Suspense And Suffering In The Wake Of Balkan War.

New York Times 100 years ago today, January 5, 1913:
Frederick Palmer, New York Times Correspondent with the Bulgarian Army, Tells How Wives Are Kept in Ignorance of Their Husbands' Fate and of the Terrors of Transporting the Wounded Without AmbulancesBy Frederick Palmer.
    MADAME, how would you like to wait day in and day out, week in and week out, after a battle, without knowing whether your son, or brother, or husband were dead or alive? The imagination of a Torquemada could not invent a more cruel suspense than that which has hung over the homes of Bulgaria and Servia. While the people wait on the result of a talkative peace conference, they wait also on the lists of the dead and the wounded. In both countries the method was the same; but I speak of Bulgaria — for it was the Bulgarian Army to which I was attached. The Bulgarians suffered the heaviest losses. They had the largest army of any of the allies.
    With a population of only 4,000,000, the Bulgarians boasted that they had an army of 500,000 in the field. At the same ratio, this would give the United States an army of 12,000,000, Germany an army of 8,000,000, and New York City alone an army of about 600,000. However, many observers make 400,000 the highest figure, including all the Macedonian volunteers; and possibly 300,000 is nearer the truth. Seventy-five thousand were struck by bullets or shrapnel. That is, one man out of every four or five was hit within two months of fighting. History, so far as I know, records, since the days when no quarter was given, no such heavy percentage of loss in so short a time. Not less than 12,000, and probably 15,000, were killed in action or died of wounds. Add to this 5,000 who died from disease, and you have 20,000 breadwinners whose last service to their country has been performed.
    Twenty thousand is equal to the total force that we sent up San Juan Hill. It is larger than any single army that we had in the revolution against the mother country. It is more than one-fourth the number engaged on either side at Gettysburg. It represents a force large enough to run a pretty big railroad system; wage earners enough for a city of 70,000 or 100,000.
    There is not a man, woman, or child in all Bulgaria who has not had some relative killed; for these dead are scattered over all parts of the country and distributed through every class of society. The well-to-do merchant or professional man must serve under the law of conscription beside the peasant and the street cleaner. Bulgaria was one great family of common grief at the same time that it rejoiced over its victories.
    Officially, whenever a Turkish bullet went through a Bulgarian such was his flesh structure that it was supposed to be immediately self-healing. Far from telling the number of casualties, the correspondent was not expected to mention the wounded, though exceptions were made if you praised their behavior, which you were only too glad to do, for their conduct in the face of hardship deserved more praise than the generalship of the staff.
    The Bulgarian staff said that their first object was to win the war. When they had done that they would count the costs. The hardest kind of military reasoning thus prevailed. A poor country might better use its money in the wherewithal to beat the enemy than in comforts for the wounded. A dead man is out of the war. He is lost — but not a source of any expense, of any labor except that of making a grave to cover him. A man shot through the hand, or suffering any kind of a flesh wound, is bound to recover if he has a proper first-aid dressing; and soon he will be back on the firing line. But the badly wounded man is a real burden. There is no chance of his being of any further service in a short war. Do the best you can for him: but the price of a Creusot shell is more valuable to a nation in a hurry to win than a hospital tent, or a spring ambulance, if you must choose between the two.
    When our own country is conducting a campaign we publish a complete list of the killed and wounded at the earliest possible moment after a battle. All the immediate relatives of the dead and wounded receive prompt personal notification. From the Philippines we sent home to the relatives the bodies of their dead. When I mentioned this system to a Bulgarian, in order to get his comment, he answered: "That was a colonial campaign against guerrillas. How about your great civil war, when you had a big issue at stake?"
    Those veterans who have survived Shiloh can better understand conditions after a battle like Kirk-Kilisseh or Lule Burgas than any of our younger generation of soldiers. Much of the horror that shocks our modern sensitive minds would have been accepted as a matter of course in the civil war or the Crimea.
