On the Quai at Smyrna

Considered little more than a vignette, the piece was renamed "On the Quai at Smyrna" in the 1938 publication of The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories.

[2] When In Our Time was reissued in 1955, it led with "On the Quai at Smyrna", replacing "Indian Camp" as the first story of the collection.

[1] A narrator describes the evacuation of refugees,[4] where naval troops – possibly British[1] – arrive to impose order at the docks.

"[5] The narrator tells of the women who have dead infants and refuse to give them up for six days and that his men had to take them away.

When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn't take off with them, so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them in the shallow water.