The Balkan Peninsula

It was a beautiful story, and why should any one let loose a brutal bulldog of a fact and point out that King Ferdinand during the campaign lived in temporary palaces at Stara Zagora and Kirk Kilisse, and when he travelled on a visit to some point near the front it was usually by motor-car?

In a paper of another nationality there was a vivid story of the battle of Chatalja. This story started the battle seven days too soon; had the positions and the armies all wrong; the result all wrong; and the picturesque details were in harmony. But for the purposes of the public it was a very good story of a battle. Those men who, after great hardships, were enabled to see the actual battle found that the poor messages which the censor permitted them to send took ten days or more in transmission to London. Why have taken all the trouble and expense of going to the front? Buda-Pest, on the way there, is a lovely city; Bucharest also; and charming Vienna was not at all too far away if you had a good staff map and a lively military imagination.

In yet another paper there was a vivid picture—scenery, date, Greenwich time, and all to give an air of artistic verisimilitude—of the signing of the Peace armistice. The armistice had not been signed at the time, was not signed for some days after. But it would have been absurd to have waited, since "our special correspondent" had seen it all in advance, right down to the embrace of the Turkish delegate and the Bulgarian delegate, and knew that some of the conditions were that the Turkish commissariat was to feed the Bulgarian troops at Chatalja and the Bulgarian commissariat the Turkish troops in Adrianople. If his paper had waited for the truth that most charming story would never have seen the light.

So, in a little book I shall one day bring out in the "Attractive Occupations" series on "How to be a War Correspondent," I shall give this general advice:

1. Before operations begin, visit the army to which you are accredited, and take notes of the general appearance of officers and men. Also learn a few military phrases of their language. Ascertain all possible particulars of a personal character concerning the generals and chief officers.

2. Return then to a base outside the country. It must have good telegraph communication with your newspaper. For the rest you may decide its locality by the quality of the wine, or the beer, or the cooking.

3. Secure a set of good maps of the scene of operations. It will be handy also to have any books which have been published describing campaigns over the same terrain.

4. Keep in touch with the official bulletins issued by the military authorities from the scene of operations. But be on guard not to become enslaved by them. If, for instance, you wait for official notices of battles, you will be much hampered in your picturesque work. Fight battles when they ought to be fought and how they ought to be fought. The story's the thing.

5. A little sprinkling of personal experience is wise: for example, a bivouac on the battle-field, toasting your bacon at a fire made of a broken-down gun carriage with a bayonet taken from a dead soldier. Mention the nationality of the bacon. You cannot be too precise in details.

Ko-Ko's account of the execution of Nankipoo is, in short, the model for the future war correspondent. The other sort of war correspondent, who patiently studied and recorded operations, seems to be doomed. In the nature of things it must be so. The more competent and the more accurate he is, the greater the danger he is to the army which he accompanies. His despatches, published in his newspaper and telegraphed promptly to the other side, give to them at a cheap cost that information of what is going on behind their enemy's screen of scouts which is so vital to tactical, and sometimes to strategical, dispositions. To try to obtain that information an army pours out much blood and treasure; to guard that information an army will consume a full third of its energies in an elaborate system of mystification. A modern army must either banish the war correspondent altogether or subject him to such restrictions of censorship as to veto honest, accurate, and prompt criticism or record of operations.

Some of the correspondents—one in particular—overcame a secretive military system and a harsh censorship by the use of a skilled imagination, and of a friendly telegraph line outside the area of censorship. At the Staff headquarters at Stara Zagora during the early days of the campaign, when we were all straining at the leash to get to the front, waiting and fussing, he was working, reconstructing the operations with maps and a fine imagination, and never allowing his paper to want for news. I think that he was quite prepared to have taken pupils for his new school of war correspondents. Often he would come to me for a yarn—in halting French on both sides—and would explain the campaign as it was being carried on. One eloquent gesture he habitually had—a sweeping motion which brought his arms together as though they were gathering up a bundle of spears, then the hands would meet in an expressive squeeze. "It is that," he said, "it is Napoleonic."

