[Footnote 1: Reprinted by permission from an article in _Everybody's
Magazine_.]
Against any one of his little Christian neighbors the Turk had superior
numbers, and had only to concentrate on a single section of his
many-sided frontier line. It had never entered his mind that the little
neighbors would form an alliance. He had trusted to their jealousies to
keep them apart. United, they could strike him on the front and both
sides simultaneously. He was due for an attack coming down the main
street and from alleys to the right and left.
In this situation he must temporarily accept the defensive. Meanwhile,
he foresaw the battalions of "chocolate soldiers" beating themselves to
pieces against the breastworks of his garrisons, and Greek turning on
Serb and Serb on Bulgar after a taste of real war. Against divided
counsels would be one mind, which, with reenforcements of the faithful
from Asia Minor, would send the remnants of the _opéra bouffe_ invasion
flying back over their passes.
But the allies fully realized the danger of quarreling among
themselves, which would have been much harder to avert if their armies
had been acting together as a unit under a single command. Happily,
each army was to make a separate campaign under its own generals; each
had its own separate task; each was to strike at the force in front of
its own borders. Prompt, staggering blows before the Turkish reserves
could arrive were essential.
The Montenegrins in the northwest, who had the side-show (while
Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece had the three rings under the main tent),
did their part when they invested the garrison of Scutari.
Advancing northward, the Greeks, with strong odds in their favor,
easily took care of the Turkish force at Elassona and continued their
advance toward Salonika.
Advancing southward, the Serbs, one hundred thousand strong (that is,
the army of their first line), moved on Kumanova among the hills, where
the forty thousand Turks defending the city of Uskub would make their
stand as inevitably as a board of army engineers would select Sandy
Hook as a site for some of the defenses of New York harbor.
Confidently, the Turkish commander staked all on the issue.
The Serbs did not depend alone on mass or envelopment by flank. They
murderously and swiftly pressed the attack in the front as well as on
the sides; and the cost of victory was seven or eight thousand
casualties. Two or three fragments of the Turkish army escaped along
the road; otherwise, there was complete disintegration.
Uskub was now undefended. It was the ancient capital of Servia; and the
feelings of the Serbs, as they marched in, approximated what ours would
be if our battalions were swinging down Pennsylvania Avenue after a
Mexican proconsul had occupied the White House for five hundred years.
Meanwhile, at Monastir were forty thousand more Turks. So far as
helping their comrades at Kumanova was concerned, they might as well
have been in jail in Kamchatka. You can imagine them sitting
cross-legged, Turkish fashion, waiting their turn. They broke the
precedent of Plevna, which the garrisons of Adrianople and Scutari
gloriously kept, by yielding rather easily. There must have been a
smile on the golden dome of the tomb of Napoleon, who thrashed the
armies of Europe in detail.
A Servian division, immediately after Kumanova, started southwest over
the mountain passes in the snow and through the valleys in the mud to
clinch the great Servian object of the war with the nine points of
possession. To young Servia, Durazzo, the port of old Servia, is as
water to the gasping fish. It stands for unhampered trade relations
with the world; for economic freedom. When that division, ragged and
footsore, came at last in sight of the blue Adriatic--well, it may
safely be called a historic moment for one little nation.
Now we turn from the side lines, where the Serbs and the Greeks were
occupied, to the neck of the funnel through which the Turkish
reenforcements from Asia Minor were coming. There the Bulgars had
undertaken the great, vital task of the war against the main Turkish
army.
The Bulgarian army was little given to gaiety and laughter, but sang
the "Shuma Maritza" on the march. This is the song of big men in
boots--big white men with set faces--making the thunder of a torrent as
they charge. "Roaring Maritza" is the nearest that you can come to
putting it into English. The Maritza is the national river, and the
song pictures it swollen and rushing in the winter rains or when the
snows on the Balkans melt, on its way past the Bulgarian border into
Turkey; and the gray army was now to follow it to the Aegean, in the
spirit of its flood, and make the harbor at its mouth Bulgarian.
Yes, a gray army, bent on a grim business in a hurry, in gray winter
weather and chill mountain mists, with the sun showing through overcast
skies--something of the kind of weather that bred the Scotch. Cromwell
or Stonewall Jackson would have felt at home, saying his prayers at the
double-quick, in such company. As mementos from home, the soldiers wore
in their caps and buttonholes withered flowers and sprigs of green
which their womenfolk had given in farewell. The women were just as
Spartan as the Spartans; perhaps more so. If any soldier lacked innate
courage, the spur of public opinion drove him forward in step with his
comrades.
Naturally, Bulgarian generalship had to adapt its plan of campaign to
the obstacles between it and its adversary. For armies are cumbrous
affairs. In all times they have been tied down to roads and bridges.
