Via Appia, which, starting from Dyracchium, the modern Durazzo, crossed
the Cavaia plain to the Skumbi, climbed the slopes of the Candavian
range, and traversing Macedonia and Thrace, ended at the Bosphorus, thus
linking the capitals of the western and the eastern empires. We traveled
this age-old highway, down which the four-horse chariots of the Cæsars
had rumbled two thousand years ago, in another sort of chariot, with the
power of twenty times four horses beneath its sloping hood. This will
entitle us in future years to listen with the condescension of pioneers
to the tales of the tourists who make the same trans-Balkan journey in a
comfortable _wagon-lit_, with hot and cold running water and electric
lights and a dining-car ahead. It is a great thing to have seen a
country in the pioneer stage of its existence.

In that portion of Southern Albania known as North Epirus we motored for
an entire day through a region dotted with what had been, apparently,
fairly prosperous towns and villages but which are now heaps of
fire-blackened ruins. This wholesale devastation, I was informed to my
astonishment, was the work of the Greeks, who, at about the time the
Germans were horrifying the civilized world by their conduct in
Belgium, were doing precisely the same thing, it is said, but on a far
more extensive scale, in Albania. As a result of these atrocities,
perpetrated by a so-called Christian and professedly civilized nation, a
large number of Albanian towns and villages were destroyed by fire or
dynamite. Though I have been unable to obtain any reliable figures, the
consensus of opinion among the Albanians, the French and Italian
officials, and the American missionaries and relief workers with whom I
talked is that between 10,000 and 12,000 men, women, and children were
shot, bayoneted, or burned to death, at least double that number died
from exposure and starvation, and an enormous number--I have heard the
figure placed as high as 200,000--were rendered homeless. The stories