Probably the censor at this stage did not interfere much with his activities, content enough to allow fanciful descriptions of Napoleonic strategy to go to the outer world. But, in my experience, facts, if one ascertained something independently, were not treated kindly.

"Why not?" I asked the censor vexedly about one message he had stopped. "It is true."

"Yes, that is the trouble," he said,—the nearest approach to a joke I ever got out of a Bulgarian, for they are a sober, God-fearing, and humour-fearing race.

The idea of the Bulgarian censorship in regard to the privileges and duties of the war correspondent was further illustrated to me on another occasion when a harmless map of a past phase of the campaign was stopped.

"Then what am I to send?" I asked.

"There are the bulletins," he said.

"Yes, the bulletins which are just your bald official account of week-old happenings which are sent to every news agency in Europe before we see them!"

"But you are a war correspondent. You can add to them in your own language."

Remembering that conversation, I suspect that at first the Bulgarian censorship did not object to fairy tales passing over the wires, though the way was blocked for exact observation. An enterprising story-maker had not very serious difficulties at the outset. Afterwards there was a change, and even the writer of fairy stories had to work outside the range of the censor.

The Mustapha Pasha censorship would not allow ox wagons, reservists, or Serbians to be mentioned, nor officers' names. The censorship objected, too, for a long time to any mention of the all-pervading mud which was the chief item of interest in the town's life. Yet you might have lost an army division in some of the puddles. (But stop, I am lapsing into the picturesque ways of the new school of correspondents. Actually you could not have lost more than a regiment in the largest mud puddle.)

Let the position be frankly faced that if one is with an army in modern warfare, common sense prohibits the authorities from allowing you to see anything, and suggests the further precautions of a strict censorship and a general hold-up of wires until their military value (and therefore their "news" value) has passed. If your paper wants picturesque stories hot off the grill it is much better not to be with the army (which means in effect in the rear of the army), but to write about its deeds from outside the radius of the censorship.

Perhaps, though, your paper has old-fashioned prejudices in favour of veracity, and will be annoyed if your imagination leads you too palpably astray? In that case do not venture to be a war correspondent at all. If you do not invent, you will send nothing of value. If you invent you will be reprimanded.

Here is my personal record of "getting to the front" and the net result of the trouble and the expense. I went down to Mustapha Pasha with the great body of war correspondents and soon recognised that there was no hope of useful work there. The attacking army was at a stand-still, and a long, wearisome siege—its operations strictly guarded from inspection—was in prospect. I decided to get back to Staff headquarters (then at Stara Zagora) and just managed to catch the Staff before it moved on to Kirk Kilisse. By threatening to return to London at once I got a promise of leave to join the Third Army and to "see some fighting."

The promise anticipated the actual granting of leave by two days. It would be tedious to record all the little and big difficulties that were then encountered through the reluctance of the military authorities to allow one to get transport or help of any kind. But four days later I was marching out of Mustapha Pasha on the way to Kirk Kilisse by way of Adrianople, a bullock wagon carrying my baggage, an interpreter trundling my bicycle, I riding a small pony. The interpreter was gloomy and disinclined to face the hardships and dangers (mostly fancied) of the journey. Beside the driver (a Macedonian) marched a soldier with fixed bayonet. Persuasion was necessary to force the driver to undertake the journey and a friendly transport officer had, with more or less legality, put at my command this means of argument. A mile outside Mustapha Pasha the soldier turned back and I was left to coax my unwilling helpers on a four days' journey across a war-stricken countryside, swept of all supplies, infested with savage dogs (fortunately well-fed by the harvest of the battle-fields), liable to ravage by roving bands.

That night I gave the Macedonian driver some jam and some meat to eke out his bread and cheese.

