Adrianople Turks Saved The Capital.

New York Times 100 years ago today, December 26, 1912:
Mr. Palmer Tells How Their Desperate Resistance Upset the Whole Bulgarian Advance.
SHOWED OLD-TIME SPIRIT
Forts Taken by Besiegers Were Recaptured and Held — Tales of Famine Not Borne Out.
By FREDERICK PALMER.
Special Correspondent of The New York Times in the Balkan War.
    The minarets of Sultan Selim! Needle-like, I have seen them rise over the indistinct mass of Adrianople from the distant hills, then as substantial columns from the nearby hills, and again so close from the shellproof of an advanced infantry position that I could make out the tilings on the dome of the great mosque itself. The simple grace of the minarets dominated town, and landscape, and siege. Weary drivers of the weary oxen, of the transport and still wearier artillerymen, bringing up additional guns through seas of mud, saw them for the first time as a token of defiance, of work unfinished, of battles yet to be fought, and of lives yet to be lost. Infantrymen in the advanced trenches saw them as the goal against a foe which had fallen back without any adequate rear-guard section, but which had begun to fight desperately under their shadows.
    That Turkish garrison, as it withdrew into the shelter of its forts, seemed to find something of the spirit of old Sultan Selim the Magnificent, for whom the mosque was named, but with this difference: Sultan Selim was not given to falling back on forts and minarets. He stormed forts: he went ahead to plant new minarets in the soil of Christendom.

Old Quality of Turk Aroused.
    From the first in this war, the Turk took the defensive; from the first he accepted it as his part and portion of the campaign in Bulgaria, where many Turks still live under Christian rule, we had seen the Terrible Turk, the great fighting man of the past, whose soul was supposed to be above lowly toil, as a hewer of wood and carrier of water. He did odd jobs in the absence of the Bulgarian at the front. The lion of the past had been trained to dog harness.
    All the early victories of the Bulgarian Army completed an impression of a onetime lordly race demoralized and enervated, who retained only the fatalism of "Kismet" in its lexicon. The warrior's cry, "For Allah!" was lost forever. But at Adrianople "For Allah! For the Minarets! For the Padishah!" rose again to the dignity which abandoned bravery always commands. The sheer, impetuous fearlessness of the Bulgarian, well drilled and coolly manipulated, was the first great revelation of the campaign, and the second was how, in the hour of hopelessness, his desperation aroused the old qualities of the Turk.
    Though we saw but little of the war — nothing until the last — among my memories of personal experiences I would not yield that of the minarets, of the daily trickle of wounded back from the front, the arrival of groups of prisoners, the many talks with officers and soldiers which the censors would not allow to pass, and the glimpses that we had of the actual workings of the siege. What is written here is uncensored, is written after the armistice is signed, and it can do no harm to the army which gave me a red arm band to wear and a set of multifarious regulations to obey. The world public has had news of a sort in meeting its demands for something recking from the field of action, but has not had much of the inside facts of the war. These could not be given when fighting was still in progress.

Centre of the Whole Situation.
    Every situation. every development in the war reverted to Adrianople. It was the nut to crack in the first plan of strategy of the campaign. It hovered over the First Army before Tchatalja as a nightmare. It stood in the way of the prompt supplies of bread and bullets for the First Army, it delayed the signing of the armistice for ten days; it has been the main subject of contention before the London Peace Conference; it was responsible for the treatment of the Military Attachés, who saw nothing of the war, and of the correspondents — who saw a little. Even our phlegmatic English-speaking censor assistant at Mustapha would lose his temper at the very suggestion of any peace terms with Adrianople still in Turkish possession.
    "We shall have a revolution if we don't get Adrianople," I have heard many officials say.
    "We shall not go home without Adrianople," the wounded soldiers returning from the front kept repeating.
    Such were the instructions which Dr. Daneff, the Elihu Root of the Balkans, took with him to London. Adrianople was graven on the minds of his countrymen. By diplomacy he must get a fortress which was not yet taken by force of arms. If he went home without it, he must face the same sort of unpopularity that Baron Komura, head of the Japanese Commissioners at Portsmouth, faced when he returned to Japan without any indemnity.
    The day that Komura and his party boarded the outward-going steamer at Yokohama, a foreign diplomatist said to him:
    "Yours is an honor that rarely comes to any foreign Minister. You wrote the ultimatum, and now you go to dictate the terms of peace."
    At the moment the Japanese were sending up daylight fireworks over the harbor in Komura's honor.
    "Yes, I am going," he said; "and like the rockets going up, I shall return like the rocket sticks."
    For Komura knew that he would not be able to get any indemnity. Japan must have peace, she had fought herself to a standstill, while all the world, in view of her previous victories, thought that she had only to press the button in order to win another victory.
    What did Daneff know as he journeyed Londonward, stopping at Bucharest to see the Rumanian statesmen, who must have "something" in the dismemberment of the Turkish corpse at Vienna, which must also have something, and at Berlin, which wanted to make sure that no one got anything which interfered with German interests? He must have known, as well as Komura knew, whether his rocket was going up to become a fixed star, or whether he was to come down with the stick. He must have known whether Turkey was to keep Adrianople or not. Its future was in his portfolio.

