XV

In September of 1912 war broke out in the Balkans and, though we knew

it not at the time, it was the overture to another war in which the

whole world would be involved.

This seemed to be no more than a gathering of semi-civilized

peoples--Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro--joined together in

military alliance and by an old heritage of hatred against the Turk

in Europe. Behind that combination, however, there were Great Powers,

watching this affair with jealous hostility, with brooding anxiety, and

with racial, dynastic, and financial interests closely touched. Russia

was behind Serbia, whose hatred of Austria was equaled only by its fear

that Austria might attack it in the rear when it marched against the

Turks. Germany was behind the Turks, afraid of a Russian intervention.

Serbia’s claim for “an open window,” on the Adriatic would not be

tolerated by the Austrian Empire. The Greek claim to Crete and the

dream of getting back to Asia Minor would arouse the jealousy of France

and Italy. There was in this Balkan business a devil’s brew to poison

the system of international relations, and behind the scenes corrupt

interests of armament firms, Jewish money lenders, international

financiers, were working in secret, sinister ways for great stakes.

Before war was actually declared, I set out for Serbia, on the way

to Bulgaria, as “artist correspondent” of _The Graphic_ and _Daily

Graphic_, a title that amused me a good deal, as my artistic talent was

of a most elementary kind. All I was required to do, however, was to

provide the roughest sketches to be worked up by artists at home.

I was excited by this chance of becoming a war correspondent, which

seemed to me the crown of journalistic ambition, and the heart of its

adventure and romance. I little knew then that my squalid experience

in this Balkan campaign would be but the first faint whiff of war with

which, two years later, like most other men of my age, I was to become

familiar in its daily routine, in the midst of its monstrous melodrama.

Provided with enough notebooks and sketchbooks to write and illustrate

a history of the world, and enriched with a belt of gold which weighed

heavy and chafed my waistline, I had an uneventful journey as far

as the Danube below Belgrade. Then it brightened up a little. After

my passports had been examined by a fat Serbian officer in a highly

decorated uniform, my baggage was pounced on by a band of hairy

brigands who, without paying the slightest attention to me, proceeded

to fight among themselves for my bags. They shouted and cursed each

other, exchanging lusty blows, and it was full twenty minutes before

the victors piled my baggage into a miserable cab drawn by two starved

horses, and allowed me to go, after heavy payment. My driver whipped up

his bags of bones and started off on a wild career over the roads of

Belgrade, that is to say, over rock-strewn quagmires and gaping pits.

The carriage lurched from one side to another, with its wheels deep in

the ruts, or high on piles of stones, and at times it seemed to me that

only a miracle could save me from instant death.

The city of Belgrade, perched high above the Danube, with old, narrow,

filthy streets within its walls, was filled with crowds of peasants

mobilized for the war which had not yet been declared. Many of them

had come from remote villages, and looked as if they had come from the

Middle Ages. Some wore sheepskin coats with the shaggy wool inside and

the skin decorated with crude paintings or garish embroideries. Others

had woolen vests and a loose undergarment reaching like a kilt to

their knees. Nearly all of them wore loose gaiters, worked with red

stitches, or white woolen buskins. Others wore flat, oval sandals,

almost as big as a tennis racquet, or shoes turned up at the toes with

sharp peaks.

A wild cavalcade came riding down from the hills, like the hordes of

Ghengis Khan. Their black hair was long and matted, beneath sheepskin

caps or broad-brimmed hats. Pistols bristled in their red sashes, and

they stood up, yelling, above saddles made of fagots tied to a piece of

skin, cracking long whips, and urging on hairy little horses with rope

reins and stirrups.

I had not been in Belgrade more than a few hours when I was arrested as

an Austrian spy. Anxious to begin work as an “artist correspondent,”

I made a rough sketch of a crowd of reservists waiting to entrain.

Suddenly two soldiers fell upon me, took me prisoner, and hauled

me through the streets, followed by a yelling crowd. Speaking only

Serbian, they paid no heed to my protests in English, French, and

German. In the police headquarters, I had the same difficulty with the

commandant, who had one language and perfect conviction that I was an

Austrian and a spy. After a weary time, when I thought of a white wall

and a firing party, an interpreter appeared and listened to my efforts

at explanation in bad German. The sketch was what alarmed them, as well

it might have done, if they had any artistic sense. Finally, I was

allowed to go, after a close investigation of my papers.