"That is better than having a bayonet poked into your inside," I said, by pantomime. He understood, grinned, and gave no great trouble thereafter, though he was always in a state of pitiable funk when I left the wagon to take a trip within the lines of the besieging forces.

So to Kirk Kilisse. There I got to General Savoff himself and won not only leave, but a letter of aid to go down to the Third Army at the lines of Chatalja. But by then what must be the final battle of the war was imminent. Every hour of delay was dangerous. To go by cart meant a journey of several days. A military train was available part of the way if I were content to drop interpreter, horse, and baggage, and travel with a soldier's load.

That decision was easy enough at the moment—though I sometimes regretted it afterwards when the only pair of riding breeches I had with me gave out at the knees and I had to walk the earth ragged—and by train I got to Chorlu. There a friendly artillery officer helped me to get a cart (springless) and two fast horses. He insisted also on giving me a patrol, a single Bulgarian soldier, with 200 rounds of ammunition, as Bashi-Bazouks were ranging the country.

It was an unnecessary precaution, though the presence of the soldier was comforting as we entered Silviri at night, the outskirts of the town deserted, the chattering of the driver's teeth audible over the clamour of the cart, the gutted houses ideal refuges for prowling bands. From Silviri to Chatalja there was again no appearance of Bashi-Bazouks. But thought of another danger obtruded as we came near the lines and encountered men from the Bulgarian army suffering from the choleraic dysentery which had then begun its ravages. To one dying soldier by the roadside I gave brandy; and then had to leave him with his mates, who were trying to get him to a hospital. They were sorely puzzled by his cries, his pitiful grimaces. Wounds they knew and the pain of them they despised. They could not comprehend this disease which took away all the manhood of a stoic peasant and made him weak in spirit as an ailing child.

From Chatalja, the right flank of the Bulgarian position, I passed along the front to Ermenikioi ("the village of Armenians"), passing the night at Arjenli, near the centre and the headquarters of the ammunition park. That night at Arjenli seemed to make a rough and sometimes perilous journey, which had extended over seven days, worth while. The Commander, an artillery officer, welcomed me to a little mess which the Bulgarian officers and non-commissioned officers (six in all) had set up in a clean room of a village house. We had dinner, "Turkish fashion," squatting round a dish of stewed goat and rice, and then smoked excellent cigarettes through the evening hours as we looked out on the Chatalja lines.

Arjenli is perched on a high hill, to the west of Ermenikioi. It gave a view of all the Chatalja position—the range of hills stretching from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmora, along which the Bulgarians were entrenched, and, beyond the invisible valley, the second range which held the Turkish defence. Over the Turkish lines, like a standard, shone in the clear sky a crescent moon, within its tip a bright star. It seemed an omen, an omen of good to the Turks. My Australian eye instinctively sought for the Southern Cross ranged against it in the sky in sign that the Christian standard held the Heavens too. I sought in vain in those northern latitudes, shivered a little and, as though arguing against a superstitious thought, said to myself: "But there is the Great Bear."

Now there had been "good copy" in the journey. At Arjenli I happened to be the witness of a vivid dramatic scene (more stirring than any battle incident). It was a splendid incident, showing the high courage and moral of these peasant soldiers at an anxious time. To have witnessed it, participated in it, was personal reward sufficient for a week of toil and anxiety. To my paper, too, the reader might say, it was of some value, if properly told and given to the London reader the next morning, the day before the battle of Chatalja.

Yes. But it was the next afternoon before I could get to a telegraph office within the Bulgarian lines. Then the censor said any long message was hopeless. I was allowed to send a bare 100 words. They reached London eight days later, a week after the battle had been fought, when London was interested no longer in anything but the armistice negotiations. The reason was that the single telegraph line was monopolised for military business. My account of the battle of Chatalja reached London a full fortnight after the event, though I had the advantage of the highest influence to expedite the message.

Thus from a daily-newspaper point of view all the expense, toil, danger were wasted.

