The Balkan War

New York Times 100 years ago today, February 23, 1913:
A Correspondent's Interesting Adventures at the Front
THE BALKAN WAR. ADVENTURES OF WAR WITH CROSS AND CRESCENT.
By Philip Gibbs and Bernard Grant, Boston: Small, Maynard & Co. $1.20.

    It may have struck some newspaper readers that they have been singularly poorly informed of the latest developments of the renewed Balkan war. For the last two or three weeks the fighting, which may mean more to the future of Europe than even that which took place in the last months of the old year, has been in progress, yet practically nothing has been published about it. The account of their experiences at the front, written by two correspondents of English newspapers in the first stage of the conflict, gives the reason for this strange silence.
    Philip Gibbs was the special representative of The London Graphic and Daily Graphic with the Bulgarians, and Bernard Grant was sent by The London Daily Mirror to get photographs of the progress of the Turkish army. They were, it seemed, in a position to get information of what took place on both sides, and yet when all they can tell is summed up it amounts to very little. Mr. Gibbs found himself herded with other correspondents at Mustafa Pasha, within sound of the guns pounding Adrianople but getting within sight of the beleagured city only at the risk of his life or at any rate of his liberty. Mr. Grant was under almost as close a surveillance with the Turks and was able to see a little more of the war, merely because of the disorganization that overthrew the Turkish forces after the crushing defeat of Lule Burgas.
    So if any one turns to this book for information as to the course of the war they will find little to enlighten them, but if they ask an account of personal adventures in a land when every man has been forced into the ranks and every woman and child feels the true meaning of war, he will find much to enlighten him. It is a story told without any attempt at purple passages, but perhaps none the less effective for that.
    The one military lesson to be learned from the book is the supreme importance of preparation for war. The allies won because they had thought out every move in advance; the Turks were miserably routed because to their lack of organization was added all the evils of graft. The Bulgarians, though they depended on ox-wagons, were able to advance irresistibly and carry out their strategic scheme; they failed to drive their shaft home because at the supreme moment, when they had their enemies on the run, their transport trains were unequal to the task of pressing forward to Tchataldja. The Turks, supplied with wooden bullets, as Mr. Gibbs testifies from personal observation, and starved to death at the front, were utterly unable to cope with the fierce onslaughts of the Allies, and were driven like sheep before the bayonet charges, which, if they had been provided with a reasonable amount of ammunition would have meant the death of all the attacking party.
    So the actual fighting ended, as all the world knows, in the crumbling up of the once terrible Turks, but the interest of the story told by Mr. Gibbs and Mr. Grant lies rather in the extraordinary picture they draw of the desolation of modern war. They have not paused in the narrative of their own experiences to dwell on the misery around them; but the reader can picture for himself the horrors of Bulgaria, swept almost clean of men of fighting age, and of Turkey with a great army flying like sheep before an enemy it had the courage but not the ammunition or the food to resist. Some day or other the historian will tell what it meant to one nation to mobilize at a moment's notice its entire male population to leave for the front, from which even the news of death was never received; and for the other to be overrun first by the foe and then by the cholera, and Mr. Gibbs and Mr. Grant have supplied some of the materials from which his deductions will be drawn.
    In straightforward fashion they have told how the extraordinary conditions affected their personal fortunes, and have described its well the troubles of a newspaper correspondent under modern conditions of censorship. Their stories are full of interest, perhaps all the greater for their simplicity and evident sincerity; but their full meaning will only be understood by reflecting upon the horrors over which they pass so rapidly. A number of photographs illustrate the book, which, excellent as they are, make the reader regret the day when the war artist rather than the war photographer was in vogue.