Inside The War Circle Surrounding Adrianople.

New York Times 100 years ago today, December 22, 1912:
Frederick Palmer, The New York Times Special Correspondent, Gives an Interesting Picture of What Is Going on Near the Besieged City, and Incidentally Tells the Woes of the War Correspondent in This Struggle.By Frederick Palmer.
Special Correspondent of the New York Times in the Balkan War.
    Mustapha Pasha, Nov. 19. WE are within 20 miles of Adrianople. Around Adrianople is a ring of Turkish guns and soldiers. Holding them in is a ring of Bulgarian guns and soldiers. There is still another ring. This extends some three miles around the little town of Mustapha Pasha, recently taken from the Turks and now headquarters of the Second Bulgarian Army. Here the correspondents are in a state of siege.
    We are not concerned with the western half of the circle. That is in the direction of Sofia, of Paris, and of New York. Any one who crosses the eastern half and is not in uniform and in good standing in the army is stopped by a soldier, who is particularly on the lookout, thanks to a general order, for men wearing the red armband of the press. The offender is turned over to an officer, who starts him back to Mustapha and sends another soldier with him to make sure that he does not lose his way.
    What is the use of staying? There is none, except that you have come 5,000 miles and you hate the thought of returning until you have at least witnessed a shell burst Then there is the promise of the Major who is chief of the censorship. He has given his word that if there is a general attack, or if Adrianople capitulates without a general attack, we shall have full opportunity for observation. Patience becomes more important to a "war-correspondent" than a good horse.
    I remain because I think that the Major will keep his promise. Meanwhile military secrecy prevents it; and the Major certainly knows how to maintain military secrecy. He is upstairs in the former Turkish City Hall with his aids, who know the different languages and who read all the European newspapers. Here, also, the General of the Bulgarian Army has his headquarters. In the yard a big tonneau car is in attendance to take him out to the front. But if you had letters from all the Premiers of Europe you might not accompany him — that is, if he were going very near Adrianople. Other automobiles are at the service of the staff. Someway or other they are kept in order despite the roads, which seem about the only thing Turkish which remains terrible.
    Twice a day we so to the censorate, asking for any news in general, or, particularly, about the nature of the heavy firing we heard last night, for example. Another sortie, you are told. If you get news from other sources and put it in a wire you are informed, perhaps, that it is not true, but you may send it if you like. Indeed, you may send all kinds of wild rumors. A great many are sent.
    The offered telegram is read by one of the assistant censors, who understands the language in which it is written. Then he takes it up the rickety old Turkish stairs and returns with what has not been eliminated stamped over with the censor's stamp. For a while, at least, it was not certain that this was the end of the blue penciling. All telegrams were forwarded on to the supreme censorship at Stara Zagora, where another hack might be taken at them. The correspondent who held a receipt for a certain number of words might not find that anything like that number appeared in his paper. In Servia this was altogether the rule. At Belgrade you were not even shown the first lesions. You paid for your wire, and it was censored after it was turned in, which must have led many a foreign editor to wonder if the sender had merely taken to the drink habit or had gone mad. When the Servian censor was asked if this were a commercially honest proceeding, he answered: "It is the regulation. We are at war."
    And it is Winter in the Balkans and the Maritza flows on under the old bridge built by Mustapha Pasha, for whom the town was named, in the time of Sultan Selim, for whom the great mosque in Adrianople was named. Mustapha built it strong for the passage of conquering armies against Christendom. So solid is its masonry that his people in their decadence could not destroy it with dynamite. Blessed by centuries of travelers under succeeding regimes which left more and more to fate and Allah, it furnished a crossing for the Bulgarian Army and its transport.

In a Bulgarian House.
    I know this bridge well; for Hare and I live over in Brooklyn, on the other side of the Maritza from the main town itself. The Mayor assigned us quarters with a Bulgarian family. Though the whitewashed exterior of their house is not much to look at, we are very comfortable. Once you enter you are on a kind of platform sprinkled with red sand, with two big living rooms on either side. Before you is a court, with shrubs and trees and some grapevines, inhabited by ducks and chickens and two sleek family cats, while at one side, pretty near the well, his porcine majesty is kept in a nicely thatched pen, with only his snout appearing on the lookout for any refuse coming his way.