Summing up, an accurate and prompt Press service as war correspondent with the Bulgarian army was impossible, because—

1. The Bulgarian authorities were keen that correspondents should see nothing.

2. A rigid first censorship checked a full record of what little was seen.

3. The first censorship being passed, despatches often had still to pass a second censorship at Staff headquarters, a third censorship at Sofia.

4. Despatches passing through Roumania underwent another censorship there, and yet another in Austria, possibly yet others in other European countries.

5. In addition to these censorship delays the Bulgarian authorities made newspaper messages yield precedence to military messages, and at the front this meant that Press messages were sent on by mail (ox transport most of the way) to the Staff headquarters or the capital.

6. In the meanwhile the imaginative accounts written nearer Fleet Street had been published, and the accurate news was "dead" from a point of public interest.

Most of these conditions will rule over all future wars. Therefore I conclude that the day of the war correspondent—in the sense of a truthful observer of a campaign—has gone, and he died with the Balkan War. He can only survive if newspapers are willing to incur the very great expense of sending out war correspondents not for the news, day by day, but for what observation and criticism they could supply after the campaign was over. To a daily newspaper such matter is almost valueless, especially as during the progress of the campaign the correspondents of the "new" school would be at work with their many inventions, raising the hair of the public and the circulation of their journals with bright feats of imagination.

CHAPTER VII

JOTTINGS FROM MY BALKAN TRAVEL BOOK

These observations I will quote from my diary during 1912 in illustration of phases of Balkan character, dating them at the time and place that they were made.

Belgrade, October 21.—The declaration of war has not set the Serbians singing in the streets. In the chief café there is displayed a great war map. Young soldiers not yet sent to the front lounge about in all the cafés and are lionised by the older men. They are the only signs of war.

The patriotic Serbian illustrates his case against the Turk by taking you for a ramble around his capital. The old Turkish quarters of the town are made up of narrow unpaved muddy lanes lined with low hovels. The modern Serbian town has handsome buildings markedly Russian in architecture, electric trams, and wood-blocked pavements. Near the railway station one side of a street is as the Turks left it and shows a row of hovels: the other side is occupied by a great school. The shops, because it is war-time and business is largely suspended, are mostly closed. But a few remain open with reduced staffs. The goods displayed are as a rule woefully expensive when they are not of local origin. Landlocked Serbia, surrounded by commercially hostile countries, finds imports expensive. British goods are very much favoured, but are hard to obtain.

The Serbians speak bitterly of the efforts of Austria "to strangle them commercially." "Whenever they wish to put diplomatic pressure upon us," said one Serbian to me, "they discover that swine fever has broken out in our country and stop our exports of pigs and bacon—our chief lines of export. What can we do? Once, in retaliation, we found that we suspected a consignment of Austrian linen goods of carrying swine fever and stopped it on the frontier. It almost caused war."

Nish (Serbia), October 22.—A military train carrying some members of the army and Staff has brought also a band of war correspondents this far. We were a merry but rather a hungry lot. The train has been sixteen hours on the journey, and as we started at 6 a.m. most of us did not bring any stores of food except such as were packed away and inaccessible in the big baggage. The wayside refreshment rooms are swept clean of all food. Finally we manage to obtain some bread, and five hungry correspondents in one carriage eat at it without enthusiasm, whilst in a corner sits a Serbian officer having a good meal of sausage and onions and bread. We make remarks, a little envious, a little jocose, in English, on his selfishness. "He is a greedy pig, anyhow," said one, putting the final cap on our grumbles. The Serbian officer had not betrayed by a smile or a frown that he understood but now in good English he remarked: "Perhaps you gentlemen will be so kind as to share this with me." We all laughed and he laughed then: and we took a little of the sausage, and liked that Serbian rather well: and no reference was made to what had gone before. At nightfall we stop at Nish and all my Press comrades leave the train to go on in the rear of the Serbian army. I push on to Sofia. Clearly these Balkan peoples are not quite so savage as I had thought once.

