Saw The Tide Turn With Sultan's Army.

New York Times 100 years ago today, November 2, 1912:
Correspondents in Auto Witnessed Dash of Reinforcements to Meet Flank Attack.
TURKS HAD PREVIOUSLY WON
Officer Told How Bulgarians Had Been Driven Across a River on the Northern Front.
By WARD PRICE.
(First Correspondent at the Front with the Turkish Army.)
Special Cable to The New York Times. Dispatch to The London Dally Mail.
    FOUR MILES SOUTHEAST OF LULE-BURGAS, Wednesday, Oct. 30.— It is noon, and the bang and boom of field guns, near and distant, and the manifold rattle of a fierce rifle fire are the sounds among which this telegram is written.
    I am at the top of a gentle slope on a broad, bare, rolling plain, which reaches on either side to the blue distance — a plain where the battle of Lule-Burgas is being fought before my eyes.
    This is the first battle of the war on the Bulgarian frontier to be watched by a correspondent on the Turkish side, and the fact that one colleague and myself are here alone is because we are the only correspondents fortunate enough to possess a motor car, which has petrol sufficient for the seventy-two-mile return journey from our base, and also capable of making its way through the soft mud of the track over the rough grass of the plain which serves as a road.
    The story of the reasons that kept us from the front for the last few weeks is a long one, but at last we find ourselves, two solitary foreigners, alone at a viewpoint which is the focus of the whole of the fighting on the Turkish left flank.

A View of the Battlefield.
    What lies before our eyes is this: We are standing by our car in the middle of an absolutely bare grass plain, with not so much as a bush to break its dull green monotony. To the northwest, straight ahead toward the town of Lule Burgas, one looks across three shallow waves of land before a blue ridge, three miles distant, climbs up against the sky to close the vista. Above this ridge and on the slope where the Turkish supports are sheltered, the Bulgarians' shrapnel is bursting in white balloons of lingering smoke.
    Follow the line of this first little valley in front out to the left, and you will see plainly through your glasses the iron railway bridge over which passes the line from Constantinople to Adrianople. That bridge marks the extreme left of the Turkish front, which stretches away northeast for thirty miles in an almost continuous battle line to Viza.
    The Bulgarians are making a fierce effort to turn this left flank, in full sight of which we are standing.
    That railway bridge over the river is the key to this flank engagement. Look closely through the telescope. The sun is so warm that heated air trickles across the field of view of the glass like running water.

Turkish Heads in the Trenches.
    You can just make out the long line of Turkish heads in the trenches at this end of the bridge. Quite plainly you see the firing line strung out on the shoulder of that slope of plowed land, lying nearer to us.
    There are pack-horses with boxes of ammunition grazing in the sheltered valley on this side.
    Strain your eye through the haze right beyond, and on the other side of the river past the blue-gray railway bridge are two black points, moving across a yellow path of maize stubble.
    Two men on horseback? No, they are splitting up. They are four men on horseback — Bulgarians. How slowly they move. They must be in the full field of fire of those Turks lining the ridge of plowed land. Now they are gone again.
    That soft, black column of smoke westward along the line from the bridge marks where the Lule-Burgas railway station is burning. It was set on fire by shells probably.

Infantry Slouch Along.
    It is now 1 o'clock. The infantry that were lying on the reverse of the slope next to the long billow of the plain have been closed up and are moving along the valley toward the bridge on the left flank of the Bulgarian attack, which is evidently developing in the valley beyond, out of our sight. They just saunter slouchingly along in no sort of formation, hands in pockets, and rifles slung on shoulders, but they take care to keep under cover of the slope of the hill, and they get to their position, which are the main things.
    They do not get there without loss, though. They must have had to cross a neck of skyline, which we from our greater height cannot distinguish. There is one of them down. He just lies there quite plain in the circle of the telescope — a shapeless green khaki lump on the bare hillside. Now another is wounded, evidently, for he lies stretched out flat, and three or four little khaki figures come and kneel in the road beside him.
    Two Turkish guns on the same slope where the infantry were to have been have slewed around to the left, too, and are firing very rapidly. First there is a momentary patch of golden flame, then a sharp stab of a report comes up to us. The rifle rattle now is loud and far-spread. The Bulgars are attacking that left flank furiously.
    Rest the telescope on the side of the car and sweep it around to the right. The most conspicuous features are two tumuli (hillocks) about three miles away on the crest of a low swell of ground. There are troops sheltering on this side of them.
    Officers, riding by us on their way to the Turkish general reserve, three miles back, say that Tourgout Shevket Pasha is the commander of the army corps there, with Prince Aziz as the divisional commander.
    One officer says that Abdullah Pasha, the Commander in Chief, is at Amurgza, which must be near the tumuli we see. The army corps, engaged at this end of the Turkish front, are the First, Second, and Fourth Corps, and one division of reserves. There is a cavalry division in reserve, as we see later.

