Besieging a City in Winter.

New York Times 100 years ago today, April 1, 1913:
    Of what may be called the intimate side of the war in the Balkans we are as yet almost uninformed. The professional observers of military operations have, indeed, written not a little about their own experiences and adventures, but they were kept so rigorously and so far away from the firing lines that then-reports did not enable us to see the course, as distinguished from the results, of the campaign. The ravages of the cholera among the Turks defending the Tchatalja forts were more than adequately described, but that was hardly a part of the war, though of course affecting it for the time being.
    Now, however, news is beginning to arrive about the siege and capture of Adrianople, and it proves to be much more informing as to the characteristics of the opposing forces than did the accounts of battles in the field further eastward — battles that showed only that these soldiers, like others, take no thought of their lives in the excitement of actual conflict. The investment of the sacred city called for other qualities.
    That the Turks would make an obstinate resistance was expected, as it was that the men in the allied armies would show courage in assault. What is surprising is that the Bulgarians and Servians should have been able to endure with patience the sufferings incidental to a siege conducted through all the months of a long and exceptionally severe Winter, and be ready at the end of it with the same energy and courage that was exhibited in the first weeks of the campaign. What their sufferings were can be imagined from yesterday's dispatches, which told of camping for endless months on a wind-swept plain, with the snow six feet deep, and the weather so cold that again and again sentries and men in the trenches were frozen to death.
    The conditions around Adrianople were evidently more terrible than the worst in the Crimean war, but perhaps they were not so hard to bear because they were the result of inevitable circumstance, and not, as in the other instance, largely the product of incompetence and neglect on the part of the officers and the home Governments. The Balkan peoples knew what they were fighting for and they wanted to fight, and though in a way it was a game of international politics in which their lives were sacrificed, at least it was their own game, with profit for themselves in victory it they survived to see it.