Sofia, October 24.—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 has gone to fight who could fight. But further, every family has 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 a law 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 has not had 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—those goods which were obtained in this way totalled in value some six million pounds. That represented the surplus goods, beyond those necessary for consumption by the Bulgarian people, at the outset of the war. The numbers of the Bulgarian people represent half the population of London. The peasant population is very 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. I am told that the gold supply in the Bulgarian Treasury at the declaration of war was only three million pounds. So that there was an army of 350,000 men put into the field, and only three million pounds as the gold supply.

Kirk Kilisse, November 7.—The extraordinary simplicity of the commissariat has helped the Bulgarian generals a great deal. The men have 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 the 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 that 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. As I travelled in the trail of the Bulgarian army, I 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 seems to be a good fighting diet.

Seleniki, November 13.—The transport was, naturally, the great problem which faced the generals. I have seen here (Seleniki, which is the point at which the rail-head is), within 30 miles of Constantinople as the crow flies, ox wagons which have come from the Shipka Pass in the north of Bulgaria. I asked one driver how long it 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. A 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. They do not walk, they crawl, like an insect, with an irresistible crawl. It reminds you 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 could sleep in those ox wagons. There is no jolting 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 as perfectly organised, and if the oxen had not been as patiently enduring as they proved to be, the Bulgarian army must have perished by starvation. 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.

But after Lule Burgas, the ox transport has had to do the impossible. It is impossible for it to maintain the food and the ammunition supply of the army at the front, which I suppose must number 250,000 to 300,000 men. That army has 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.

Arjenli (Turkey), November 15, 1912.—It is Friday, and we expect to-morrow the Battle of Chatalja. In the little Turkish village of Arjenli, situated on a high hill a little to the rear of the Bulgarian lines, is the ammunition park of the artillery, guarded by a small body of troops under Lieutenant-Colonel Tchobanoff. Coming towards the front from Chorlu, the fall of night and the weariness of my horses have compelled me to halt at Arjenli, and this officer and Dr. Neytchef give me a warm welcome to their little mess. There are six members, and for all, to sleep and to eat, one room. Three are officers, three have no commissions. With this nation in arms that is not an objection to a common table. Discipline is strict, but officers and soldiers are men and brothers when out of the ranks. Social position does not govern military position. I found sometimes the University professor and the bank manager without commissions, the peasant proprietor an officer. The whole nation has poured out its manhood for the war, from farm, field, factory, shop, bank, university, and consulting-room.

Here, at Arjenli, on the eve of the decisive battle, I think over early incidents of the campaign. It is a curious fact that in all Bulgaria I have met but one man who was young enough and well enough to fight and who had not enlisted. He had become an American subject, I believe, and so could not be compelled to serve. In America he had learned to be an "International Socialist," and so he did not volunteer. I believe he was unique. With half the population of London, Bulgaria had put 350,000 trained men under arms. But there was in the nation one good Socialist who knew that war was an evil thing, and that it was better to sit down meekly under tyranny than to take up arms.

I followed in the track of the victorious Third Army as it came down through the border mountains on to Kirk Kilisse, then to Lule Burgas, then past Chorlu to the Chatalja lines. At Arjenli I had overtaken them in time to see the final battle, and now sat looking out on the entrenched armies, talking over the position with a serene and cheerful artillery officer. The past week had been one of hardship and horrors. From Chorlu the road was lined with the bodies of the Turkish dead, still awaiting burial. Entering the Bulgarian lines on their right flank that morning, I had tried in vain to succour a soldier dying of the choleraic dysentery which had begun its ravages. But here in the middle of the battle line the atmosphere of noble confidence is inspiriting. The horrors of war vanish; only its glory shows. The men around me feel that they are engaged in a just war. They know that everything that man can do has been done. Proudly, cheerfully, they await the issue.