That night news came that the Montenegrins had fired the first shots in

a war that was now certain, though still undeclared, and the streets

were thronged with crowds drunk with emotion. I went to a café filled

with Serbian officers, most of whom were amateur soldiers who had been

professors, lawyers, doctors, and business men in civil life. They

drank innumerable toasts, shouted and cheered, even wept a little.

At my table one, who spoke English, raised his glass and said, “Here’s

to our first meal in Constantinople!” Later, having drunk much wine, he

confided to me in a whisper, that he was deeply anxious. No one knew

the power of the Turk, and he added gloomily, “War is an uncertain

thing.”

There was an immense rally of correspondents, photographers, and cinema

men in Belgrade, all desperate to get to the front with the Serbians,

or the Bulgarians, or the Greeks. Some of the “old guard” were there,

like Frederic Villiers, Henry Nevinson, and Bennett Burleigh, who

had been in many campaigns before I was born. Frederic Villiers had

a wonderful kit, with a glorious leather coat, and looked a romantic

old figure. His pencil, his pocket knife, his compass, were fastened

to his waist belt by steel chains. He still played the part of the war

correspondent familiar in romantic melodrama. Among the younger crowd

was Percival Phillips, afterward my comrade from first to last in a

greater and longer war. It was then that I first become acquainted

with his rapid way on a typewriter, on which he rattled out words like

bursts of machine-gun fire.

After waiting about Belgrade for some days, I left Serbia and traveled

to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where I hoped to be attached to the

Bulgarian army. It was a horrible experience. Before the train started

there was a wild stampede by a battalion of reservists and Bulgarian

peasants. I narrowly escaped getting jabbed by long bayonets, as the

men scrambled on to the train, storming the doorways and clambering on

to the roof. When at last I got on board, I found myself wedged in the

corridor between piles of baggage, peasants, and soldiers. I had only

a piece of cheese and a little drop of brandy, and I cursed myself for

my folly when I found that the journey was likely to take two days. We

stopped at every wayside station, and were then turned out at night on

the platform at Sarabrot, hungry, chilled to the bone, with a biting

wind and hard frost, and without a place in which to lay our heads.

Here we waited all night till dawn, and the one room in which there

was shelter from the wind was crowded to suffocation by peasants lying

asleep on their bundles, and was filled with a foul, sickening heat.

One fantastic figure stood among the Serbians with their peaked caps,

leather coats, and baggy white breeches. He wore a frock coat and tall

hat, and looked as though he had just stepped out of the Rue de Rivoli.

He was a French journalist on his way to the front!

Outside the station door there was, all night long, the tramp of

soldiers, as battalion after battalion of Serbian troops marched up

to entrain for the front. Officers moved up and down the ranks with

lanterns which threw pallid rays of light upon these gray-clad men.

Presently a long troop train came into Sarabrot, and the soldiers were

packed into open trucks, so tightly that they could not move. Their

bayonets made a quickset hedge above each truck. They were utterly

silent. There was no laughing or singing now. These young peasants were

like cattle being carried to the slaughterhouses.

It was a night of queer conversations for me. One man slouched up in

the dim light, and said, “I guess you’re an Englishman, anyhow?” I

returned the compliment, saying, “You’re an American, of course?” But I

was wrong. He was a Bulgarian who had been in America for a few years

and had now come back, in a thin flannel suit, and a straw hat, from a

township in the Western states.

“I heard the call,” he told me, “and I’m ready to take my place in the

firing line. I’ll be glad to give hell to the Turks.”

I was as dirty as a Bulgarian peasant, and exhausted with hunger, when

at last I reached Sofia.

Still war had not been declared, but its spirit reigned in Sofia.

Outside the old white mosque, with its tall and slender minaret--the

one thing of beauty which had been inherited from the Turks--there

passed all day long companies of soldiers, heavily laden in their field

kit, and bands of Macedonian volunteers. Through the streets there was

the rumble of bullock wagons and forage carts, drawn by buffaloes. On

the plain of Slivnitza, the old battle ground between the Bulgars and

Serbians, there were great camps of the Macedonians who drilled all day

long, and at intervals shouted strange war cries, and flung up their

fur caps, while, from primitive bagpipes, there came a squealing as

though a herd of pigs were being killed. In the ranks stood many young

girls, dressed in the rough sheepskin jackets and white woolen trousers

of their men folk, and serving as soldiers. Bullocks and buffaloes

roamed in the outskirts of their camps, and when darkness crept down

the distant mountains the light of camp fires turned a lurid glare upon

the scene.