Bulgarians' Lively Attack.
    The Bulgarians are evidently attacking vigorously near those tumult, too, for supports start going up to the skyline.
    It is now 2 o'clock, and we have sixty-five miles of atrocious road to cover before reaching Rodosto, from which port this dispatch must be sent to Constantinople by steamer, as it is impossible to telegraph from the front. "We are drawing off a little more," says an officer riding by, "but further to the right we are advancing rapidly. Yesterday we drove the Bulgarians pell-mell across the river Ajali up there to the north."

Crack Cavalry to the Rescue.
    We start back toward the rear, and have crossed the first ridge when we see a whole division of cavalry and several battalions of infantry coming along from the right flank to reinforce the left.
    A regiment of lancers leads the way. They look like the Constantinople lancers, and suddenly there is Selim Bey, the young, fair-haired Lieutenant I had often met in Constantinople. But this stubble-bearded Selim on a spirited black horse is scarcely to be known for the well-groomed young cavalry "blood" with whom I was sitting at table a fortnight ago. He takes a cigar with almost a shout of joy.
    "I assure you," he says, "cigars are a detail in which our equipment has been lacking for a long time."
    "We are going to reinforce the left," he answers to my question, and off they go at a trot, perhaps to sacrifice themselves in a way that has always been the pride of cavalry.

By Auto to the Battlefield.
    But though we were on the battlefield for four hours, that by no means made up our whole experiences of the day. Overnight we fixed the time for Starting from Tchorlu for 5 A.M. I was up all night writing, for the uncertainty of communications is such that one has to send each message by as many routes as possible, in the hope that one may take it safely.
    At 4:30 A.M. I awoke the sleeping servants and went around to the Turkish inn where our car was stabled. The steel blue of the moonlight night was as yet undimmed by the dawn. In the dark, earth-floored, low-roofed stable where our car was huddled in with incongruous bullock carts and a score of mistrustful horses, a small group of syces, the native grooms, waked from their sleep on the bare ground and gathered around with lanterns to watch the mysterious rites of preparing the car for the road.
    We backed out into the narrow, chaotically-cobbled street in the milky blue light of the first dawn, and were off through the crooked little town, past the startled sentries of the night. The light changed to a dove gray on the naked hillsides round the town, and the dying campfires glowed red. The thick white hoar frost was broken only where the warmth of the sleeping draught-oxen had thawed out a black patch. The sky lightened at first to a silver gray, then to a ghostly white, as we crossed the railway and started with thirty-five miles of stark, empty wilderness to cross to reach the battlefield.
    Until the sun loosened the frozen mud the going was rough but firm. The road, which, by the way, is marked on the Austrian General Staff maps as "a first class metalled road," is nothing but a muddy, deep-rutted track of the consistency of chocolate blanc mange, scored across the plain by countless bullock carts. Where any attempt has been made at road-building, such as at some of the prehistoric bridges, the result has been an engineering crime, apparently perpetrated by preparing a layer of rich mud and sprinkling huge unhewn blocks of granite on to it.
    If our car had not been a very light one it would certainly have taken root there. As it was, we had often to unload it and push from behind, wading boot-high. Several flocks of sheep, taken, said their guard, from the Bulgarians, and an army service corps wagon train lumbering slowly to the front, were all the traffic we passed until we began to meet the wounded of yesterday's battle.

Meet the Turkish Wounded.
    First they were in straggling groups of three or four. Most of them were hit in the arm or had slight head wounds. These were moving slowly but steadily on their thirty-mile walk to Tchorlu. But soon came long columns of bullock-drawn tumbrils full of them.
    The wreckage of an army is not a pleasant sight. There were bandaged heads with blood staining through the lint. A yellow old man, astride a little barebacked donkey, was trailing one bare foot wrapped in a crimsoned rag. A young fellow on a horse was held up by two other cripples on either side, his head drooping on his right shoulder with an unnatural twist.
    It was almost uncanny to think that it was the agreeable Bulgarians with whom I had been staying six weeks ago, who had smashed and broken the sturdy Turkish peasants into these faint, limp, drooping-eyed wrecks who lay on the floor of the carts just as they happened to fall when lifted in — and all in the cause of the progressive decentralization in Macedonia.
    The fortitude of these Turks was wonderful. I saw two men with bullet wounds in their legs who had limped thirty-five miles, one, groaning at every step, being helped by his wounded friend, the other alone using the rifles as crutches.
    We saw Tchorlu on a far hill by the light of a pure sunset of flaming gold that filled the hollows of the plain with Violet shadow, while above the silver evening star shone in a pale green sky. The grim warfare of men could not mar the peace of heaven.