He stopped at a farmhouse a few miles from Velvendos in the Greek sector of Macedonia. The farmer was a comrade who would give him food and a place to sleep until he was ready for the trip back to Athens. I shared the last of the bottle with him, and we drank deeply to the glory that was and would again be Greece. We shook hands warmly. He hurried off to the shelter of the farmhouse, and I walked through a gray and drizzling dawn toward the Yugoslav frontier.

I spent a few hours walking and slipping into character. For three days I had been speaking and thinking in Greek and now I had to shift mental gears and switch to the strain of Bulgarian spoken in Macedonia. I have been fluent in the language for several years, and it was only a question of making the proper mental adjustment. Languages have always come easily to me, and the more languages a person knows, the easier it is to add another to the string. All it takes is time.

And time is one commodity of which I am rarely in short supply. My endless insomnia has meant rather more to me than the $112 a month partial disability payment the Army graciously pays me. It has meant that I have at my disposal a full twenty-four hours a day, not the usual sixteen or so. Such an abundance of waking hours permits one to learn any number of languages and embrace any number of lost causes.

Here too a mental adjustment was required. I had spent time with Greek members of the Pan-Hellenic Friendship Society and was now heading toward members of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. The Pan-Hellenists dreamed of a restoration of the old Greek empire, while the IMRO comrades pledged their lives to the vision of a Macedonia free and independent, independent not only of Yugoslavia but of Greece as well. My Pan-Hellenist brothers and my IMRO brothers would have cheerfully slit one another’s throats.

By midmorning the rain had let up entirely. I practiced my Bulgarian on a succession of peasants who carried me a few miles each in donkey carts. I flashed IMRO signs at each of them. One or two seemed to recognize the signs but chose to ignore them, but ultimately a bull-necked goatherd with a thick brown moustache offered the appropriate countersign, and I gave him an abbreviated version of who I was and where I wanted to go.