One night in Sofia a few of us heard that the Turkish Ambassador had

handed in his papers, and driven to the station, where a train was

waiting for him. That meant war. A few hours later King Ferdinand

signed a manifesto, proclaiming it to his people, and then delayed its

publication for twenty-four hours while he stole away from his capital,

leaving his flag flying above the palace, to his headquarters at Stara

Zagora. It was as though he was frightened of his people.

He need not have been. Those Bulgarian folk, whose sons and brothers

were already on their way to the front, behaved as all people do when

the spell of war first comes to them, before its disillusion and its

horror. They greeted it as joyful tidings. The great bell of the

cathedral boomed out above the peals of innumerable bells with vaguely

clashing notes. That morning in the cathedral, a Te Deum was sung

before Queen Eleanor and all the Ministers of State. It was market day,

and thousands of women had come in from the country districts, with

market produce and great milk cans slung across their shoulders on big

poles, glistening like quicksilver in the brilliant sunlight. In their

white headdresses, short embroidered kirtles, and lace petticoats,

they made a pretty picture as they pressed toward the great cathedral.

The square was filled with Macedonian peasants, in their sheepskins

and white woolen trousers, standing bareheaded and reverent before the

cathedral doors. There were remarkable faces among them, belonging to

young men with long flaxen hair, parted in the middle and waving on

each side, like pictures of John the Baptist. Others were old, old

fellows, with brown, rugged faces, white beards, and bent backs, who,

in their ragged skins and fur caps, looked like a gathering of Rip van

Winkles down from the mountains....

After exasperating delays, the correspondents of all countries--a

wild horde--who had come to describe this war, as though its bloody

melodrama had been staged as a spectacle for a dull world, were allowed

to proceed to Stara Zagora, where King Ferdinand had established his

headquarters. A special train was provided for this amazing crowd,

accompanied by the military _attachés_, and a large number of Bulgarian

staff officers. The journey was uneventful, except for a strange sign

in the heavens, which seemed a portent of ill omen for the Bulgarians.

As night came over the Rhodope Mountains, there rose a crescent moon

with one bright star in the curve of its scimitar. It was the Turkish

emblem, and the Bulgarian officers, who had been chatting gayly in the

corridor, became silent and moody.

In the town of Stara Zagora, which my humorous friend Ludovic Nodeau

called invariably Cascara Sagrada, I came in touch for the first time

with the spirit of the Near East. It was Oriental in its architecture,

in its dirt, in its smell, and in its human types. Turkish minarets

rose above the huddle of houses. Turkish houses, with their lattice

casements and ironwork grilles, high up in whitewashed walls, were

among the Bulgarian hovels, shops, and churches. Mohammedan women,

closely veiled, came into the market place, and young Turks and old

squatted round the fountains, sat cross-legged inside their wooden

booths, and smoked their _narghile_ in dirty little cafés.

A strange people from the farther East dwelt in a village of their

own outside the town--a village of houses so low that I was a head

taller than their roofs when I walked down its streets, like Gulliver

in Lilliput. Their doorways were like the holes of dog kennels and the

inhabitants crawled in and out on their hands and knees. It was a gypsy

village, swarming with wild-looking men--black-haired, sunburned to the

color of terra cotta, wonderfully handsome--and with women and young

girls clad in tattered gowns of gaudy color, with bare arms and legs,

and the breast revealed. Children, stark naked, played among heaps of

filth, and savage dogs leaped at every stranger, as they did when I

went with two friends inside the village. A tall girl, beautiful as

an Eastern houri, beat back the dogs and led us to the king of this

Romany tribe, an old, old villain who made signs for money and was not

satisfied with what I gave him. Presently he called to some women,

and they brought out a girl of some fifteen years, like a little wild

animal, with the grace and beauty of a woodland thing. She was for

sale; and I could have bought her and taken her as my slave, for five

French francs. I was tempted to do so, but did not quite know how I

should get her back to my little house in Holland Street, Kensington,

as a Christmas present to my wife. Also, I was not certain whether my

wife would like to adopt her. I declined the offer, therefore, but gave

the old man the five francs as a sign of friendship--and as a bribe of

safety.

