THE WAR OF 1912-1913
I can still recollect the glad surprise which a first sight of Sofia
gave to me. With the then conventional view of the Balkan states, I had
expected, on leaving Buda-Pesth, to cut away altogether from
civilisation. Paved streets; solid and good, if not exactly handsome,
buildings; first-class hotels and cafes; electric trams and comfortable,
cheap cabs; luxurious public baths; well-stocked stores; a telephone
system, water-supply, drainage--each one of these was a surprise. I had
expected a semi-barbaric Eastern town. I found a modern capital, small
but orderly, clean, and well managed.
That enthusiastic friend of the Balkan nationalities, Mr. Noel Buxton,
M.P., writing of Sofia and other Balkan capitals, becomes quite lyrical
in his praise:
"Their capitals," he writes, "have at all times an aspect of
reality, industry, and simplicity. There is little needless
wealth to show, and nothing which, in the West, would be called
luxury. Every one is a worker, and every one a serious
politician. There are no drones, and none who spend their lives
in the pleasures, refinements, luxuries, vices, the idle
amusements of the great cities of Europe. The buildings
represent utility, means fairly adapted to ends, but with no
cumbrous decoration or ponderous display. These capitals are
bureaucratic settlements, devoted to the deliberate ends of
national government with a minimum of waste, strictly
appropriated to use alone, rendering their service to the nation
as a counting-house renders its service to a great factory.
Peasants walk their streets in brilliant village dresses. No one
thinks a rational country costume inappropriate to the pavement
of the capital. This is an index to the idea of purpose which
pervades the town; there is none of the sense that a different
costume is needed for urban life, an idea which arises from the
association of towns with pleasure and display.
[Illustration: BLESSING THE LAMB ON ST. GEORGE'S DAY]
"Few sights can be more inspiring to the lover of liberty and
national progress than a view of Sofia from the hill where the
great seminary of the national church overlooks the plain. There
at your feet is spread out the unpretentious seat of a
government which stands for the advance of European order in
lands long blighted with barbarism. Here resides, and is
centred, the virile force of a people which has advanced the
bounds of liberty. From here, symbolised by the rivers and roads
running down on each side, has extended, and will further
extend, the power of modern education, of unhampered ideas, of
science and of humanity. From this magnificent view-point Sofia
stretches along the low hill with the dark background of the
Balkan beyond. Against that background now stands out the new
embodiment of Bulgarian and Slavonic energy, genius, and freedom
of mind, the great cathedral, with its vast golden domes
brilliantly standing out from the shade behind them. In no other
capital is a great church shown to such effect, viewed from one
range of hills against the mountainous slopes of another. It is
a building which, with its marvellous mural paintings, would in
any capital form an object of world interest, but which, in the
capital of a tiny peasant State, supremely embodies that breadth
of mind which
"... rejects the lore
Of nicely calculated less or more."
I confess humbly that I could not see all that in Sofia. But the city
was a welcome surprise, recalling Turin in its situation beneath a great
range of mountains, in its size and its general disposition. With closer
acquaintance, which came to me during the armistice that followed the
first phase of the war, Sofia showed as still clean, well managed,
admirable, but, oh, so deadly dull. The system of partial seclusion of
the women-folk kills all social life, and the absence of a feminine
element in the restaurants and other places of social resort deprives
them of all convivial charm. One could eat, drink, work in Sofia, and
that was all.
Coming first to Sofia just as war had been declared, I was struck by
the evidence of the exceedingly careful preparation that the Bulgarians
had made for the struggle. This was no unexpected or sudden war; they
had known for some time that war was inevitable; for they had made up
their minds for quite a considerable time that the wrongs of their
fellow-nationals in Macedonia and Thrace would have to be righted by
force of arms. Attempts on the part of the Powers to enforce reforms in
the Christian provinces of Turkey had, in the opinion of the Bulgars,
been absolute failures. In their opinion there was nothing to hope for
except armed intervention on their part against Turkey. And, believing
that, they had made most careful preparation, extending over several
years, for this struggle.
