Bulgaria

by Frank Fox

The Bulgarians had no effective siege-train. A press photographer at Mustapha Pasha was very much annoyed because photographs he had taken of guns passing through the towns were not allowed to be sent through to his paper. He sent a humorous message to his editor, that he could not send photographs of guns, "it being a military secret that the Bulgarians had any guns." But the reason the Bulgarians did not want photographs taken was that these guns were practically useless for the purpose for which they were intended.

The main excellence of the Bulgarian army was its infantry, which was very steady under punishment, admirably disciplined, perfect in courage, and which had, I think, that supreme merit in infantry, that it always wanted to get to work with the bayonet. The Bulgarian soldiers had a joke among themselves. The order for "Bayonets forward!" was, as near as I could get it, "Nepret nanochi." Arguing by similarity of sound, the Bulgarian soldier affected to believe it meant "Spit five men on your bayonet." It was the common camp saying that it was the duty of the infantryman to impale five Turks on his bayonet, to show that he had conducted himself well. The Bulgarian infantrymen had devised a little "jim" in regard to bayonet work, which I had not heard of being used in war before. When they were in the trenches, and the order was expected to fix bayonets, they had a habit of fixing them, or rather pretending to, with a tremendous rattle, on which signal the Turks would often leave their trenches and run, expecting the bayonet charge; but the Bulgarians still stuck to their trenches, and got in another volley.

The artillery work of the Bulgarians was very good indeed; they had an excellent field-piece, practically the same field-piece as the French army. Their work was very fine with regard to aim and to the bursting of shrapnel, and their firing from concealed positions was also good. But I never saw enterprising work on their part; I never saw them go into the open, except during a brief time at Chatalja. They seemed to dig themselves in behind the crest of a hill, where they could fire, unobserved by the enemy.

Now, with regard to the conduct of the troops. Much has been said about outrages in this war. I believe that in Macedonia, where irregular troops were at work, outrages were frequent on both sides; but in my observation of the main army there was a singular lack of any excess. The war, as I saw it, was carried out by the Bulgarians under the most humane possible conditions. At Chundra Bridge I was walking across country, and I had separated myself from my cart. I arrived at the bridge at eight o'clock at night, and found a vedette on guard. They took me for a Turk. I had on English civilian green puttees, and green was the colour of the Turks. It was a cold night, and I wished to take refuge at the camp fire, waiting for my cart to come. Though they thought I was a Turk, they allowed me to stay at their camp fire for two hours. Then an officer who could speak French appeared, and I was safe; the men attempted in no way to molest me during those two hours. They made signs as of cutting throats, and so on, but they were doing it humorously, and they showed no intention to cut mine. Yet I was there irregularly, and I could not explain to them how I came to be there.

The extraordinary simplicity of the commissariat helped the Bulgarian generals a great deal. The men had bread and cheese, sometimes even bread alone; and that was accounted a satisfactory ration. When meat and other things could be obtained, they were obtained; but there were long periods when the Bulgarian soldier had nothing but bread and water. (The water, unfortunately, he took wherever he could get it, by the side of his route at any stream he could find. There was no attempt to ensure a pure water supply for the army.) I do not think that without the simplicity of commissariat it would have been possible for the Bulgarian forces to have got as far as they did. There was an entire absence of tinned foods. If you travelled in the trail of the Bulgarian army, you found it impossible to imagine that an army had passed that way; because there was none of the litter which is usually left by an army. It was not that they cleared away their rubbish with them; it simply did not exist. Their bread and cheese seemed to be a good fighting diet.

The transport was, naturally, the great problem which faced the generals. I have already said something about the extreme difficulty of that transport. I have seen at Seleniki, which is the point at which the rail-head was, within thirty miles of Constantinople as the crow flies, ox-wagons, which had come from the Shipka Pass, in the north of Bulgaria. I asked one driver how long he had been on the road; he told me three weeks. He was carrying food down to the front.

The way the ox-wagons were used for transport was a marvel of organisation to me. The transport officer at Mustapha Pasha, with whom I became very friendly, was lyrical in his praise of the ox-wagon. It was, he said, the only thing that stuck to him during the war. The railway got choked, and even the horse failed, but the ox never failed. There were thousands of ox-wagons crawling across the country. These oxen do not walk, they crawl, like an insect, with an irresistible crawl. It reminded me of those armies of soldier ants which move across Africa, eating everything which they come across, and stopping at nothing. I had an ox-wagon coming from Mustapha Pasha to Kirk Kilisse, and we went over the hills and down through the valleys, and stopped for nothing—we never had to unload once.

And one can sleep in those ox-wagons. There is no jumping and pulling at the traces, such as you get with a harnessed horse. The ox-wagon moved slowly; but it always moved. If the ox-transport had not been so perfectly organised, and if the oxen had not been so patiently enduring as they proved to be, the Bulgarian army must have perished by starvation.