We were surrounded, now, by a crowd of tall young Gypsies with long

sticks, and I did not like the way they eyed us. Luckily, a Bulgarian

police officer rode through the village, and at the sight of him,

the Gypsies scuttled like rabbits in their holes. We kept close

to his saddle until we were beyond the village, and by expressive

gesticulation the man made us understand that, in his judgment, the

place behind us was not a safe spot for Christian gentlemen.

One little trouble of mine, and of friends of mine, in Stara Zagora,

was the question of food. There was one pretty good restaurant, set

apart for the military _attachés_ and high staff officers, but after

they had dined well, while we hung around, sniffing their fat meats,

there was nothing left for us. We were reduced to eating in a filthy

little place, where the food was vile, and the chief method of washing

plates was by the tongues of the hungry serving wenches, as I saw,

through the kitchen door. Our billeting arrangements, also, left much

to be desired, and with two inseparable companions, Horace Grant, of

the _Daily Mirror_, and a young Italian photographer named Console, I

slept in a pestilential house, so utterly foul that I dare not describe

it. One little additional discomfort, to me, was the merry gamboling of

a tribe of mice, who played hide and seek over my body as I lay in a

coffinlike bed, and cleaned their whiskers on the window sill.

We were heartily glad to move forward from General Headquarters to the

Turkish village of Mustapha Pasha, on the river Maritza, which had just

been captured by the Bulgarians on their way to the siege of Adrianople.

My most dominant memory of this village, which was the headquarters of

the Bulgarian Second Army, may be summed up in the two words, mud and

oxen. The “roads” were just quagmires, in which endless teams of oxen,

with some buffaloes, dragging interminable batteries of heavy guns,

ammunition wagons, and forage, wallowed deep. Stones, piled loosely,

about a foot broad, at the edge of the track, made the only dry

foothold for those who walked. But the Bulgarian army trudged through

the slime, battalion after battalion, with flowers on their rifles, led

forward by priests, dancing and waving their arms in an ecstasy of war

fever, inspired by hatred of the Turk. The oxen snarled and snuffled,

and constantly I had to avoid being tramped down by holding on to

their curly horns or thrusting myself away from their wet nozzles.

Strange groups of volunteers followed the army--family groups, with

old grandfathers and grandmothers and grandma-aunties, with uncles and

cousins and brothers, laden with tin pots and bundles, and armed with

old sporting guns and country knives, and any kind of weapon useful for

carving up a Turk.

One night, when the guns were furious round Adrianople, and the sky was

lurid with bursting shells, I saw a division of Serbian cavalry pass

through Mustapha Pasha. They had traveled far, and every man was asleep

on his horse, which plodded on in the track of an old peasant with a

lantern. I shall never forget the sight of those sleeping riders in the

night.

Horace Grant, Console, and I were billeted in a farmhouse a mile or

so outside Mustapha Pasha, kept by a tall, bearded Bulgarian peasant

with his wife and mother, and three dirty little children. We slept

on divans, as hard as boards, and fed on gristly old chickens killed

beyond the doorposts. The family regarded us as though we had come from

a far planet--mysterious beings, of incomprehensible ways--and our

ablutions in the mornings, when we stripped to the waist and washed in

a pail, filled them with deep wonderment. It was our local reputation

as “The men who wash their bodies” which liberated us from military

arrest.

On the way to Mustapha Pasha and back again to our farmhouse, we had

to pass a cemetery which was used as a camp. It was never a pleasant

journey at night, because we stumbled over loose boulders, fell into

three feet of mud, and were attacked by packs of wolflike dogs whose

fierce eyes shone through the darkness. One night I felt a prick in

the shoulder, and found I had run up against the sword of a Bulgarian

officer who was feeling his way along the wall in pitch darkness. But

it was when the Bulgarians were suddenly replaced by Serbians that we

were challenged by a sentry and arrested by the guard, which rushed

out at the sound of his shots. They could make nothing of us, and

suspected the worst, until some peasants in the neighborhood came up

and identified us as three men strangely addicted to cold water, but

under the protection of Bulgarian headquarters.