That preparation was in every sense admirable. For instance, it had
extended, I gathered from informants in Bulgaria, to this degree, that
they formed military camps in winter for the training of their troops.
Thus they did not train solely in the most favourable time of the year
for manoeuvres, but in the unfavourable weather too, in case that time
should prove favourable for their war. I think the standard of their
artillery arm, and the evidence of the scientific training of their
officers, prove to what extent their training beforehand had gone. Most
of the officers in high command I met at the front had been trained at
the Military College at St. Petrograd, some of them at the Military
College at Turin, and others again at a Military College which had been
established at Sofia. Of this last-named the head was Colonel Jostoff,
who was Chief-of-Staff to General Demetrieff (the great conquering
general of this war), and a singularly able soldier. He was the chief
Professor of the Military College at Sofia, and judging by the standard
he set, the Military College must have reached a high degree of
efficiency.
[Illustration: THE CATHEDRAL, SOFIA]
The Balkan League having been formed, and the time being ripe for the
war, Bulgaria was quite determined that war should be. The Turks at that
time were inclined to make reforms and concessions; they had an
inclination to ease the pressure on their Christian subjects in the
Christian provinces. Perhaps knowing--perhaps not knowing--that they
were unready for war themselves, but feeling that the Balkan States were
preparing for war, the Turks were undoubtedly willing to make great
concessions. But whatever concessions the Turks might have offered, war
would still have taken place.
I do not think one need offer any harsh criticism about a nation coming
to such a decision as that. If you have made your preparation for
war--perhaps a very expensive preparation, perhaps a preparation which
has involved very great commitments apart from expense--it is not
reasonable to suppose that at the last moment you will consent to stop
that war.
I was much struck with the wonderful value to the Bulgarian generals of
the fact that the whole Bulgarian nation was filled with the martial
spirit--was, in a sense, wrapped up in the colours. Every male Bulgarian
citizen was trained to the use of arms. Every Bulgarian citizen of
fighting age was engaged either at the front or on the lines of
communication. Before the war, every Bulgarian man, being a soldier, was
under a soldier's honour; and the preliminaries of the war, the
preparations for mobilisation in particular, were carried out with a
degree of secrecy that, I think, astonished every Court and every
Military Department in Europe. The secret was so well kept that one of
the diplomatists in Roumania left for a holiday three days before the
declaration of war, feeling certain that there was to be no war.
Bulgaria has a newspaper Press that, on ordinary matters, for delightful
irresponsibility, might be matched in London. Yet not a single whisper
of what the nation was designing and planning leaked abroad. Because the
whole nation was a soldier, and the whole nation was under a soldier's
honour, absolute secrecy could be kept. No one abroad knew anything,
either from the babbling of "Pro-Turks," or from the newspapers, that
this great campaign was being designed by Bulgaria.
The Secret Service of Bulgaria before the war had evidently been
excellent. They seemed to know all that was necessary to know about the
country in which they were going to fight; and I think this very
complete knowledge of theirs was in part responsible for the
arrangements which were made between the Balkan Allies for carrying on
the war. The Bulgarian people had made up their minds to do the lion's
share of the work and to have the lion's share of the spoils, for the
Bulgarian people knew the state of corruption and rottenness to which
the Turkish nation had come. When I reached Sofia, the Bulgarians told
me they were going to be in Constantinople three weeks after the
declaration of war. That was the view that they took of the
possibilities of the campaign. And they kept their programme as far as
Chatalja fairly closely.
Having declared war, the Bulgarians invaded Turkey along two main lines,
by the railway which passed through Adrianople to Constantinople and by
the wild mountain passes of the north between Yamboli and Kirk Kilisse.