    In other wars the harvests of wounded have come at intervals of months. It was a long wait between Shiloh and Vicksburg, between Antietam and Fredericksburg. At least 60,000 of the Bulgarian casualties occurred within a space of three weeks.
    While the Bulgarians declared their loss as 15,000 at Lule Burgas, they did not say how much more than 15,000 it was. On all other occasions, "our losses were slight." The publication of some sort of figures about Lule Burgas was good policy. After this terrific battle, which was won with a groggy fighter pressing home an attack when his opponent was a little groggier than he, it was hardly wise to deny that at least some Bulgarians had been killed and wounded.
    The one object of every official statement was to affect the morale of the disorganized Turk. Inevitably a beaten army magnifies the strength and morale of the victor. The sheer clerical labor of the preparation of the list of killed and wounded at Lule Burgas would have been a big task for the staff at the front, when the army wanted every clerk to have a rifle rather than a pen in his hand. If the lists had been sent over the field wires, as is our custom, how would staff orders which fully occupied the wires ever have been transmitted?
    The Turkish General reading that list would have thought:
    "We got it pretty bad, but it looks as if the other fellow had been mussed up a little, too!"
    Throughout the Turkish ranks would have traveled the cheering news of the price that the victor had paid for his victory. On the contrary, the message that the Bulgarian staff wished to keep ringing in the ears of the Turkish Army was:
    "We are fresh. We have not suffered any great losses. We are irresistible. We are coming on again. Nothing can stop us!"
    Military secrecy, with its entail of mystery, only added to the effect. Concealment of losses was the prime factor in the plan. Therefore, the wives and mothers had to wait.
    "Do not mistake for brutality our attitude about the killed and wounded," said a Bulgarian officer. "Let us insist on that. It means mercy, kindness, and wisdom. If concealment of losses helped us to force an early peace, it meant that there would be fewer mothers and wives to grieve in the end. And merely giving out the list would not bring back the dead or heal any of the wounded. It only ended suspense for individuals. We are not thinking of individuals. We are thinking only of the national welfare."
    For three weeks the wounded measured an almost continuous stream of suffering humanity along the lines of transport. Those from one battle were no sooner on the way than those from another were starting. Hospitals and barracks in Philippopolis, Stara Zagora, and Sofia were soon crowded. Trains that went to the front with ammunition and supplies returned with wounded soldiers. At every station which was a hospital centre the cases that had grown serious with travel were taken off. There were no regular ambulance railroad cars that I saw, and the number of ambulance wagons was inadequate as New York's would be if the population of five or six blocks in the most crowded section were all victims of accident in a single day.
    Some of the wounded knew the luxury of the rough board seats of the ordinary third-class European passenger coach, which were mixed in the same train with freight cars. It was a case of making up a train with the rolling stock at hand and putting aboard as many as possible and getting the train under way — literal excursion conditions of a football game or an aviation meet of men exhausted with marching and feverish from their wounds. The crowd wants to get home with all speed, and the traffic directors have the same idea.
    As a rule, the passenger cars had no heat; the box cars never had any. It seemed to rain about half the time, a chilling, persistent Winter rain. Coming from the warmer regions of Thrace, as the trains rose with the grade up to the great Balkan tableland the thermometer often dropped below freezing. With few exceptions, the wounded had no blankets. They could depend only on their long, gray overcoats, which frequently were saturated with the blood from the wounds and the mud of the trenches or the tramped fields where the men had lain while engaging the enemy with rifle fire. Many had not changed their underclothes since the war began. Perhaps they were already drenched with rain at the time they were hit. If so, their clothes had to dry on their bodies. The ox-carts which brought the loaves of black bread to the front carried the men to the railroad terminus when they were unable to walk.
    It was not the pain of their wounds or the cold alone that made their condition pitiable, but the long delays before they could reach anything like rest and proper care. Trains with wounded from Lule Burgas were still on the way eight days after the battle. As many as 1,500 men were carried on a single train. At certain stations they received pannikins of water and quarter loaves. The native Red Cross sometimes supplied native cognac and hot tea. Rarely had the poor devils had any chance to wash since they were wounded. They had had no second dressings. The blood from their wounds, dried and grimy, still stained their first-aid bandages and their flesh. Unshaven faces and sunken eyes peered out from the windows of the third-class carriages or the doors of the box cars, in hunger and thirst unsatisfied.