    The living rooms continue on one side of the court, and at the end is the stable where our horses are kept. If it did not cost so much to feed our horses our expenses would be moderate. (Some correspondents have economized by feeding their horses bread instead of oats and hay.) We have roast mutton for dinner and cold mutton for luncheon every day. This is a land of sheep and wheat and oxen. The army has been fed by droves of sheep driven in its track. Long trains of oxcarts have carried the bread and the ammunition, each team driven by its owner, who was drafted into service at the same time as the other reservists. Certainly I should rather dine off the sheep every day than the oxen. They must be as tough as they are sage and traveled. They never need to have the mud cleaned off their legs; they are in no danger of scratches and sore backs, as pack ponies are.
    Step outside of your door and you are in the mud, thick, sticky mud, or syrupy or spongy mud, according to the state of the weather which is a plentiful quantity at this season of the year in this part of what was once a part of the Turkish Empire. Here the "snows of the Balkans" fall in the form of rain. Possibly one day of the week the sun makes a faint show. On the other six it is either overcast or misty or drizzling or raining hard. The thermometer averages about 48 Fahrenheit by day and drops five or ten degrees at night. Think of living in your apartment or your house at home without any heat at that temperature. Yet these people habitually do.
    If Bulgaria is anything it is an all-wool homespun country. The women still knit socks and weave by hand. Clad in his homespun and in sheepskins the Bulgarian lies down to sleep at night and the soldier lies down in his greatcoat. Thus an army of peasants in uniform are living in the field under conditions to which they are pretty well accustomed.

Mud Everywhere.
    The Maritza, the great Bulgarian river, from which the Bulgarians take their national hymn, "Shouma (roaring) Maritza," rises and falls barometrically with the rains. A regiment breaking into the hymn as they march gives an effect of irresistible roaring human strength. The sound is much like that of the river in flood, when it pours with a mighty voice through the arches of Mustapha's venerable bridge. Three days ago it was up to our doorsills and spread far out over the flats. Then the mud was syrupy through the narrow streets of the town; and then if you had no viewpoint except the town you might have thought that all the ox carts must be stalled in the slough.
    But "Fall rains" have no terror for Bulgarian Quartermasters in the Adrianople region. Rolling hills of hard pasture land shed the water like a duck's back. The carts move higher up away from the road, and there are no fences in their way. Encamped on the hills the soldiers are free of the mire, while we in Mustapha wallow in it. At intervals the mud is cleaned off the bridge and out of the main street and thrown into the Maritza. But the line of empty carts going in one direction and of loaded carts going in the other gradually drop a fresh supply from their tires.
    Yesterday I stopped a giant soldier who had a bandage around his hand.
    "Where were you fighting?" I asked through my interpreter.
    "Near Adrianople."
    "Attacking or in a trench?"
    "Attacking. We were lying down to fire. It came so quick, and my rifle rolled out of my hand."
    "Did the wound hurt much?"
    "Not much. Just a sting. It was a little sore the next day. Now it itches, and I know that it is getting well."
    "Are you going back to fight again?"
    "Of course. Very soon."
    Then an officer in passing told him not to talk to me wearing red arm-bands. I was simply interested in the man, and not in getting military information. However, this was an extreme case. To show that those who are doing their country's work as censors under orders are not altogether adamant and have a sense of humor, they have passed this article.
    In the Sofia papers Adrianople was falling every day. After Adrianople fell Constantinople was due to fall immediately. Yet the army staff promised nothing of the sort. It is not given to loquacity. The most it can do in the way of language over a victory is a five-line bulletin. But it had so accustomed the Sofia public to successes that not less than two represented the weekly programme.
    And Sofia is a long way from the front. At least I wanted to proceed as far in the track of the army as the other correspondents had been permitted to go. I had arrived the day after Gen. Fitcheff of the General Staff had sent a wire to the Ministry of War in Sofia saying that no more correspondents, artists, photographers, moving-picture men, or other civilians who might fall in this category would be received at army headquarters, because they had become an incumbrance to the staff. This may be called a fairly inclusive message. Not to intimate that it dealt with an equally important subject, it was almost as long as the official bulletin about the battle of Lüle Burgas.