Turks with Backs to the Wall.
    Glance at a map and you will see that the whole success of the allies depended upon bottling up the Turk on the peninsula, so that all the other Turkish forces from Scutari to Adrianople, from Kumanova to Elassona, should be cut off from communication. The Greeks, Serbs, and Montenegrins were the backs. The Bulgarians undertook to buck the line.
    Bulgaria did not have to consider a reserve army. European public opinion and the jealousies of the Powers acted as efficient substitutes for one. Bulgarian military statesmanship understood that if Bulgaria were beaten the Powers would never permit Turkey to take an inch of Bulgarian soil. It was a case of "Heads I win, tails I don't loose."
    The Turks knew this, too. It was an old situation to them. Successful war meant no aggrandizement, only that no more territory would be taken from them. This is enough, after some generations, to breed the defensive instinct in any soldier. The Turk must have his back against the wall in order to fight well. His attitude is that of the mad bull against the toreador; and a very mad bull, we know, sometimes gets a horn into the toreador's anatomy and tosses him over the paling's. This happened to the Greeks at Janina. It also happened in a way at Adrianople.
    "Victory is to the heaviest battalions." Bonaparte said this, but after Caesar said it, and Caesar said it after some General of Egypt, Babylon or Ninevah. The allies knew that their success depended on speed in a Kali campaign — speed and the shock of masses pouring over the frontier. Theirs was a hundred-yard-dash chance. The Serbs at Kumanova, their critical battle, had odds of at least four to one. The Greeks, at first, never had less favorable odds, usually much higher. As for the Montenegrins, who had a small show, what they did in one way or another did not matter. They had work to keep them fully occupied, as it developed, in the siege of Scutari. The only one of the allies who disdained modern organization, their failure to make any headway again emphasizes the wide difference between a body of men with rifles and an actual army.

Dash of the Bulgarians.
    So the Bulgarians took the great and telling work of the war on their shoulders. You have only to know the Bulgarians to understand that this was inevitable. There is stubborn and aggressive character enough in Bulgaria to spare for all Southwestern Europe. Bulgaria made a hundred-yard dash with ox-cart transportation, and made it around an obstacle — Adrianople. The main railroad line and the great Constantinople highway ran by Adrianople. It was on the direct line of communication from the centre of the Bulgarian base to the centre of its objective. In the centre of Thrace, it was the only real fortress on the way to Constantinople. Kirk-Kilisseh, (or Losengrade, as the Bulgarians call it), despite their willingness to allow an impression of its formidability to be spread abroad, was not in any sense well fortified.
    Now, the first thing was to surround Adrianople; that is, to strike at it from all sides, as the key to the position. A branch of the main Sofia-Constantinople railroad line runs to Yamboli. With this as its base, Demetrieff's swung around Kirk-Kilisseh, which was taken in the first splendid ardor of the campaign. With its fall and one can see from a staff map that any battle line of defense with Adrianople as a part of it was impossible for a force of the numbers of the Turkish main army. Two or three hundred thousand men who were homogeneous might have held on, but not half that number when badly organised. Therefore, Nizam Pasha had to fall bark to a new line and leave Adrianople to care for itself.
    The next step was the decisive battle on the line from Lule Burgas to Bunnarhissar. There, again, superiority of numbers, as well as organization, counted; that superiority which makes a heavy turning movement possible while the enemy's front is engaged. In short, the Bulgarians had the Turks going. They gave the Turks no rest, and they had a sufficient numerical preponderance, in addition to the dependable courage of their infantry, to guarantee success.