    Train after train in the rain. Patches of red and white and mud-spattered, blood-stained, gray coats. Occasionally a dead form taken out of the straw on the bottom of a box car, where it had lain among the press which had found warmth from one another's bodies.
    "What would happen in our countries if our sensitive people witnessed such sights among their own wounded!" a thoughtful English correspondent remarked to me.
    "There would be something to pay in mine!" I answered impulsively.
    "Yet I don't know," he resumed. "If the Germans had landed at Dover I don't suppose that we should have any sentiment to spare. Our prayers would all be for strength to the living who could still fight." It is all in the point of view. We may complain of the consistency of the cream for our coffee one morning, and the next morning, after a railroad wreck, find ourselves very cheerful to get coffee without any cream. The Bulgarian soldiers accepted the conditions as a matter of course. Everybody in Bulgaria had been looking forward to this war for years, as one may count on a hospital operation. They knew that it was going to be terrible; that all classes of population must endure great suffering. They were as prepared for the suffering which came as one who goes to the operating table is for the consequent ether-nausea after returning to consciousness. He accepts the nausea philosophically because he is so glad to be alive.
    "We knew that there would be killed! We knew that there would be wounded!" the spirit of the land seemed to say; while in the peasant villages and cottages every woman was asking the question: "Is one of ours among them?"
    It seemed to me that the courage of the women left behind was greater than that of the men, with their faculties numbed by the weariness of marches, their minds preoccupied by the desperate gamble of charges in the face of whispering bullets. You saw the women standing at the stations, their peasant faces curiously stoical and blank with centuries of race-hatred. You heard of them telling their wounded husbands to get well quickly in order that they might the sooner return to the ranks.
    But even government orders, even a racial passion which made the emotions of a whole people abnormal, could not keep nature from breaking bounds. I saw a mother who had gone out of her head after watching trainload after trainload of wounded in the rain. She was hysterically demanding passage to the front. I saw another mother, cramped with rheumatism, scarcely able to get aboard the train, uttering prayers that her son, who was in the hospital at Sofia, might live until she should see him.
    The women who had heard that their menfolk were in some hospital made the railroad officials the most "trouble." They did not think that anybody could nurse their menfolk as well as they could. They wanted to look into the eyes of sons and husbands, and hear their voices, and take them the dainties that they liked. Of course, the women were told that they were foolish. If the Government said that they were, they knew that they must be. The shadow of Oriental custom lies pretty dense as yet over Southeastern Europe. There are no suffragettes in the Balkans. Woman is supposed to serve her lord and master cheerfully.
    The thing that did most to minimize the hardships was the joy of victory — for all the wounded had been hit with their faces to the enemy, and the enemy had had to fly. To peasants who had been drilled and drilled for an eventuality, but who were inexperienced in actual war, their wounds were the talisman of conquering manhood. A wound in war gives a kind of glamour to the commonest man. All stories of their exploits by the wounded must be accepted as true by the groups of women and children who listen.
    Thus far I have referred only to the wounded whom the swift examination of a surgeon considered able to bear the Journey to one of the hospitals in Stara Zagora, Philippopolis, or Sofia. Many of these had only a small puncture, the size of a lead pencil. The modern bullet is merciful, the Turkish Mauser being of a particularly small calibre. The Red Cross contingents who hurried from all parts of Europe did not find, as our own women's societies found at Montauk, that there were five Lady Bountifuls for every soldier, and supplies of dainties enough for every one to make a vigorous squad on the march bilious. It was the Crimea over again. There was no delay of Government red tape in making assignments in the crying emergency. On the very day of arrival the contingents were sent to places where a glut of work awaited them.
