The Russian Government looked on complacently—its plans were taking shape. In London and Paris curiosity was more in evidence than any emotion which might have been dictated by knowledge or foresight. In Vienna and Berlin the news was received with anger and astonishment; better things had been expected from King Ferdinand of Bulgaria. The stubborn fact remained, however, and called for immediate action. A German military mission had for some years directed the training of the Turkish army; the time had now come for that mission to direct Turkish strategy. Events had moved too quickly for the cynical, realistic policy of the Central Empires, but they could be turned to good account if, at the outset of the campaign, the Serbs were crushed. And so, while yielding ground in Thrace and Southern Macedonia, the Turks massed troops at Uskub, and made their plans for an offensive battle against the Serbs advancing southward into Kossovo.
My lot had been cast with the Serbian forces and, by great good fortune, I was able to join the First Army as it poured through the defiles of the Kara Dagh into the region called “Old Servia.” At Belgrade the talk had been of a war of liberation from economic thraldom, of a conflict between the Crescent and the Cross; with the armies it was otherwise. No thought of policy or secret treaties, or even of religion, confused the minds of Servia’s peasant soldiers; they marched like men called to fulfil their country’s destiny, singing the story of their race, making the mountains echo with their martial songs. There was no need to understand their language to catch the meaning of these singers; they sang of sorrow and tribulation, of centuries of helplessness in oppression, but the note of defiance was never absent; defeat was admitted but never despair. Something unconquerable was in their hearts, stirring their blood and nerving every muscle—the spirit of revenge. Bacon, in his famous essay, says: “The most tolerable sort of revenge is for those wrongs which there is no law to remedy.” The Serbs had five centuries of wrongs to avenge, and the Great Powers had produced no law as a remedy, except the law of force; by force these peasants, in their turn, meant to obtain “a kind of wild justice.”
For them, the plains of Kossovo were sacred; there had been made the last heroic stand against a cruel and implacable foe; there had occurred the dreadful rout, whose few survivors told the tale, at first in frightened whispers, then in songs—long, wailing songs, like dirges. Songs are the chronicles of Slavonic races, they pass into the nation’s ritual and permeate its life. Succeeding generations sang these songs of Kossovo, and so the legend grew, and spread to all the Balkan lands; each humble home, even in far Rumania, had heard of Lazar, a Tsar who led his people and gave his life up for them on a battlefield known as “the Field of Blackbirds.” When princes perish thus, servility conspires with pity to make them martyrs. The dead Tsar led his people still, and far more potently in death than life; his legendary form, looming gigantic through the mists of time, beckoned them, irresistibly, to blood-soaked fields, where, once again, the Turks and Serbs would meet in mortal strife.
The First Servian Army, under the command of the Crown Prince Alexander, had crossed the old Serbo-Turkish frontier near Vranje. After two exhausting marches in enemy territory, the leading units, emerging from the mountains, saw in front of them an undulating plain; in the distance some minarets, surmounting a collection of whitewashed houses, stood out against the sky. The Serbs were in sight of Kumanovo, a town situated 15 miles north-east of Uskub, on the western fringe of a vast stretch of pasture land bearing the local name of “Ovce Polje” or “Sheepfield.” Running across the plain, from east to west, a line of trenches was clearly visible; on the railway track from Salonica many trains were standing, from which men descended and, after forming into groups, moved outwards to the trenches. It required no special military acumen to appreciate the fact that the Turks intended to make a stand at Kumanovo. The battlefield was flanked on the west by a railway and on the east by a small river, an affluent of the Vardar; to the north lay mountains, to the south the plain extended as far as the eye could reach.
Night was falling, in a hurricane of wind and rain, when the Servian advanced guards reached the northern limit of the plain and began to place their outposts. During the day there had been skirmishes with hostile patrols; every one was soaked to the skin, and supplies were a march behind. I must have seen several hundred infantry soldiers take up their appointed positions in a cluster of stony kopjes, which marked the extreme left of the Servian outpost line, and not a murmur of complaint or grumbling reached my ears. Sometimes men passed who muttered to themselves. I asked a Servian staff officer what they were saying; he replied simply, “Their prayers.” And on this note began their vigil.
All through the night the rain-sodden, wearied troops were arriving at their bivouacs. The front taken up was unduly extended and, notably on the extreme left, there were many gaps. The dawn revealed a scene of desolation and considerable disorder. Soon after sunrise the Turks attacked.
Throughout the first day of battle the Turks pursued offensive tactics, attempting repeatedly to turn the Servian left. More than once the situation on this flank became critical. Reinforcements arrived in driblets and in an exhausted condition; they were at once absorbed in the fighting line, without regard for any other consideration except the saving of a local situation. Of higher leading there was little, it was just a soldier’s battle—hard, brutal fighting, stubborn valour in the front line, chaotic confusion behind.
Late in the evening I saw a small party of horsemen moving rapidly from battalion to battalion immediately behind the front line. Riding by himself, a little in advance of the others, was a young man with a thin, sallow face, wearing pince-nez. He stopped frequently and spoke with the officers and men. When he had passed on, they followed him with their eyes and seemed to move more briskly about their business. To these rough men from all parts of Servia this brief visit had a special interest; the young man who rode alone and in front was the Crown Prince Alexander, and most of them were seeing him for the first time.
In more senses than one the Crown Prince was alone that day. His exalted rank had conferred on him the command of an army; his extreme youth made it hard for him to impose his will on a staff of military experts. At the headquarters of the First Servian Army there was the usual percentage of senior officers whose peace training had taken from them any human or imaginative qualities they may ever have possessed; who regarded war as a science, not a drama; men without elasticity of mind, eternally seeking an analogy between their own situation, at any given moment, and some vaguely similar situation in the career of their favourite strategist (usually von Moltke). Since in war, at least, analogies are never perfect, such men lack quick decision and, almost invariably, they take the line of least resistance.
During the afternoon preceding the evening visit of the Crown Prince to his troops, several influential and elderly officers had been advising retreat; they had studied the map carefully, and in their opinion no other course was left to the Commander of the First Army. All the text books confirmed this view, and in these books were embodied the great principles of strategy. They pointed out to Prince Alexander that he owed it to himself and his country to retire, as soon as possible, to a new position and fight again another day. They were absolutely sincere and were convinced that, since the Serbian left was in process of being turned, all the military experts would approve of what might, euphemistically, be termed “a strategic retirement.”