Startling Courage of Invaders.
    So there was nothing wonderful about the strategy of the campaign, nothing new, nothing startling. The old principle of the swift turning movement had been applied to the situation in hand. By the flank the Japanese kept putting the Russians back from the Halu to Mukden. By the flank Grant put Lee back to Richmond. There was just one, and only one, startling feature in this war — Bulgarian courage. That enabled Demetrieff to gain at Kirk-Kilisseh and Lule Burgas in a hurry what with most armies would have required much more time. Demetrieff had willing flesh for a necessary sacrifice. He threw his infantry against frontal positions in a cloud, into shrapnel and automatic gun fire, without waiting to silence the enemy's batteries.
    The cry of "Fix bayonets!" became that of a military fanaticism. It was an army intoxicated, an army lifted out of human limitations by an idea which fed on its success.
    "Nothing can stop us," thought every Bulgarian soldier.
    "They come like a flood! Kismet!" thought the Turk.
    For psychology is still a factor in war. Victory is easier for the heavier battalions when in the full cry of the pack on the quarry's heels.
    Yet relatively few Bulgarian soldiers ever gave a Turk a bayonet thrust. The Turk was gone from most points of the position before the Bulgarian arrived, thanks to the fact that cold steel had been used at the critical points. Boer tactics, with thin lines of infantry, were proven a relic of a campaign against guerilla sharpshooters. They have nothing to do with the war of great masses of troops. Where big armies are concerned, enough troops must be thrown into critical positions with a rush to hold the position once it is taken, and that means slaughter, and willingness to suffer slaughter on the part of the soldiers, and readiness to order slaughter on the part of the General. Such willingness of the Bulgarian infantry, such readiness on the part of Demetrieff, account for the Bulgarian successes.

Planned to Storm Adrianople.
    And after Lule Burgas the next step would have seemed the storming of Adrianople. When peace negotiations should begin, it was a vital point in the Bulgarians' favor in the negotiations to have Adrianople in their possession. The Bulgarian treatment of the correspondents is one of the many indications that the Bulgarian staff did expect at one time to take Adrianople by storm.
    It was argued by serious correspondents who did not feel that they ought to waste their time or the money of their papers in idleness, that the Bulgarian Government ought not to have received any correspondents at all. But this was not logic to the Government. The press represented public opinion. It could serve a purpose, and all the college professors in the land who spoke any foreign language found their work in the common cause, no less than grandfather found his in driving an ox cart and the women in making bread. The plan was well thought out, and the regulations, which would fill a column of The New York Times, left nothing that occurred to officers or college professors out of consideration. No mention was to be made of the wounded, nor even of the weather if it were bad, for bad weather might tell the enemy that the roads were bad.
    But there was no limitation put on press agent enthusiasm. Then one correspondent turned in an elaborate account of a splendid Bulgarian charge which was entirely imaginary, the censor let it go.
    "But it is untrue," protested another correspondent.
    "It praises Bulgaria," answered the censor. "and so long as a correspondent and his paper wish to take the responsibility of it, why that is not our affair."
    "But it's hard on the fellows who have not got any imagination," the correspondent further protested. Then the censor offered him a story. It was about the Turks burning villages and massacring.
    "That is merely using another's imagination. I cannot report what I have not seen," said the captious correspondent.
    Then the censor smiled in a way that indicated that he gave up trying to assist so perverted a reportorial mind. While many an imaginary account, because it had the similitude of narrative which characterizes all convincing fiction, was hailed as real war correspondence, the Bulgarian staff, when it came to actual reports of actions (exclusive of massacres,) was scrupulously exact and exasperatingly late and brief. All praise by the press kept the ball of the prestige of victory rolling. It helped to convince the Powers and the Turk that the Bulgarian army was irresistible. The stage climax of the whole campaign would be the fall of Adrianople. Therefore were the correspondents moved to Mustapha Pasha just as Lule Burgas was being won; and Constantinople, being then supposedly defended only by a demoralized army which could not make a stand, every report from Mustapha Pasha, which showed that Adrianople was on the point of capitulation added to the stage effect of Bulgarian triumph.