    In a professional sense, the fortunate ones were those who were sent on to Kirk-Kilisseh and Lule Burgas and Tchorlu, where they were in the very reek of the horror of the army's rear. There awaited them the cases which were unequal to a longer journey. And they will tell you that the modern shell is not merciful. As the horror of war seemed about to be minimized with the small calibre bullet, appears the rapid-fire field gun, which can pour out shells with a diabolical accuracy of concentration. The Bulgarians, doing everything by the main force of infantry courage, attacked positions without waiting to silence the enemy's batteries. When the lines halted or bunched, when they were stopped before a zone where there was a hail of bullets, then the Turkish field guns, poorly handled though they were, played havoc.
    A first-aid dressing hardly prevents infection in the gash from a shrapnel's jacket. Many lives were lost for want of dressing stations close to the field of action. The surgeons tell of many ghastly cases: of a man with jaws torn away, and of another with a great hole through the cheeks with the flesh of the corners of the mouth still intact, both of whom will live. They tell of — but these exhibits are enough to show what a splendid thing war is — to avoid. Civilization can get horrors enough in the way of factory accidents, railroad wrecks and tenement fires, without setting to work deliberately to produce them.
    Except in the cases of neglect, we can learn no more in military sanitation from this war than in the treatment of the wounded. By this I do not mean to imply that the Bulgarians are not cognizant of the value of proper sanitation. Around Adrianople, where the troops on the dry hills were comfortable and all the besieging force was settled in relatively stationary positions, the simpler rules were observed without, of course, the elaborate and expensive methods which our army in its mobilization at the time of the Madero revolution.
    Mustapha Pasha and other towns were cleaned up. They were put in better sanitary condition than they had ever been under Turkish rule. The wounded had not far to come for hospital treatment; yet I witnessed sights to make a doctor heartsick among the wounded who came trickling back over the hills or in ox-carts after the sorties.
    I recall a man who had a shell gash in the head. His face, unwashed of blood stains, was black, his cheeks were so swollen that there was only a small round opening between his lips through which his breath came in a kind of gasping whistle. Every jounce of that springless old ox-cart cost him excruciating pain. The man in the next cart, with a wounded arm, was cheerful enough, however.
    "The Turks ran and left a lot of dead on the field. They always run if we keep at them," he said.
    All accounts agree that with the main army the principles of sanitation were forgotten in the last stages of the war. It was a case of getting well soldiers and ammunition to the front for the final battle at Tchatalja — and "devil take the thought of anything else." An army of peasants in a country which is still backward in those present necessities of our physical existence — which have not been necessities with us for a century yet — went their peasant way, which is pretty fatal for a great mass of men in camp or on the march.
    Nothing can be so clean; so orderly, and so impressive in its orderliness and cleanliness as an army; nothing so filthy and disgusting, particularly in the mud. And this mass of men was without shelter, exhausted, two-thirds of their officers reservists, and their doctors relatively meagre in numbers and without authority.
    The dead were buried in long trenches, but not the dead oxen and horses. If either the Bulgarian or ther Turkish Army, with such limited sanitary measures, had been in such heat as that in which the allied forces made the march for the relief of the foreign legations in Pekín in that burning August of 1900, I think that, after the cholera, the typhus, and the dysentery got fairly under, way, it would not have been long before two armies of ghosts would have faced each other on the Tchatalja lines. For more reasons than one, then, the Bulgarians, taking into account the poverty of their resources, were wise in making a Winter campaign.
    Twelve or fifteen thousand dead Bulgarians alone! Counting all the Servians and the Turks who fell in battle and from disease, and you should at least multiply by five. Sixty thousand men in the prime of life! What length of road could they build in a month? How many acres could they have sown to wheat? All the slaughter might have been prevented if the great powers, acting as a unit had simply given the word for the Turk to get out of Europe! But they could not give any such word as a unit. Apparently they preferred to see 60,000 men killed in the Balkans to 200,000, or 300,000, perhaps 400,000 or 500,000, killed in a big European war.