(MENAFN- AFP) It was the front where the war which seemed to have no end finally turned, where the world's first truly global military force was assembled, and where air power's deadly potential was first demonstrated.
But only now, a century after World War I began in the Balkans with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 in Sarajevo, is it being slowly rescued from the footnotes of history.
This month a French junior defence minister, Jean-Marc Todeschini, flew to Greece "to repair the injustice" by opening the first museum dedicated to the Salonica Front.
The fact that it consists of only two small rooms in the gatehouse of the vast Allied cemetery at Zeitenlick is not likely to mollify its veterans' ghosts.
"They saw themselves as the 'Forgotten Army' even as they were fighting," British historian Alan Wakefield told AFP, their story "just too strange" for the usual Great War narrative.
You only have to walk through graves of the long-haired Moroccan spahi cavalry, Senegalese riflemen, Berber zouaves, Vietnamese Buddhists and Malagasy animists who fell for France -- all incongruously marked by crosses -- to realise this was not the same war you read about at school.
If few historians today stress how the Allies' Macedonia campaign hastened the end of the slaughter, the German commander General Erich Ludendorff was in no doubt at the time.
As his memoirs make clear, the stunning breakthrough Serb and French troops made on the top of 2,000-metre (6,500-feet) Macedonian mountains in September 1918 convinced him the war was lost.
"In this situation I felt incumbent upon me the heavy responsibility of hastening the end of the war," he wrote.
Yet for decades the soldiers who won that victory were dismissed as slackers, the "Gardeners of Salonica", tending their grapes in the Mediterranean sun while their comrades died in the mud of Flanders.
It is true, Wakefield admitted, that Allied soldiers in Salonica -- now called Thessaloniki -- were 20 times more likely to fall victim to malaria, dysentery or venereal disease than bullet, bayonet or bombardment.
- Heroic Serbs -
But life inside its barbed wire defences, known as the "Birdcage", was not the endless of round of cafe, music hall and brothel visits that many back home imagined.
The region had already been ravaged by two Balkans wars and had trouble feeding its own people when Allied troops landed in neutral Greece in 1915, too late to save the valiant Serbs from defeat.
The Serbians' retreat with terrible losses through the snows of Albania was another of the war's great, rarely told stories.
"Serbs were then the heroes of the free, progressive world," Belgrade's consul Sinsia Pavic said, standing outside an ossuary that holds the bones of 6,000 of his countrymen.
"People forget we lost one in three of our male population in World War I."
Salonica was already a Babel -- capital of what was then the mostly ethnically and religiously diverse corner of Europe, its Mayor Yiannis Boutaris said -- before the arrival of troops and labourers from all over the world.
They came from France, Britain, Russia, Italy, India, north, west and central Africa, Japan, China, Vietnam and Madagascar, not to mention a Czech legion and the broken remnants of the Serbian army.
Then a majority-Jewish city, it had a sizeable Greek and Turkish population that included the Donme, descendants of Jews who had converted to Islam. But its cosmopolitan exoticism was not to everyone's taste.
Captain Cyril Falls, the official British historian of the front, described it as a hugely overcrowded "nest of spies".
"In its tawdry fashion Salonika (Salonica) undoubtedly was gay, but the tawdriness was more notable than the gaiety; the very women of pleasure were the last reserves of the Army of Aphrodite," he wrote.
The distractions did not end there. The neighbouring countryside produced the world's best opium, fine hashish and Turkish tobacco, and to top it all, Russian troops revolted in sympathy with the October Revolution.
- Dashing French -
Against such odds a succession of dashing French generals managed to meld these disparate troops into a formidable multinational fighting force that swept north as far as Hungary in an almighty push in the autumn of 1918.
Another army wing turned through Bulgaria and Romania while the British -- who had sent the mostly Irish survivors of Gallipoli up into the snows of the Macedonian mountains in shorts and tropical kit to stop the Bulgarians -- pushed on to occupy Istanbul, then still called Constantinople.
"Just organising commemorations, you get some idea of the logistical headaches they must have had," Wakefield said. "Everybody does everything differently." Indeed another museum about the front has been delayed because of a cross-border political row.
Survivors of the campaign produced two extraordinary novels, Stratis Myrivilis's Greek anti-war masterpiece "Life in the Tomb" and "Capitaine Conan" by Roger Vercel -- later filmed by French director Bertrand Tavernier. It follows the French troops who made the key breakthrough alongside the Serbs to Ukraine, where many would die fighting for the anti-communist "White" Russians against the "Red" Russian Bolsheviks.
"Before I entered the trenches I had not the slightest inkling of life's true worth," Myrivilis wrote. "Now I treasure its moments one by one."
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