There was great enterprise shown in this second line of advance and it
was responsible for all the great victories won. Taking Kirk Kilisse by
surprise the Bulgarian forces kept the Turkish vanguard on the run until
Lule Burgas, where the Turkish main army made a stand and the decisive
battle of the campaign was fought. The Turks were utterly routed and
fled in confusion towards Constantinople by Tchorlu. Had an enterprising
pursuit on the part of the Bulgarians been possible, the Bulgarian army
undoubtedly would have then entered Constantinople and the Christmas
Mass would have been said at St. Sophia. But the strength of the
Bulgarian attack was exhausted by the tremendous exertions of marching
and fighting which they had already made and a long pause to recuperate
was necessary. That pause enabled the Turks to re-marshal their forces
and to make a stand at the fortified lines of Chatalja some twenty miles
as the crow flies from Constantinople. Against those lines a Bulgarian
attack was finally launched, but too late. The entrenched Turks were
strong enough to withstand the attack of the Bulgarian forces. My diary
of these three critical days of the campaign reads:
ERMENIKIOI
(Headquarters of the Third Bulgarian Army),
_November 17 (Sunday)._
The battle of Chatalja has been opened. To-day, General
Demetrieff rode out with his staff to the battlefield whilst the
bells of a Christian church in this little village rang. The day
was spent in artillery reconnaissance, the Bulgarian guns
searching the Turkish entrenchments to discover their real
strength. Only once during the day was the infantry employed;
and then it was rather to take the place of artillery than to
complete the work begun by artillery. It seems to me that the
Bulgarian forces have not enough big gun ammunition at the
front. They are ten days from their base and shells must come up
by ox-waggon the greater part of the way.
ERMENIKIOI, _November 18._
This was a wild day on the Chatalja hills. Driving rain and mist
swept over from the Black Sea, and at times obscured all the
valley across which the battle raged. With but slight support
from the artillery the Bulgarian infantry was sent again and
again up to the Turkish entrenchments. Once a fort was taken but
had to be abandoned again. The result of the day's fighting is
indecisive. The Bulgarian forces have driven in the Turkish
right flank a little, but have effected nothing against the
central positions which bar the road to Constantinople. It is
clear that the artillery is not well enough supplied with
ammunition. There is a sprinkle of shells when there should be a
flood. Gallant as is the infantry it cannot win much ground
faced by conditions such as the Light Brigade met at Balaclava.
ERMENIKIOI, _November 19._
Operations have been suspended. Yesterday's cold and bitter
weather has fanned to an epidemic the choleraic dysentery which
had been creeping through the trenches. The casualties in the
fighting had been heavy. "But for every wounded man who comes to
the Hospitals," Colonel Jostoff, the chief of the staff, tells
me, "there are ten who say 'I am ill.'" The Bulgarians recognise
bitterly that in their otherwise fine organisation there has
been one flaw, the medical service. Among this nation of peasant
proprietors--sturdy, abstemious, moral, living in the main on
whole-meal bread and water--illness was so rare that the medical
service was but little regarded. Up to Chatalja confidence in
the rude health of the peasants was justified. They passed
through cold, hunger, fatigue and kept healthy. But ignorant of
sanitary discipline, camped among the filthy Turkish villages,
the choleraic dysentery passed from the Turkish trenches to
theirs. There are 30,000 cases of illness and the healthy for
the first time feel fear as they see the torments of the sick.
The Bulgarians recognise that there must be a pause in the
fighting whilst the hospital and sanitary service is
reorganised.
There was this check, mainly because, in an otherwise perfect system of
training, sanitation had been overlooked. From a military point of view,
of course, it was almost impossible in any case that the Bulgarian army
should have forced the Chatalja lines without a railway line to bring up
ammunition from their base. It was, however, an army which had been
accustomed to do the impossible. But for the cholera I believe it might
have got through to the walls of Constantinople.