Hotel Life in Sofia.
    It looked as if I should have to observe the campaign in the one hotel in Sofia which caters to foreigners who dwell north and west of the Alps. Here was a General in command as important in his way as Fitcheff himself, an efficient German porter who spoke So many languages that I should not have been surprised to have heard him greet a Greenlander with a "good day" in Eskimo.
    He was as busy as a brigade in pursuit of the enemy. He answered the telephone, he made change, he sold stamps, he addressed letters in Bulgarian, he brought in the baggage of guests arriving at 2 A.M. and took out the baggage for guests departing at 6 A.M. The descent of a hundred correspondents had not phazed him, nor had the Red Cross missions which succeeded the correspondents. He must have had some sleep, though when remains to me one of the military secrets of the war. He may have snatched a few seconds of slumber between telling a French correspondent the way to the Bureau of Censure and an English Red Cross doctor the way to the Ministry of War.
    Upstairs was a German chambermaid whose linguistic range was narrow but suited to the occasion. She knew the words for towel and bath in every tongue. She also took care after the first hegira of the correspondents in the track of the army that no correspondent or Red Cross doctor packed up any of the towels before departing to a region where towels might not be plentiful. A second factotum was a youth of 13. His idea was that all foreign dictionaries were comprised of a single word. Utter any word in any language and he ran for coffee. A third functionary was an elderly man who ran for the boy or the chambermaid or the porter when a head appeared from a room door with a protesting yell after an electric bell had been rung in vain, The indicator downstairs was always going. The urbane porter paid no more attention to it than to the twitter of the birds in the park. One part he refused to play was that of bellhop.
    "Everybody has gone to the war. We can get no help," said the managing director, who spent most of his time in an inner chamber making out the accounts. I am certain that there was no case of undercharging.
    Already with the battle of Lüle Burgas the decisive action of the war was over. There yet remained Adrianople, Tchatalja, and the business of cleaning up the remaining Turkish garrisons scattered over European Turkey and cut off from communication with Constantinople. However, I still hope to see something.
    "Impossible. You will not be allowed to go. It is orders," said the chief censor in Sofia, showing me the telegram from Gen. Fitcheff.
    Therefore I went to see the Minister President Guechof. He ought to have a little influence with the army as Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs. It was suggested that Americans who had traveled 5,000 miles might be made an exception to the edict without leaving the squad of daily arrivals from Europe any ground for complaint of favoritism. This included "Jimmy" Hare, who has photographed a number of wars, and naturally felt that this one would not be complete without his personal attention. Mr. Guechof saw that reason was with us. He telephoned to Gen. Fitcheff, with the result that we won the first step, for which we had worked as hard as if it guaranteed us seats among the immortals.
    Statesmanship turned us over to the army; and the initial army pass allowed us to go to Stara Zagora, where the polyglot brigade of correspondents in a town well inside the Bulgarian border had had their patience worn down to brittle irritability while the early battles were fought, with no information to work on except the brief official bulletins. They thought that Sofia was getting the complete details, and Sofia thought that they were. After Lüle Burgas they were sent on to Mustapha Pasha, just over the frontier, and within sound of the guns of Adrianople, where they complained that although they were nearer the army, they saw nothing, the bulletins were less frequent and later, and the telegraphic service was worse.

Disgruntled Correspondents.
    A number were once more in Stara Zagora when I arrived. They had been sent back from Mustapha for riding beyond the four-kilometer circle set as their bounds, in the hope of seeing a battle. They did not see the battle and were arrested. They were not happy, and they freely said so in all the languages of Europe, some using the most effective words of two or more languages to strengthen the emphasis of their views.