Expected Victory at Tchatalja.
    As Demetrieff's Army drew near the Tchatalja lines, the mise en scène was complete; but Nizam Pasha, making use of the elapsed time to fortify the Tchatalja lines, rather than submit to the humiliating terms offered, bade the Bulgarian hosts "come on." Success had turned the heads even of the Bulgarian staff. They had begun to think that the old fighting quality was out of the Turk, and so willing was the Bulgarian infantry to undergo slaughter that it was only a case of reordering another charge of flesh against shrapnel and automatic gun fire, and the day was won.
    Alas, an old principle of war dealing with an impossibility of the same order as squaring the circle in mathematics, was now to bring generalship back from the clouds to solid earth.. You can take strong positions in front only with time by sapping and mining and all the weary operations of a siege, as the indomitable Grant learned by the failure of his first rush attack at Vicksburg and the indomitable Nogi learned by the failure of the first rush attack at Port Arthur. In a week, any army that has spades and a few of the resources of material which should be part of the storehouse at its base should make such a position as that of the series of rising hills back of Tchatalja fully tenable against any but siege attack, unless there was room for a flank attack.
    And the breadth of the position open to infantry approach in any attempt at storming was only sixteen miles, while from either sea side of the narrow strip of peninsula the Turkish Navy could bring into play more powerful guns than any Demetrieff had at his disposal. At the same time there is to be kept in view the generally accepted tenent that you must not send infantry against any well-entrenched position until its batteries are silenced or it is known that they can be kept under control during the infantry attack by a well concentrated fire of your own batteries.

Hail of Bullets Too Much.
    Demetrieff used his guns for a day in trying to develop the strength and location of the enemy's batteries. But the Turks would not be drawn. At last the tables were turned. With the Moslem was the satisfaction of a new confidence.
    Yet — "Guards, up and at them!"
    What the Bulgarian guns had failed to accomplish the sheer intrepidity of the private soldier would accomplish. So the Bulgarian infantry was sent forth against the batteries. It found them all right and the rapid fire guns, too, and concentrated hell generally.
    I talked with three soldiers wounded in one of these charges. Each illustrated by comparison with some object in the neighboring landscape how near he got to the first infantry trench before he fell. (Behind these, were other supporting trenches, of course.)
    "Many bullets?" I asked.
    "Whish, whish, whish, all about the ears!" one of the soldiers answered.
    "You could not take the position?"
    "No; too many bullets — just like hail. Lie as close as you could to the ground you were bound to be hit."
    "When you are well you will go back to fight again?"
    "Yes! it is our duty when our country calls us." What infantry! Trusting fearless, stubborn, yet a very tired infantry as all three of those wounded men were free to confess.
    It was at the three-quarters now of the Marathon which it had undertaken with the impetus of a hundred-yard dash. The Turks had their base of supplies close at their backs; the Bulgarian base was well away over muddy roads. Absence of sanitary equipment, sheer human exhaustion, and the clumsiness of the ox-transport for rapid operations, were telling. If there had been mulecarts and mulepacks and mounted infantry and ample artillery, then a real hundred-yard-dash at the close of the Marathon could have broken through to Constantinople before the Turks had time to reform and fortify.
    "A reconnoissance in force" was the Sofia description of the attempt on Tchatalja; and, of course, if this were not threat enough to force the Turks to terms, a real and decisive attack would be made. However, Demetrieff was franker. He said to the correspondents who were with his staff: "We thought that we could do it. We have gone far enough to know we can't. There is no use of sacrificing further lives in the attempt."

Adrianople a Natural Fortress.
    Meanwhile, Adrianople also was toiling. You may discuss as much as you please whether the original plan of the Bulgarian staff was to mask this fortress or to take it by storm, the fact remains that the only result was to mask it, and the lesson was that any garrison in the rear of an advancing army, though it is held securely in investment, remains a mighty force in being for the enemy's purpose.
    Nature meant Adrianople to be a fortress. Past it on the south flows the Maritza River, taking its origin in the Balkans and plowing its way across the alluvial lowlands of Thrace to the sea. A strong bridge crosses it on the line of the Constantinople highway at Mustapha
    Pasha, some twenty-five miles from Adrianople. This bridge, which is not far from the Bulgarian frontier, the Turks left intact, a characteristic piece of carelessness in the earlier part of the war in keeping with all other signs of Turkish demoralization and wrongheadedness, which might easily lead the Bulgarians to think that Adrianople would not resist a brilliant onslaught.
    Everywhere the Turks had made fatal blunders. At Kirk Kilisseh Turkish troops had spent the night firing on each other. Again, they had attempted practically no rearguard action at the Mustapha Bridge. The very fates seemed in favor of the Bulgarians. It was inconceivable that Turkish stupidity would not leave some opening by which the Bulgarians could turn the trick at Adrianople. Mustapha Pasha became the headquarters of the second Bulgarian army, under General Ivanoff, who was to have the thankless task of the operations around Adrianople, while easy glory was to be the fortune of Demetrieff who commanded the first army — until the first army had to take positions in front without any opportunity for flanking, which was the nature of Ivanoff's task from the start.
    The Maritza, which twists and turns among the hills, is joined to the south of Adrianople by the River Arda, whose valley is comparatively broad and sprinkled with villages and farms and orchards, which would furnish cover to the operations of advancing infantry. On the south side of the Maritza the railroad line follows the river pretty closely. On the north side is the Constantinople highway, which runs through the town. At the risk of repetition, let it be observed again how completely Adrianople lay astride the direct and natural line of communications for Demetrieff's army.

