Spartan Heroism Of Bulgar Wounded.

New York Times 100 years ago today, November 24, 1912:
Even While Being Jolted In Ox-Wagons on Terrible Roads They Do Not Complain.
LAY DAYS ON BATTLEFIELDS
Foreign Doctors and Nurses Doing Splendid Work — Bulgarian Women of Every Class Aiding.
Special Correspondence The New York Times.
    LONDON, Nov. 8.— A correspondent of The Times at Philippopolis has sent an interesting account of the Bulgarian organization for the care of the wounded. The trained nurses, he says, are admirably aided by hundreds of Bulgarian women of every rank and station.
    Most of the wounded make the long journey from the front in ox-wagons, slow-moving and springless, jolting and reeling over roads that are unimaginable by English people. In wet weather they are seas of liquid mud, often axle-deep, which hide cruel hollows and hillocks in the track; in dry weather they are wide, dusty paths broken by innumerable gullies and hummocks and deep-worn wheel tracks.
    "I have seen," says the correspondent, "miles of such so-called road that would have made an admirable sporting golf course — one long vista of bunkers. I jolted several miles over such a road in a Red Cross wagon a few days ago, and my bones have ached ever since. Very many of the less badly hurt, those with cuts and shrapnel wounds about the hands and arms, trudge along beside the wagons in which their sorely wounded comrades lie on a bed of straw. One never hears a groan or a murmur. Those peasants have much of the stoicism of the East. Only as the wagons come into the broad valley of the Maritza the parched men, seeming to smell the water, raise their heads, a light comes into their lustreless eyes, and a pathetic ejaculation brings to the wagon side some good Samaritan with a big pannikin of yellow water.
    "But the long jolting journey to the hospitals is, alas! not the worst part of their sufferings. After several battles the wounded have lain on the bare field where they fell through two and three hot days and bitterly cold nights; and the worst sights in the hospitals are the rows of poor fellows with swollen, gangrened limbs for whom there is no hope of recovery under the best of skill and care.
    "I saw in one hospital near the front — I wish I could forget the sight — a young Bulgarian officer whose body, head, arms, and legs were torn and gouged with thirteen separate wounds, shrapnel and bullet, and he was dying of — exposure. He had lain thus wounded on the battlefield for three nights and two days, yet so strong was his physique that but for the exposure and the resulting gangrene and pneumonia, the doctors said he surely would have recovered. And his mother sat at the foot of the bed, motionless and dry-eyed, dumb with grief, watching the nurses tenderly dressing her son's awful wounds. They told me that she was a widow, and that she had two other sons at the front.
    "That the fighting has been fierce was evident enough. Every imaginable kind of wound was under treatment; bullet and shell and bayonet thrust and sword hack. And not all the bullet wounds were of the clean kind made by the nickel bullet. I saw, under the X-rays, fractured shoulders in which a great splash of lead was still embedded, and limbs from which great pieces had been torn. But all was quiet, and even cheerful. I saw one great bearded Bulgarian, with a bullet in his head, lying on the floor between two beds in one of which was a Turk and in the other a Pomak. He beckoned to the doctor and muttered something. 'He wants to know when he will be able to go back,' said the doctor. 'He has a wounded son in the next ward, but he does not.ask about him.' On an operating table I saw a young Servian, half sitting up and watching curiously the surgeon, who was shaving his leg, a ghastly, gangrened, almost ' shapeless limb, before amputating it close up to the thigh. 'Hopeless, I'm afraid,' said the doctor; but he man only asked for a cigarette.
    "More than a third of the wounded men in this big hospital were Turks. They say that the Turks left most of their wounded on the field. They also say that they left few of the Bulgarian wounded. I heard horrid stories of mutilation and murder, but one hears so many tales of horror in a war that one should only tell of things seen. I saw a chubby little Bulgarian baby, scarcely three years of age, which the soldiers said they found in a village near Kirk-Kilisseh crying by the side of its murdered mother. One of the nurses, who lost a 17-year-old son at Kirk-Kilisseh, was going to adopt it.
    "No praise can be too high for the foreign doctors and nurses and for the Bulgarian women of all degrees who are working night and day, often in circumstances that must be trying beyond description. What must be the emotions of mothers and wives and daughters and sisters tending the terrible wreckage of friend and foe while ignorant as to the welfare or even the whereabouts of their own loved ones! And as I write this I hear from the street below the lusty singing of several thousand more Macedonian and Armenian men and Bulgarian boys on their way to the front."