During the evening, a Turk suspected of being a spy is brought in for trial. He had attempted to rush past one of the sentries guarding the ammunition wagons. He is given a patient hearing, is able to establish his innocence, and is allowed to go. There is no feeling of panic or injustice among these Bulgarians. I see the trial and its end (having been asked to act as friend of the accused).

It is to-day forty days since the mobilisation. At the call this trained nation was in arms in a day. The citizen soldiers hurried to the depots for their arms and uniforms. In one district the rumour that mobilisation had been authorised was bruited abroad a day before the actual issue of the orders, and the depot was besieged by the peasants who had rushed in from their farms. The officer in charge could not give out the rifles, so the men lit fires, got food from the neighbours, and camped around the depot until they were armed. Some navvies received their mobilisation orders on returning to their camp after ten hours' work at railway-building. They had supper and marched through the night to their respective headquarters. For one soldier the march was twenty-four miles. The railway carriages were not adequate to bring all the men to their assigned centres. Some rode on the steps, on the roofs of carriages, on the buffers even.

At Stara Zagora, early in November, I noted a mother of the people who had come to see some Turkish prisoners just brought in from Mustapha Pasha. To one she gave a cake. "They are hungry," she said. This woman had five men at the war—her four sons in the fighting line, her husband under arms guarding a line of communication. She had sent them proudly. It was the boast of the Bulgarian women that not a tear was shed at the going away of the soldiers.

Later, at a little village outside Kirk Kilisse, a young civil servant, an official of the Foreign Office, spoke of the war whilst we ate a dish of cheese and eggs. "It is a war," he said, "of the peasants and the intellectuals. It is not a war made by the politicians or the soldiers of the Staff. That would be impossible. In our nation every soldier is a citizen and every citizen a soldier. There could not be a war unless it were a war desired by the people. In my office it was with rage that some of the clerks heard that they must stay at Sofia, and not go to the front. We were all eager to take arms."

At Nova Zagora, travelling by a troop train carrying reserves to the front, I crossed a train bringing wounded from the battle-fields. For some hours both trains were delayed. The men going to the front were decorated with flowers as though going to a feast. They filled the waiting time by dancing to the music of the national bagpipes, and there joined in the dance such of the wounded as could stand on their feet. There was no daunting these trained patriots.

These and a score of other pictures pass through my mind and explain Kirk Kilisse and Lule Burgas, and give confidence for the battle to come. Here was a people ranged for battle with the steady nerves and the stolid courage that come from tilling the soil, with the skill and the discipline that come from adequate training, with the fervent faith of a great patriotism. I have talked with Turkish prisoners and found infantrymen who had been sent to the front after two days' training, gunners who had been drafted into a battery after ten days' drill. Such soldiers can only march to defeat.

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 battle-field 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 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 wagon 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.

Kirk Kilisse, December 1.—It seems certain now that peace must be declared, and that the dream of driving the Turk right out of Europe must be abandoned. These peasant peoples of the Balkans have done wonderful things, but they have stumbled on one point—the want of knowledge of sanitary science. I have seen only one attempt at a clean camp since I have been in the field, and that was a Serbian camp, north of Adrianople.

With the Bulgarian army there was not, at any stage of the campaign up to the Battle of Chatalja—that is, until after the outbreak of cholera—any precaution, to my knowledge, taken to secure a clean water supply, or clean camping-grounds, or to take the most elementary precautions against the outbreak of disease in the army. The medical service was almost as bad. I have seen much of the hospital work at Kirk Kilisse after the armistice; and it has been deplorable to see the fine fellows whose lives were sacrificed, or whose limbs were sacrificed, through neglect of medical knowledge. I am sure the Bulgarians would have saved many hundreds of lives if there had been anything like a proper medical service at the front.

At Chatalja the chief reason given for the stoppage of operations was the ravages of disease in the Bulgarian lines. The illness was of a choleraic type; it had, as usual, a profound moral as well as physical effect. The courage of the men broke down before this visitation. The victims howled with pain and terror, though the same men would withstand serious wounds without a complaint or a wincing.