The main highway and the main railway line from Sofia, the capital of
Bulgaria, to Constantinople both ran through Adrianople. Nature meant
this city, set in a basin among hills, for defense, and for the center
of any army defending Thrace. On the near-by hills is a circle of
permanent forts that commands all approaches for guns or infantry. In
front of it is the turbulent Maritza, and to the northeast lies the
town of Kirk-Kilesseh, partly fortified and naturally strong, which
formed the Turkish right. The left rested at Demotika, to the south of
Adrianople, in a rough country inaccessible to prompt action by a large
force.
The Bulgars must turn one wing or the other. Foreign military experts
thought that Kirk-Kilesseh could be taken only after a long operation,
and then only by a force much larger than the Bulgars could spare for
concentration at any one point of the line. Let two weeks pass without
a definite victory, and the Turks would have numbers equal to the
Bulgars; a month, superior numbers. As it was, the Turks had
altogether, including the Adrianople garrison, a hundred and
seventy-five thousand men in strong position against the Bulgars' first
line of two hundred and eighty thousand.
A branch of the Sofia-Constantinople railway line runs northeast to
Yamboli, on the Bulgarian frontier. Between Yamboli and Kirk-Kilesseh
is a highway--the Turkish kind of highway--and no unfordable streams or
other natural obstacles to an army's progress. At Yamboli the Bulgars
concentrated their third army corps, under General Demetrief, and a
portion of their second. The rest of the second faced Adrianople, while
the first corps operated to the south and east.
Swinging around on Kirk-Kilesseh, the third army would not take "No!"
for an answer. The Bulgarian infantry stormed the redoubts in the
moonlight. They knew how to use the bayonet and the Turks did not.
Skilfully driven steel slaughtered Mohammedan fanaticism that fought
with clubbed guns, hands, and teeth, asking no quarter this side of
Paradise. Kirk-Kilesseh fell. The Turkish army, flanked, had to go;
Adrianople was isolated. The Bulgarian dead on the field could not
complain; the wounded were in the rear; the living had burning eyes on
the next goal.
"_Na noj!"_ ("Fix bayonets!") had won. "_Na noj!_ Give them the steel!"
was the cry of a nation. Soldiers sang it out to one another on the
march. Children prattled it at home as if it were a new kind of game:
"Give them the steel and they will go! Nothing can stop Bulgaria!"
Not more than two Bulgarian soldiers out of twenty ever reached the
Turk with a bayonet. The Turk did not wait for them. So the bayonet
counted no less in the morale of the eighteen than of the two.
Frequently they fixed it at a distance of five or six hundred yards.
Their desire to use it made them press close at all points with the
grim initiative that will not be gainsaid. When they charged, the
spirit of cold steel was in their rush.
There was a splendid audacity in General Demetrief's next move after
Kirk-Kilesseh. He did not pause to surround Adrianople. To the east was
a wide gap in the investing lines. Through this the garrison might have
made a sortie with telling effect. But Demetrief knew his enemy. He
took it for granted that the garrison was settling itself for a siege.
With twelve thousand Turkish reenforcements a day arriving from Asia,
even hours counted.
As yet, the Turks were not decisively beaten; only the right that
fought at Kirk-Kilesseh had been really demoralized. On the line of
Bunar Hissar to Lüle Burgas they formed to receive the second shock.
They were given scant time to prepare for it. "_Na noj!_" For three
days this battle, the Waterloo of the war, raged. The advancing
Bulgarian infantry went down like ninepins; but it did not give up, for
it knew that "they would go when they saw the steel." Again the turning
movement in flank crushed in the end. This time the Turkish main army
was shattered. It hardly had the cohesiveness of a large mob. It was
many little mobs, hungry, staggering on to the rear, where the ravages
of cholera awaited.
In two weeks the Bulgars had made their dispositions and fought two
battles, each lasting three days. They had advanced seventy-five miles
over a rough country where the roads were sloughs. The loss in killed
and wounded was sixty thousand; one man out of five was down.
When officers and men had snatched any sleep it was on the rain-soaked
earth. The bread in their haversacks was wet and moldy. When they lay
in the fire zones they were lucky if they had this to eat. By day they
had dug their way, trench by trench, up to the enemy's position,
crouching in the mud to keep clear of bullets. By night they had
charged. They were an army in a state of auto-intoxication, bent on the
one object of driving the Turkish army back to the narrow line of the
peninsula. This accomplished, all the isolated forces in European
Turkey, whether at distant Scutari or near-by Adrianople, were without
hope of relief. The neck of the funnel was closed; the war practically
won.
All the world knows now, and the Bulgarian staff must have known at the
time, that for a week after Lüle Burgas the utter demoralization of the
Turkish retreat left the way open to Constantinople. Why did not
General Demetrief go on? Why did that army which had proceeded thus far
with such impetuous and irresistible momentum suddenly turn snail?
For the reason that the Marathon winner when he drops across the tape
is not good for another mile. The Bulgar was on his stomach in the mud,
though he was facing toward the heels of the Turk. Food and ammunition
were not up. A fresh force of fifty thousand men following up the
victory might easily have made its own terms at the door of Yildiz
Palace within three or four days; but there was not even a fresh
regiment.