Failed to Find an Opening.
    The nearby ring of hills around Adrianople all had strong, permanent fortifications well laid out by foreign military engineers. Of course, each fortification was located with the object of commanding any guns which should be brought within range of the town itself. It was said that the execution of the plans of the fortification had been left to Turkish contractors, who had used mud in the place of cement; while there were gun positions without guns and guns without ammunition. Therein lay the opportunity of the well-informed commander to penetrate the circle and gain a foothold from which he could force the surrender of the garrison. Such an opening was selected on the north, I understand; but when it was tried out the result was disappointing. Meanwhile, topographically the obviously weak point of attack was from the Arda Valley, and once the Bulgarians had control of the bridge, from the suburb of Karagash into the city the trick was done. The bridge of Mustapha having been easy, why not this also?
    While the correspondents had been led to expect the immediate fall of Adrianople, they also heard any number of reports of the garrison's distress. Not a day but refugees came out with reports of the Turkish soldier growing emaciated on one biscuit a day, and the civil population, with their stores being requisitioned, gradually starving. And reports were all we had to work with. We were not allowed to go over the hills and see things for ourselves. But we did observe that the occasional group of Turkish prisoners looked fairly well fed, and even the refugees were not hollow-cheeked from famine.
    Obviously the first step after the victory of Kirk Kilisseh was to make sure that the Adrianople garrison was actually shut in. Even when Lule Burgras was being fought there were big gaps through which the garrison might have cut its way. The troops which had assisted in the surrounding movement, were moved on to reinforce the main army as rapidly as their places could be filled.

Serbs Took Up the Siege.
    With Kumanova won, the Serbs sent two divisions of 50,000 men to assist in the siege. We were not allowed to mention their presence. Even the photograph of a man in civilian clothes and a Serb military cap was not allowed to go. The Serbs had better transportation than the Bulgarians, including excellent pony carts, and they made a smarter appearance. They furnished the majority of the guns and howitzers which were of a calibre suited for siege operations. The rapidity with which the whole force was moved from Servia over the single line railway was amazing.
    When mention was made of any action in which the Serbs took part, the implication was that it was the work of the brave Bulgarians. The Servian officers accepted the situation with good nature. They showed themselves true allies. They were there for the cause, not for quarreling about the international distribution of glory. Yet it was evident when you talked with them that the Servian policy did not contemplate a terrible loss of life in making a general attack. Their divisions were acting only as a retaining force. This also goes to show that the original idea of storming must have been given up early in November, while every Bulgarian gun and soldier that could be spared was hurried to Demetrieff at Tchatalja. If Demetrieff won, there was no need of a general attack upon Adrianople. After all, including the Servians, there were only 90,000 men in the investment, and while the world was waiting for Adrianople to fall, the actual situation was that of a kind of checkmate.

Fort Taken and Retaken.
    It was Papastepe and Kartaltepe which awakened Ivanoff from his dream of a final brilliant stroke in keeping with the earlier ones of the war, just as Tchatalja brought Demetrieff down from the clouds of overconfidence. Papastepe is one of many hills in the narrowing rib of hills between the Arda and the Maritza, the 203 Meter Hill of the siege. With guns in position there, Adrianople would be under bombardment. The Bulgarians took it by sending in the usual cloud of infantry and losing about a thousand men. But the Turks took it back again. Four times, I am told, it changed hands in the course of those night actions which we observed only by the brilliant flashes in the sky above the hills.
    At least I know this, that it was still in Turkish hands ten days before the signing of the armistice, unless my informant, a Servian officer, was wrong on that red letter day when I actually got into a battery when it was firing and saw something of the positions at close quarters. The Servian officer was acting as my guide in a series of elaborate shell proofs which protected the advanced infantry position in the direction of Papastepe. We looked through a narrow slit in a heavy timbered roof from one of many chambers so fashioned that the damage done by an exploding shell would be localized, and back of them the regiment had made for themselves a set of rabbit warrens, where they sat high and dry and comfortable in the season of heavy rains, while the opposite slope of the valley was pitted with craters made by the Turkish shells passing overhead.
    "Yes! We could take Papastepe again," he said, "but we could not hold it. It is untenable under the hell of fire the Turks can pour upon it."