The Turks are blamed for the outbreak in the Bulgarian lines. It is more than probable that their villages, inexpressibly filthy; the prisoners taken from their ranks; the infection of the soil abandoned by them, were contributing causes.

But it must be stated frankly that the almost complete absence of any sanitary discipline or precaution in the Bulgarian lines at this place earned for them all the diseases that afflict mankind. So far as I can ascertain after careful investigation, there were no sanitary police; no attempts to secure and safeguard a pure water supply; no latrine regulations. I have seen the Bulgarian soldiers drinking from streams running through battle-fields, though a few feet away were swollen carcases. I have seen no attempt in the field at a proper latrine service. Some hundreds of thousands of peasant soldiers, accustomed to the simplest life on their own farms, were collected together and left practically without sanitary discipline. The details can be filled in without my setting them forth in print. There is one fact, however, to be recorded of a pleasant character. In all investigations of the hospital services I never found a case of any malady arising from vice. There was also a complete absence of drunkenness. This might be ascribed to the want of means to obtain alcohol. But in Turkey there was an abundance of wines and spirits, and some beer in the captured villages and towns; it led, however, to no orgies.

Naturally, the Bulgarian peasant is wonderfully healthy. His food is rough whole-meal bread and cheese; his occasional luxuries, a dish of the sour milk which is so well known in London, a little alcohol on Sunday, some sweet stuff, and, rarely, grilled meat or meat soup with vegetables. It is possible to judge that his alimentary tract differs widely from that of the Western European. I should say he was almost immune from enteric, unless attacked by a very virulent infection. He can live on bread and water alone without serious inconvenience for lengthy periods. His blood is very pure, and ordinarily heals in a way that astonished the British surgeons.

Here, then, was the best of material from an army medical point of view. Given the roughest food, the simplest sanitary precautions, and ordinarily good field dressing, and the army would have marched without disease and the wounded would have dropped out of the firing line for a few days only. But there were no sanitary precautions; hence disease. The hospital service as regards the first aid in the field was pitiably deficient; hence serious and unnecessary losses of wounded. Without seeking to pile up a record of horrors, I cite a few individual instances to illustrate bad methods. At the front, punctured bayonet wounds were closely bandaged—in some cases stitched up—without provision for irrigation, without even proper cleansing. This led to gangrene and often caused the sacrifice of a life or of a limb (which, to these peasants, was almost as great a loss as that of life: their feeling against amputations was very strong, and if they understood that amputation was intended, they sometimes begged to be "killed instead"). Bullet wounds also were often plugged up on the field. When proper treatment was at last available, it was sometimes too late to avoid death or amputation. No treatment at all on the field would have been preferable to this well-intentioned but shocking ignorance.

Of the purely Bulgarian hospitals those at Kirk Kilisse are very deficient: at Philippopolis, however, there were excellent Bulgarian hospitals, and also at Sofia. The Russian hospital at Kirk Kilisse is very good. The British Red Cross Hospital, under Major E. T. F. Birrell, of the R.A.M.C., is excellently organised, has the fullest possible equipment, and tries to specialise in serious cases. It is subjected locally (as is the Russian hospital) to the criticism that by insisting on perfection of system it unduly restricts its salvage work: that, in short, it could deal with far more patients if it consented to more "rough-and-ready" methods. I record this criticism, and acknowledge that it is based on facts. Yet it may be urged on the other side that it was ultimately far more useful to have a model hospital to show how things should be done than to sacrifice that valuable lesson for the sake of striving to cope in rough-and-ready fashion with the flood of wounded. This hospital gives interesting proof that Great Britain is an Empire, not an island nation. I first encountered three of its doctors in a café. One was from the Mother Country, one from the West Indies, one an Australian friend, who set at once to talking of gum trees and of Melbourne University. Then a non-commissioned officer attached to the hospital—most of its Staff are army men—is a Canadian, who had had war experience in South Africa. His comments on the Bulgarian wounded are full of sympathy. "These chaps," he said, "take their gruel better even than the Tommies. The Tommy takes his all right, but he 'grouses' about it. These chaps never grumble. One of them had to have a very painful dressing. He winced a little. A comrade at once laughed at him. 'Ah,' he said, 'you learn new kinds of dancing here.'" Nurses endorse this evidence about the Bulgarian soldiers' patience, though one stated that she found the officers sometimes to be rather neurasthenic.