Along the valley of the Maritza, on the way to Adrianople, which was

closely invested, the Turkish villages had been fired, and we saw

the smoke rising above the flames, and then tramped through their

ruins. Looting was strictly forbidden, under pain of death, but in one

village old men and women were prowling about in a ghoullike way, and

filling sacks with bits of half-burnt rubbish. Suddenly an old woman

began to scream, and we saw her struggling with a Bulgarian soldier

who threatened to run his bayonet through her body. The others fled,

leaving their sacks behind.

That night, in a dirty little eating house, a Hungarian correspondent

protested to his friends against the ruthless way in which the Bulgars

had burned those Turkish homesteads. Upon leaving the restaurant he

was arrested by military police and flung into a filthy jail, with the

warning that he would rot to death there unless he changed his opinion

about the burning of the villages, and agreed that the Turks had

fired them on their retreat. He decided to change his opinion. Later,

however, he was riding alone when he was set upon by Bulgarian police,

who seized his horse, flung him into a ditch, and kicked him senseless.

It was a warning against careless table conversation.

We soon discovered that, instead of being treated as war

correspondents, we were in a position more like that of prisoners of

war. Strict orders were issued that we were not to go beyond a certain

limit outside Mustapha Pasha, and the severity of the censorship was

so great that my harmless descriptive articles about the scenes behind

the lines, as well as my feeble sketches, were mostly canceled. I have

to confess that I became a rebel against these orders, and, with my two

companions, not only broke bounds, day after day, but smuggled through

my articles at a risk which I now know was extremely rash. I hired a

carriage with three scraggy horses, a chime of bells, and a Bulgarian

giant, at enormous expense. It had once belonged to a Bulgarian priest,

and was so imposing that when we drove out to the open country, toward

Adrianople, we used to be saluted by the Bulgarian army.

I remember driving one day to a spur of hills overlooking the city

of Adrianople, from which we could see the six minarets of the Great

Mosque, and the high explosives bursting above its domes and rooms. A

German--Doctor Bauer--and an Austrian--von Zifferer--accompanied us,

and we picnicked on the hill with an agreeable excitement at getting

even this glimpse of the “real business.” I played a game of chess with

von Zifferer, who carried a pocket set, and this very charming young

Austrian accepted my lucky victory with good nature, and then asked a

question which I always remembered:

“How long will it be before you and I are on opposite sides of a

fighting line?”

It was not very long.

My experiences as a war correspondent in Bulgaria were farcical. I saw

only the back wash of the bloody business--and I have a secret and

rather wicked suspicion that the war correspondent of the old type did

not see so much as his imaginative dispatches and thrilling sketches

suggested to the public, nor one-thousandth part as much as that little

body of men in the World War, who had absolute liberty of movement, and

the acknowledged right of going to any part of the front, at any time.

In Bulgaria, all we saw of the war was its slow-moving tide of peasant

soldiers, trudging forward dejectedly, the tangled traffic of guns and

transport, the misery--unimaginable and indescribable--of the wounded

and the prisoners, stricken with cholera, packed, like slaughtered

cattle, into railway trucks, tossed in heaps on straw-filled ox wagons,

jolted to death over the ruts and boulders of unmade roads: Horrible

pictures which gave me a little apprenticeship, but not much, for the

sights of the war that was to come.

One little scene comes to my mind vividly. It was at dawn, in a way

side station. King Ferdinand had arrived with his staff. The fat old

man with piggy eyes was serving out medals to heroes of the siege

of Adrianople. They were all wounded heroes, some of them horribly

mutilated, so that, without arms or legs, they were carried by soldiers

into the presence of the King. Others hobbled up on crutches, white

and haggard. Others were blind. I could not see any pleasure in their

faces, any sense of high reward, when they listened to Ferdinand’s

gruff speech while he fastened a bit of metal to their breasts. In the

white mist of dawn they looked a ghastly little crowd of broken men.

I have already told, in a previous chapter, how old Fox Ferdinand

conversed with me on the bridge over the Maritza at Mustapha Pasha.

His friendliness then did not allow me to escape his wrath a few

days later, when he saw me considerably outside the area to which

correspondents were restricted, and he sent over a staff officer

to tell me that I should be placed under arrest unless I withdrew

immediately.