    The number or brilliance of its victories could not change their view of the Bulgarian army, which was a very low one. As a medium for making reputations for special envoys and winning congratulatory telegrams about "your great beat" it was not within the pale of a progressive civilization. Some of them said things to officers of the Bureau of Censure which in some countries I know might have resulted in a black eye as an accompaniment of the Red Armband of Discouragement which bore the correspondent's official number. Of course, the officers were not to blame. They were between the fat and the fire, mostly teachers and professors in reservists' uniforms, given exact orders from above and supposed to make their breasts an Arnold von Winckelried buffer to the bayonets of publicity, which, by the way, has precious little in common with military secrecy.
    In their baffled anger the correspondents swore that they would influence the public opinion of Europe against the Bulgar and for the Turk, who certainly needed their help at the time. The point which the higher officers who told the censors how to treat them missed was, that they might partially succeed. This in spite of their motley appearance when drawn up in company formation. Their war clothes had been made by tailors' apprentices — the tailors being away with the reserve — in Sofia in a hurry. Their spirit of corps was that of a Marathon free for all. Every one was a wild individualist who wanted to get his telegram to the office before the others and have something exclusive in that telegram which no other correspondent had.
    Among the lot were blackguards and adventurers and amateurs who had secured a credential only in order to see the war. An experienced correspondent could readily select the sheep from the goats, but an artillery expert could not, let alone a censor. At home sitting in an editorial office some of them counted for a good deal in the way of public opinion. Their friendship was worth having for any army. It was pretty humiliating for them to send stale news which might be thrown into the wastebasket or printed in the lower right-hand column next to advertising "on an inside page because we had paid for it and after all it is from our own man and we want it known that we have one at the front." In their improvised costumes — I counted no less than six different kinds of leggings on six different men — their dignity, as they besieged the censors' office, was about as impressive as that of a lot of applicants at a stage door for a chance to carry a spear.
    As for the staff, its attitude is much like that of a surgeon in the middle of a major operation who is interrupted with a telephonic inquiry as to how the patient is doing or with a request that he pose for a flashlight photograph. If it had boldly announced, "No correspondents received," no correspondent could have made any logical complaint. It was Bulgaria's war, not the correspondents'. But for a while the staff received all who could get cards from their legations; and, so far as known, the legations refused no one who had a passport and presented a sheet of paper written in ink from the office of any publication.
    "It was the great war of our history," said a Bulgarian officer. "We had to strike hard and swiftly, and win our advantage in a few weeks if we were to win it at all. We must win it with our own courage and skill. We had learned from experience that we could not expect help from Europe. But what we won we felt that Europe would allow us to keep. Therefore we could take no risk in safeguarding our plans."
    That is the all-inclusive military answer to the correspondents' complaints. Yet I could sympathize with their impatience when I had to wait at Stara Zagora for three days for a pass to go to Mustapha Pasha while Adrianople still continued to fall in every day's rumors. The business of a correspondent is no less to get to the front than for an army to make war. On the third day I received a slip of paper assigning me to the second army and a little red folder with a photograph pasted in it for identification. (There were no Bertillon measurements.) Hare and myself, the two American "exceptions" to the staff rule, who had campaigned together before, were at the railroad station for the 4:30 train to Mustapha Pasha. Of course this meant the first train on its way to Mustapha. In war time you get on a train and stay on a train until you arrive, and if you are any philosopher and have had any experience of war, you are thankful if it makes the journey in half of the usual time.
    We were still waiting at 11 in a pouring rain when the homeward-bound correspondents, after their three days' quarantine at Stara Zagora, with all their different kinds of gaiters and their heterogeneous baggage, climbed into the empty space of a boxcar of a long train of wounded — as many kinds of men, indeed, as there were European nations, and more kinds of equipment — all vanquished and broken after their gallant charge against the censors of little Bulgaria.
    Their friends had seen them gayly off from the home railway station, be it in Berlin, Paris, St. Petersburg, Rome, or London; they were primed with letters from home statesmen and Generals, which may or may not remain on file; and they were ambitious to bring home the reputation of a mighty war correspondent to the editorial room of The News, the Figaro, or The Tribuna. The results were a nightmare. But they had at least kept their promises to their wives and sweethearts by not allowing their dashing natures to take foolhardy risks on the firing line.