It was three weeks after Lüle Burgas before Demetrief was ready to
attack; three weeks, in which the cholera scare had abated, the panic
in Constantinople had come and gone, reenforcements had arrived and
been organized into a kind of order, while they built fortifications.
The Turkish cruisers supported both of Nazim Pasha's flanks with the
fire of heavier guns than the Bulgars possessed. There was an
approachable Turkish front of only about sixteen miles. Without
silencing the Turkish batteries, Demetrief sent his infantry against
the redoubts. He lost five or six thousand men without gaining a single
fort. Against a stubborn and even semi-intelligent foe there is no
storming a narrow frontal line of fortifications when you may not turn
the ends.
Adrianople lay across the straight line of transportation by railroad
and highway to the peninsula. All munitions for Demetrief's army had to
go around it in the miserable, antiquated ox-carts. It was the rock
splitting the flood of the Bulgarian advance. While the world was
hearing rumors of the city's fall, the truth was that it was not really
invested until a month after Lüle Burgas was fought.
For a month the garrison reported to be starving was drawing in
supplies from a big section of farming country. When the armistice was
signed it still had pasturage within the lines of defense for flocks of
sheep and herds of cattle. The problem for the Bulgars first and last
was to keep this fact masked and to check the savage sorties and spare
all the guns and men they could for the main army. Volunteers from
Macedonia still in native dress, clerks still in white collars, old men
who had perjured themselves about their age in order to get a rifle,
and the young conscripts of twenty years came to take the place of the
regular forces on the investing lines, who moved on to re-enforce
Demetrief. Fifty thousand Servians, two divisions, were spared after
Kumanova, and speeded across Bulgaria on the single-line railway with
an amazing rapidity to assist, according to plan, the Bulgars in the
investment operations.
To the Turk, Adrianople is a holy city. Here is the most splendid
mosque in all the empire, that built by the conqueror Sultan Selim.
With the shadow of the minarets over his shoulder, the Turkish private
in a trench was ready to die for Allah. But death must come for him. He
is not going to hustle intelligently after paradise. In short, he is a
sit-and-take-it fighter. While any delay of the Bulgarian advance was
invaluable in gaining time, he made no use of his opportunities in a
country of hills and transverse valleys and ravines, which nature meant
for rear-guard action. A company of infantry posted on a hill could
force a regiment to deploy and attack, and a few miles farther on could
repeat the process. Cavalry could harass the flanks of the attacking
force. Field-guns could get a commanding position above a road, with
safe cover for retreat.
At Mustapha Pasha, twenty miles in front of Adrianople, was a solid old
stone bridge over the Maritza, whose floods in the winter rains would
be a nightmare to engineers who had to maintain a crossing with
pontoons. If ever a corps needed a bridge the second Bulgarian corps
needed this one. They found that a small and badly placed charge of
dynamite had merely knocked out a few stones between two of the
buttresses, leaving the bridge intact enough for all the armies of
Europe to pass over it; and the Turks did not even put a mitrailleuse
behind sandbags in the streets or use field-guns from the adjacent
hills to delay the Bulgars in their crossing.
The soldier who is good only for the defensive can never win. What beat
the Turk was the Turk himself. His army was in the chaos between
old-fashioned organization and an attempt at a modern organization. His
generals were divided in their counsels; his junior officers aped the
modern officer in form, but lacked application. They had ceased to
believe in their religion. Therefore, they did not lead their privates
who did believe. In the midst of the war, captains and lieutenants,
trustworthy observers tell me, would leave their untrained companies of
reservists to march by the road while they themselves rode by train.
They took their soldiers' pay. They neglected all the detail which is
the very essence of that preparation at the bottom without which no
generalship at the top can prevail.
The Bulgarian officers, two-thirds of whom were reservists, enjoyed a
comradeship with their men at the same time that discipline was rigid.
They believed in their God; at least, in the god of efficiency. They
worked hard. They belong in the world of to-day and the Turk does not.
Therefore the Turk has to go.
"We will not make peace without Adrianople!" was the cry of every
Bulgar. Its possession became a national fetish, no less than naval
superiority to the British. Adrianople stood for the real territorial
object of the war. It must be the center of any future line of defense
against the Turk. Practically its siege was set, once there was
stalemate at Tchatalja. With no hope of beating the main Bulgarian army
back, there was no hope of relieving the garrison, whose fate was only
a matter of time.
At the London Peace Conference the allies stood firm for the possession
of Adrianople. The Turkish commissioners, after repeating for six weeks
that they would never cede it, had finally agreed to yield on orders
from Constantinople, when the young Turks killed Nazim Pasha, the
Turkish commander-in-chief, and overthrew the old cabinet. "You can
have Adrianople when you take it!" was the defiance of the new cabinet
to the allies.