I was arrested, and locked up for a time, with Horace Grant and

Console, for the crime of accompanying a colleague to the railway

station at Mustapha Pasha! That was when S. J. Pryor, of _The Times_,

was leaving G.H.Q. to go back to Sofia. Being, as I thought, the proud

owner of a carriage and three horses, to say nothing of my Bulgarian

giant, I offered to give him with his luggage a lift to the station. He

accepted gladly, but at the hour appointed I discovered that carriage,

horses, giant, and all had disappeared from their stables. As I found

out later, they had been “pinched” by G.H.Q. Pryor had not too much

time to get his train, and Grant and Console and I volunteered to carry

some of his bags. We arrived in time, but were immediately confronted

by a savage Bulgarian general, who spluttered with fury, called up

some hairy savages with big guns, and ordered them to lock us up in

a baggage shed. Little S. J. Pryor was extremely distressed at this

result of our service to him, but he could not delay his journey.

My friends and I were liberated from the shed after some hours of

imprisonment, and conducted, under mounted escort, to Mustapha Pasha.

A few nights later we were informed that we had been expelled from

General Headquarters and must proceed back to filthy old “Cascara

Sagrada.” I had a violent scene with the Bulgarian staff officer and

censor who conveyed this order, and told him that I intended to stay

where I was, unless I was forcibly removed by the Bulgarian army!

He took me at my word, and that night, when Grant and I were finishing

a filthy but comforting meal in our old farmhouse, far outside the

village, there was a heavy clump at the door, followed by the entry of

six hairy-looking ruffians with fixed bayonets. One of them removed his

sheepskin hat and plucked from his matted hair a small piece of paper,

which was a written order for our expulsion signed by the General in

Command of the Second Army.

I shall never forget Console at the moment of their arrival. Having

finished his supper, he was lying asleep on the divan, but, suddenly

awakened, sat up with all his hair on end, and grabbed a large loaded

revolver from beneath his pillow. We did not allow him to indulge in a

private massacre, but adopted a friendly demeanor to our guards--for we

were their prisoners, all right--and gave them mugs of peasant wine as

a token of good will. After a frightful scramble for our belongings,

which were littered all over the room, we accompanied the hairy men to

an ox wagon, where we sat in the straw, jolted in every limb and in

every tooth, for the three miles back to the old station.

On the way we passed a battalion of Serbian infantry, and one of the

officers carried on a cheery conversation with me in German. When he

heard that I was a correspondent of _The Graphic_, he was delighted and

impressed.

“Come with us!” he shouted. “We will show you some good fighting!”

“I would like to,” I answered, “but I am a prisoner of these

Bulgarians.”

He thought I was joking, and laughed loudly.

Guarded by our soldiers--they were really a simple and sturdy little

crowd of good-natured peasants--we were taken across a railway line to

a dark train. Our guards laughed, shook hands, pushed us gently into

the train, and said, “_Dobra den, Gospodin!_”

Then we had a surprise. The train was pitch dark, but not empty. It was

filled with correspondents of all nationalities, who, like ourselves,

had been expelled! They were without food or drink or light; they had

been there for half a day and part of a night; and they were furious.

That journey was a comedy and a tragedy. The train moved away some time

in the night, and crawled forward that day and night toward “Cascara

Sagrada,” as Nodeau called that town of filth. We starved, parched

with thirst, cramped together. But we laughed until we cried over the

absurdity of our situation and a thousand jests.

Marinetti, the arch Futurist, was there, and after making impassioned

love to a Bulgarian lady who could not understand his Italian or

French, he recited his great Futurist poem, “L’Automobile,” very softly

at first, then with his voice rising higher, as the “automobile”

gained speed, until it was like the bellow of a bull. In a wayside

station, soldiers came running toward our carriage, with their bayonets

handy, thinking some horrible atrocity was in progress. Marinetti was

delighted with the success of Futurist poetry in Bulgaria!

At Stara Zagora I found wires were being pulled in London and Sofia, on

my behalf, through the means of S. J. Pryor, who was a loyal friend,

and one of the dearest men in the world. (He is my “Bellamy” in _The

Street of Adventure_.) In a few days, Grant, Console, and I, alone

among the expelled crowd, received permits to return to the Bulgarian

headquarters, where our reappearance created consternation among the

staff officers and censors, who thought they were well rid of us.