    The saddest of all were the photographic contingent, with the moving-picture men expressing the final word of misery. Naturally, the "movies" could not expect to make a reel of a real fight. They could not get near enough for that; and, alas! all the Bulgarians were so busy looking after the Turk that not even a half company could be induced to pose for a theatric imitation of the real thing. Unaccommodating and heartless army! Selfish and ill-mannered army! Meanwhile it is likely that night bayonet attacks lighted by the flashes of shells are being shown in New York on a background of New Jersey hills.
    " 'For the wounded'! We are on the right train," said a French correspondent who had not yet lost his sense of humor, as he got himself into a half-reclining position in his blanket on the floor of the boxcar among his fellows.
    Two of these long trains of wounded passed through the station before our own train came. The first was like the second. They were a story by themselves, and I will tell it in another article about the wounded, the patient, stolid wounded of this war. Meanwhile we are getting to the front, if that interests you at all. It interested Hare and myself a lot. Our train did not go to Mustapha Pasha, but only to the Junction of Nova Zagora. There we alighted at 2 in the morning. It was still raining.
    There was no waiting room; only a kind of café. In view of war's rushing trade, the proprietor had given up any attempt to keep his floor clean. When we asked if we might not sit up all night there, he paid that he was about to close up. Was there no hotel? None. However, our interpreter, who is always hearing rumors — including that of the fall of Adrianople — traced down one and found that there was fact — a hotel — at the end of it. We tramped through the mud in the dark, and then upstairs, where we threw ourselves on two objects having the form of beds. If we had seen them the night before we might not have slept. A generation of occupants in a state of continuous muddy weather must have occupied them with their boots on.
    "A peasants' hotel," the interpreter explained.
    It was still raining. We looked out at the muddy street throughout the morning, while downstairs old men and boys sang the Bulgarian national hymn, "Shuma Maritza," and beat the floor with their heels to the tune. At 4 o'clock in the afternoon we were told that we might expect a train soon, and we went over to the station. It was dark and still raining when we climbed into a carriage which did not start until after midnight. The next morning we heard the sound of guns, we saw the play of the searchlight from Adrianople rimming the hills like some movable artificial sun before the real sun came up. Adrianople had not yet fallen. Moreover, it was not raining, which is of itself a thing to be thankful for in the Balkans at this time of year.

At the Mustapha Pasha Station.
    A happy commanding officer would have been as out of keeping with the surroundings as a bandmaster without a gesture. He was sleepy-eyed. He was trying to answer a half dozen questions while he gave as many orders. He must visé all passes, he must know why a package for the General had not arrived. If he kept his temper all the while things would not move. The loss of it a few times a day when he went here and there with sharp objurgations was as the whip to the horses when the wagon is in a rut. Under his eye fell the two Americans and the three Britishers whose legation had succeeded in having them reinstated in favor after they had been sent to Stara Zagora for breaking bounds.
    "Which of you are photographers?" he demanded, somewhat fiercely. The photographers stepped forward none too briskly. After their identification they found that they were not to be shot. But they were warned that no photographs might be made of the station. How were we to get our baggage to town, which was four miles away? Nobody knew, least of all the Quartermaster commanding. It was evident that he did not care, either. Canvassing every driver of every animal and every cart we found that it was in the employ of the army. Yet we must not leave our baggage at the Station.
    I spied a big Bulgarian priest in the press. He had a fine, broad face, which radiated an Archbishop's beneficence. Already I had learned that a carriage and a good span of horses were his. When I said that I was from America he smiled and declared America a great country. He would take us to town, and then his carriage could return for our baggage. On the way he told us of the taking on the previous night of Papas Tepe, the 203-meter hill of this siege; and he said that it was only a question of two or three days before Adrianople would fall. Despite the assurance of returning correspondents at the station that I would see nothing, I determined to wait a while. Patience is as important to a correspondent these days as a good charger was in Archibald Forbes's. Tchatalja was already being fought by the main army. I had been five days in reaching Mustapha Pasha from Sofia. The distance is 150 miles. I might not be able to reach Tchatalja in a month. Any chance I had of witnessing a shell burst before returning must be around Adrianople.