On the whole, the Bulgarian army is not strong on science. In spade work it was not good. I saw no perfect trenches—never a drained trench. Undrained trenches caused some increase of mortality and of sickness. It is uncomfortable to stay for days, or even hours, in a trench which the rain has partly filled with water. In no case that I saw were there trenches with overhead protection against howitzer fire. Except at the Chatalja lines and around Adrianople the trenches were, of course, intended to be of a very temporary use, and would naturally not be elaborate. Gun-pits and emplacements were usually fairly good. It was the custom to dig a pit, or to put up a little sod wall for the gun-limber (most of the artillery work was from concealed and prepared positions). At Chatalja the trenches were masked with the stalks of the Turkish tobacco plants—about the only instance I saw of masking. It was rare to see a trench zigzagged as a precaution against enfilading fire. The Turkish trenches I saw were hopelessly bad.

Sofia, December 6, 1912.—Sofia, in spite of the great victories which have been won, is neither joyous nor contented. The failure of the siege of Adrianople seems to rest heavy upon the people: and there are gloomy stories of the extent of the losses of the nation's manhood. So far no lists of killed and wounded have been published. "The Mass at St. Sofia," which was the battle-cry of the first days of the war, is clearly not a possibility now. Some mystery attaches to the movements of the king. It is said that he had made a vow that he would not return to Sofia until a victorious peace was signed. The embittered relations with the Greeks, the signs of disagreement with the Serbians, suggest gloomy possibilities of future troubles.

Belgrade, December 8, 1912.—With the exception of the army before Adrianople, the Serbians have finished their share of the war with Turkey. Belgrade is satisfied, but not over-elated. Across the Danube, a broad gloomy waste of dun waters under the winter mists, a division of the Austrian army is mobilised. There is a fear, almost an expectation, that Austria will make war. But there seems neither panic nor war-fever in the city.

Business is creeping back to the normal state. At the Ministry for War there are to be seen pathetic scenes as parents and other relatives seek tidings of the soldiers. An old father, himself a captain of reserves, hears that his only son, a lieutenant, has been killed, and bursts into tears and tells to all around his sorrow. But generally tragic news is received stoically. Amid the congratulations on the results of the Allies' efforts there is an under-current of resolution to make a better bargain with Bulgaria than the ante bellum partition treaty proposed. Reports of envious and rude treatment of the Serbian army before Adrianople are current in the street: and there is some talk of recalling the men. This is the irresponsible talk of men in the street only: the authorities are very correct in their attitude towards "our friend and ally," and express themselves as confident that Bulgaria of her own volition will suggest better terms for her partner in the war.

A Serbian politician, who patiently endures my bad French or makes a brave effort to talk in English, a tongue which he is learning to speak and can read quite well, politely excuses the English for being such bad linguists. "For you English who have all the poetry, all the romance, all the science, all the philosophy a man may want in your own language, it is not necessary to learn any other. For us in the Balkans, we must learn other languages or remain ignorant of much that goes on in the world."

In truth the Balkan peoples are astonishing linguists. It is not at all a rare thing to find that a man can speak Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, Turkish, and French. Often he adds either English or German to this list. Bulgarian and Serbian, of course, are but differing dialects of Russian—a Russian can make himself understood in both tongues though he knows only Russian. But the grammar of one differs from that of the other, and many of the words are different. The Balkan people who know Turkish know it usually in its colloquial and spoken form and not the literary language, which is very difficult to understand thoroughly because it is really a blending of three languages.