Besiegers Still Held Well Back.
    Looking away from the minarets and the city and toward the Arda valley, you realized, as your eye was able to follow the positions which the Bulgarians had actually occupied — in contrast with the reports of their advances — that at least no Bulgarian success had been unheralded. The censors had quite held their own with the press. One smiled as he thought of the correspondents who had considered themselves crafty in masking items of news between items of praise of Bulgarian courage. The second censorship in Sofia cut out the news and let the praise go. But before you criticise the morals of this, consider what would be the state of your own morals if you were making a fight for your house and garden against an ancient racial foe.
    We had heard not only of the besiegers' infantry fighting in the suburb of Karagash, but that Marash, the hill beyond Papastepe. was in our possession. Papastepe, let alone Marash, was not ours. Far up the valley in the mist was Kartaltepe, that other important hill which commanded the river bottom of the Arda. We took Kartaltepe in November and a month afterward, in one of their splendid sorties, the Turks, so far as I could learn, had taken it back; but found it untenable. Possibly because it was again ours and very evidently ours permanently, the Bulgarian censors had found it worth while to confound skepticism and persistent unfriendly rumors by allowing the correspondents to enter the promised land of their dreams, where for weeks, between the batteries on the hills and the infantry in the muddy river bottom of the Arda, hell had raged in the Winter rains.
    We had heard the pounding of the guns; seen the sky alight with flashes at night, and had hazarded conjectures and listened to the gossip of the street. Now we saw just where the antagonists stood after that terrible month. Far from our infantry being within striking distance of Karagash, it was engaging a line of Turkish infantry with a pretty steady rifle fire some seven miles from Karagash, in the neighborhood of the village of Dadzaras, which our guns from their battery positions on the west bank of the Arda had set in flames.

Romance of Detached Army.
    We did not know then, as we were to know a few days later, that beyond Kartaltepe in the direction of Delegatch was another force isolated from the Adrianople garrison and the main Turkish army, that of Taver Pasha with some 10,000 men, caught in the literal flood of that hundred-yard dash of the ready, informed, prepared aggressor against the unready enemy taken unawares and hastening reinforcements to the scattered garrisons and trying to adjust itself for the blow about to fall with the crash of a pile driver released from its clutch.
    But Taver Pasha's 10,000 were still a force in being, with guns and full equipment — a force in a box; a force in desperation. Do you see the Adrianople garrison (which was in touch by wireless with the Turkish main army) striking out to connect up with Taver Pasha? Do you see Taver Pasha trying out lines of least resistance in a savage effort to reach Adrianople or the main Turkish army? Something to stir the blood, this, in the way of a war drama, while not a single foreign corespondent, or attaché knew even of the existence of Taver Pasha's command until its surrender. The news of this was conveyed with the official assurance that now no other Turkish force except that of Adrianople remained in Thrace, when we had been under the impression for over a month that it was the only one! The censors did not smile as they posted the bulletin, but some of the correspondents smiled — at themselves.
    No, after the first rainbow hope of a successful general attack was over, Ivanoff was fully occupied in holding Adrianople safely in siege. That battery of old Krupps, which fired over the advanced Servian infantry position, while a battery of Creusots in turn fired over it, added their items of evidence to the same end. These Krupps were taken by the Russians at Plevna in the war of 1877-78, and given to the little army of the view nation of Bulgaria. Bulgarian recruits had dragged them through the muddy roads and over the pastures and beautifully emplaced them, and were working them against the enemy with boyish pride. But the world was thinking only of the modern Creusots and their brilliant showing.
    The Bulgarians almost proved that you can make bricks without straw. They won the war by the bravery of their self-confidence as well as by their courage. Adrianople, which was about to starve if it did not fall, had, I am convinced, two months' supplies when the armistice was signed. With the nineteen and twenty-year-old conscripts already on the way to the front, with a casualty list that is easily one-fifth of the whole army, there was no sign of weakening. The square chin of the stoical Bulgarian was as firmly set as ever. I wonder what would happen in Europe if it included in its borders a nation of 100,000,000 Bulgarians!