During the latter part of 1913 there was a chorus of unstinted praise in
Europe of Bulgarian strategy. Candidly I cannot agree entirely with some
of the views then expressed, which, to me, seem to have been inspired
not so much by a study of the Bulgarian strategy, as by admiration of
the wonderful heroism and courage of the soldiers. At the outset
Bulgarian generalship was exceedingly good; the reconnaissance phase of
the campaign was carried through perfectly. In that the soldier was
assisted by the perfect discipline of the nation, which allowed a
cheerful obedience to the most exacting demands and absolute secrecy.
But it seemed to me that at the stage when the battle of Lule Burgas had
been fought and won, there was a very serious mistake. (I am not writing
now in the light of the ultimate result, for I expressed this view to
Mr. Prior, of the London _Times_, in voyaging with him from Mustapha
Pasha to Stara Zagora in November 1913.) There was a very serious
mistake in the policy of "masking" Adrianople. I have reasons for
thinking that that was not the original plan of the soldiers. Their
strategy was, in the first instance, to deceive the Turks as to where
the blow was to come from. And in that they succeeded admirably. No one
knew where the main attack on the frontier would be made. It was made
unexpectedly at Kirk Kilisse, when all expectation was that it would be
made through Mustapha Pasha and towards Adrianople. But after that
period of secrecy, when the main attack developed, and the Turks knew
where the Bulgarian forces were, it seemed to me it was a great mistake
for the Bulgarian army to push on as they did, leaving Adrianople in
their rear.
[Illustration: AN ADRIANOPLE STREET
Over the roofs, the spiral minaret of Bourmali Jami, white marble
and red granite]
It was not merely that Adrianople was a fortress, but it was a fortress
which straddled their one line of communication. The railway from
Sofia to Constantinople passed through Adrianople. Except for that
railway there was no other railroad, and there was no other carriage
road, one might say, for the Turk did not build roads. Once you were
across the Turkish frontier you met with tracks, not roads.
The effect of leaving Adrianople in the hands of the enemy was that
supplies for the army in the field coming from Bulgaria could travel by
one of two routes. They could come through Yamboli to Kirk Kilisse, or
they could come through Novi Zagora to Mustapha Pasha by railway, and
then to Kirk Kilisse around Adrianople. From Kirk Kilisse to the
rail-head at Seleniki, close to Chatalja, they could come not by railway
but by a tramway, a very limited railway. If Adrianople had fallen, the
railway would have been open. The Bulgarian railway service had, I
think, something over one hundred powerful locomotives at the outset of
the war, and whilst it was a single line in places, it was an effective
line right down to as near Constantinople as they could get. But,
Adrianople being in the hands of the enemy, supplies coming from Yamboli
had to travel to Kirk Kilisse by track, mostly by bullock wagon, and
that journey took five, six, or seven days. The British Army Medical
Detachment travelling over that road took six days.
If one took the other road one got to Mustapha Pasha comfortably by
railway. And then it was necessary to use bullock or horse transport
from Mustapha Pasha to Kirk Kilisse. That journey I took twice; once
with an ox-wagon, and afterwards with a set of fast horses, and the
least period for the journey was five days. From Kirk Kilisse there was
a line of light railway joining the main line. But on that line the
Bulgarians had only six engines, and, I think, thirty-two carriages; so
that, for practical purposes, the railway was of very little use indeed
past Mustapha Pasha. Whilst Adrianople was in the hands of the enemy,
the Bulgarians had practically no line of communication.
My reason for believing that it was not the original plan of the
generals to leave Adrianople "masked" is, that in the first instance I
have a fairly high opinion of the generals, and I do not think they
could have designed that; but I think rather it was forced upon them by
the politicians saying, "We must hurry through, we must attempt
something, no matter how desperate it is, something decisive." But,
apart from the high opinion I have of the Bulgarian generals, the fact
remains that after Adrianople had been attacked in a very half-hearted
way, and after the main Bulgarian army had pushed on to the lines of
Chatalja, the Bulgarians called in the aid of a Servian division to help
them against Adrianople. I am sure they would not have done that if it
had not been their wish to subdue Adrianople.
