A Six-Hour Shift

Waking before his night watch on a refrigerated ship in rain-soaked Salonika, a weary first-person narrator finds war reduced to monotony, fatigue, tea, toast, and the companionship of a black cat named Thomas. As he tends the machinery through the long, half-dreaming hours, he reflects on the split between body and soul that night duty creates, the emptiness of the small hours, and the shared exhaustion of officers and crew. At dawn, the harbor stirs into a ghostly pageant of hospital ships, warships, Greek schooners, whistles, and shifting lights, while the ship's multilingual company bickers, jokes, and keeps the engines going. Shore leave brings him into Salonika's paradoxical world: splendid and filthy, cosmopolitan and absurd, crowded with soldiers, laborers, vendors, priests, and children from many nations. He moves from the waterfront and Place de la Liberté to trams, cafés, the bazaar, and a nationalist procession, observing with dry humor the pageantry, propaganda, and uneasy promises of liberty. Beneath the city's bustle and theatricality, he finds a deeper truth about war, patience, vigilance, and the ordinary endurance of those who keep life moving. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.