent under a young pig, a scythe and a gun, with a chicken tied to his scythe. A husband spreads a blanket over a woman in labor in one of the carts to keeep off the driving rain. She is the only person making a sound. Her little daughter looks at her in horror and begins to cry. And the procession keeps moving. At Adrianople where the main stream moves through, there is no Near East relief at all. They are doing very good work at Rodosto on the coast, but can only touch the fringe. There are 250,000 Chriastian refugees to be evacuated from Eastern Thrace alone. The Bulgarian frontier is shut against them, There is only Macedonia and Western Thrace to receive the fruit of the Turk’s return to Europe. Nearly half a million refugees are in Macedonia now. How they are to be fed nobody knows, but in the next month all the Christian world will hear the cry: “Come over into Macedonia and help us!”
Excerpted from “BY-LINE ERNEST HEMINGWAY, Selected Articles and Dispatches of Four Decades”. Edited by William White, Publisher: Scribner, New York, London, Toronto, Sydney, Singapore.
Hemingway was a foreign correspondent for The Toronto Daily Star at that time. Islander.