The position of the Bulgarian army on the lines of Chatalja with
Adrianople in the hands of the enemy was this, that it took practically
their whole transport facilities to keep the army supplied with food,
and there was no possibility of keeping the army properly supplied with
ammunition. So if the Bulgarian generals had really designed to carry
the lines of Chatalja without first attacking Adrianople, they
miscalculated seriously. But I do not think they did. It was probably a
plan forced upon them by political authority, feeling that the war must
be pushed to a conclusion somehow. Why the Bulgarians did not take
Adrianople quickly in the first place is, I think, to be explained
simply by the fact that they could not. But if their train of sappers
had been of the same kind of stuff as their field artillery, they could
have taken Adrianople in the first week of the war.
The Bulgarians had no effective siege-train. A press photographer at
Mustapha Pasha was very much annoyed because photographs he had taken of
guns passing through the towns were not allowed to be sent through to
his paper. He sent a humorous message to his editor, that he could not
send photographs of guns, "it being a military secret that the
Bulgarians had any guns." But the reason the Bulgarians did not want
photographs taken was that these guns were practically useless for the
purpose for which they were intended.
The main excellence of the Bulgarian army was its infantry, which was
very steady under punishment, admirably disciplined, perfect in courage,
and which had, I think, that supreme merit in infantry, that it always
wanted to get to work with the bayonet. The Bulgarian soldiers had a
joke among themselves. The order for "Bayonets forward!" was, as near as
I could get it, "_Nepret nanochi_." Arguing by similarity of sound, the
Bulgarian soldier affected to believe it meant "Spit five men on your
bayonet." It was the common camp saying that it was the duty of the
infantryman to impale five Turks on his bayonet, to show that he had
conducted himself well. The Bulgarian infantrymen had devised a little
"jim" in regard to bayonet work, which I had not heard of being used in
war before. When they were in the trenches, and the order was expected
to fix bayonets, they had a habit of fixing them, or rather pretending
to, with a tremendous rattle, on which signal the Turks would often
leave their trenches and run, expecting the bayonet charge; but the
Bulgarians still stuck to their trenches, and got in another volley.
The artillery work of the Bulgarians was very good indeed; they had an
excellent field-piece, practically the same field-piece as the French
army. Their work was very fine with regard to aim and to the bursting of
shrapnel, and their firing from concealed positions was also good. But I
never saw enterprising work on their part; I never saw them go into the
open, except during a brief time at Chatalja. They seemed to dig
themselves in behind the crest of a hill, where they could fire,
unobserved by the enemy.
Now, with regard to the conduct of the troops. Much has been said about
outrages in this war. I believe that in Macedonia, where irregular
troops were at work, outrages were frequent on both sides; but in my
observation of the main army there was a singular lack of any excess.
The war, as I saw it, was carried out by the Bulgarians under the most
humane possible conditions. At Chundra Bridge I was walking across
country, and I had separated myself from my cart. I arrived at the
bridge at eight o'clock at night, and found a vedette on guard. They
took me for a Turk. I had on English civilian green puttees, and green
was the colour of the Turks. It was a cold night, and I wished to take
refuge at the camp fire, waiting for my cart to come. Though they
thought I was a Turk, they allowed me to stay at their camp fire for two
hours. Then an officer who could speak French appeared, and I was safe;
the men attempted in no way to molest me during those two hours. They
made signs as of cutting throats, and so on, but they were doing it
humorously, and they showed no intention to cut mine. Yet I was there
irregularly, and I could not explain to them how I came to be there.
The extraordinary simplicity of the commissariat helped the Bulgarian
generals a great deal. The men had bread and cheese, sometimes even
bread alone; and that was accounted a satisfactory ration. When meat and
other things could be obtained, they were obtained; but there were long
periods when the Bulgarian soldier had nothing but bread and water. (The
water, unfortunately, he took wherever he could get it, by the side of
his route at any stream he could find. There was no attempt to ensure a
pure water supply for the army.) I do not think that without the
simplicity of commissariat it would have been possible for the Bulgarian
forces to have got as far as they did. There was an entire absence of
tinned foods. If you travelled in the trail of the Bulgarian army, you
found it impossible to imagine that an army had passed that way; because
there was none of the litter which is usually left by an army. It was
not that they cleared away their rubbish with them; it simply did not
exist. Their bread and cheese seemed to be a good fighting diet.
The transport was, naturally, the great problem which faced the
generals. I have already said something about the extreme difficulty of
that transport. I have seen at Seleniki, which is the point at which the
rail-head was, within thirty miles of Constantinople as the crow flies,
ox-wagons, which had come from the Shipka Pass, in the north of
Bulgaria. I asked one driver how long he had been on the road; he told
me three weeks. He was carrying food down to the front.
The way the ox-wagons were used for transport was a marvel of
organisation to me. The transport officer at Mustapha Pasha, with whom I
became very friendly, was lyrical in his praise of the ox-wagon. It was,
he said, the only thing that stuck to him during the war. The railway
got choked, and even the horse failed, but the ox never failed. There
were thousands of ox-wagons crawling across the country. These oxen do
not walk, they crawl, like an insect, with an irresistible crawl. It
reminded me of those armies of soldier ants which move across Africa,
eating everything which they come across, and stopping at nothing. I had
an ox-wagon coming from Mustapha Pasha to Kirk Kilisse, and we went over
the hills and down through the valleys, and stopped for nothing--we
never had to unload once.
And one can sleep in those ox-wagons. There is no jumping and pulling at
the traces, such as you get with a harnessed horse. The ox-wagon moved
slowly; but it always moved. If the ox-transport had not been so
perfectly organised, and if the oxen had not been so patiently
enduring as they proved to be, the Bulgarian army must have perished by
starvation.
[Illustration: THE SHIPKA PASS]
And yet at Mustapha Pasha a Censor would not allow us to send anything
about the ox-wagons. That officer thought the ox-cart was derogatory to
the dignity of the army. If we had been able to say that they had such
things as motor transport, or steam wagons, he would have cheerfully
allowed us to send it.
After Lule Burgas the ox-transport had to do the impossible. It was
impossible for it to maintain the food and the ammunition supply of the
army at the front, which I suppose must have numbered 250,000 to 300,000
men. That army had got right away from its base, with the one line of
railway straddled by the enemy, and with the ox as practically the only
means of transport.
The position of the Bulgarian nation towards its Government on the
outbreak of the war is, I think, extremely interesting as a lesson in
patriotism. Every man fought who could fight. But further, every family
put its surplus of goods into the war-chest. The men marched away to the
front; and the women of the house loaded up the surplus goods which they
had in the house, and brought them for the use of the military
authorities on the ox-wagons, which also went to the military
authorities to be used on requisition.
A Bulgarian law, not one which was passed on the outbreak of the
war--they were far too clever for that--but an Act which was part of the
organic law of the country, allowed the military authorities to
requisition all surplus food and all surplus goods which could be of
value to the army on the outbreak of hostilities. The whole machinery
for that had been provided beforehand. But so great was the voluntary
patriotism of the people that this machinery practically had not to be
used in any compulsory form. Goods were brought in voluntarily, wagons,
cart-horses, and oxen, and all the surplus flour and wheat, and--I have
the official figures from the Bulgarian Treasurer--the goods which were
obtained in this way totalled in value some six million pounds. The
Bulgarian people represent half the population of London. The population
is poor. Their national existence dates back only half a century. But
they are very frugal and saving; that six millions which the Government
signed for represented practically all the savings which the Bulgarian
people had at the outbreak of the war.