The Balkan Peninsula

by Frank Fox

The Secret Service of Bulgaria before the war evidently had been excellent. They seemed to know all that was necessary to know about the country in which they were going to fight. This very complete knowledge of theirs was in part responsible for the arrangements which were made between the Balkan Allies for carrying on the war. The Bulgarian people had made up their minds to do the lion's share of the work, and to have the lion's share of the spoils. They knew quite definitely the state of corruption to which the Turkish nation had come. When I reached Sofia, the Bulgarians told me they were going to be in Constantinople three weeks after the declaration of war. That was the view that they took of the possibilities of the campaign. And they kept their programme as far as Chatalja fairly closely.

The view of the Bulgarians as to the ultimate result of the war, and what they had designed should be the division of spoil after the war, I gathered from various classes in Bulgaria, speaking not only with politicians but with bankers, trading people, and others. They concluded that the Turk was going to be driven out of Europe, at any rate, as far as Constantinople. They considered that Constantinople was too great a prize for the Bulgarian nation, or for the Balkan States, and that Constantinople would be left as an international city, to be governed by a commission of the Great Powers. Bulgaria was, then, to have practically all Turkey-in-Europe—the province of Thrace, and a large part of Macedonia as far as the city of Salonica. Constantinople was to be left, with a small territory, as an international city, and the Bulgarian boundary was to stretch as far as Salonica. Salonica, they admitted, was desired very much by the Bulgarians, and also very much by the Greeks; and the Bulgarian idea in regard to Salonica before the war was that it would be best to make it a free Balkan city, governed by all the Balkan States in common, and a free port for all the Balkan States. Then the frontier of Greece was to extend very much to the north, and Greece was to be allowed all the Aegean Islands. The Serbian frontier was to extend to the eastward and the southward, and what is now the autonomous province of Albania (the creation of which has been insisted on by the Powers) was to be divided between Montenegro and Servia.

That division would have left the Bulgarians with the greatest spoil of the war. They would have had entry on to the Sea of Marmora; they would have controlled, perhaps, one side of the Dardanelles (but I believe they thought that the Dardanelles might also be left to a commission of the Powers). It needed great confidence and exact knowledge as to the state of the Turkish Army to allow plans of that sort to have been not only formed, but to be generally talked about.

It must be tragical now for a patriotic Bulgarian to compare these high anticipations with the actual results of the war, and to reflect that at one time he had three-fourths of his hopes secure and then sacrificed all by straining after the remainder.

The Bulgarian mobilisation—effected after lengthy preparation with perfect success and complete secrecy—was a triumph of military achievement. It emphasises a point often urged, that when a whole nation is wrapt up in the colours, when every citizen is a soldier and taught the code of patriotic honour of the soldier—then at a time of crisis, spies, grumblers, critics are impossible. Bulgaria, as I have said, is very democratic. Unlike Roumania, where a landed aristocracy survived Turkish rule, the whole nation is of peasants or the sons and grandsons of peasants. The nobles, the wealthy, the intellectuals were exterminated by the Turk. Yet the strategy of the war suffered nothing from the democracy of the people. They acted with a unity, a secrecy, and a loyalty to the flag that no despotism could rival.

The mobilisation was effected on very slender resources. Official statistics—perhaps for a reason—are silent regarding the growth of railway material since 1909. But in that year there were only 155 locomotives in the country. As soon as war was anticipated these provident and determined people set to amassing railway material, and one railway official, without giving exact figures, talked of locomotives being added by "fifties" at a time. I doubt that. But perhaps there were between 200 and 225 locomotives in Bulgaria in October 1912, though one military attaché gave me the figure at 193. It was a slender stock, in any case, on which to move 350,000 men and to keep them in supplies. But the people contributed all their horses, mules, and oxen to the war fund. Soldiers were willing and able to walk great distances, and within a few days all the armies were over the frontier.

The Bulgarians, by the way, began the war with a moratorium. (The week of the declaration of hostilities, meeting some personages notable in European finance, they ridiculed for this reason the idea of the war being anything but a dismal failure from the point of view of the Balkan States.) It was necessary to win in a hurry if they were to win at all. They could take the field only because of the magnificent spirit of their population. They could not keep the field indefinitely under any circumstances.

The main line of communication was through Yamboli, and here the chief force was massed whilst exploratory work was carried on towards Adrianople and Kirk Kilisse. I believe that originally the capture of Adrianople was the first grand object of the campaign, and that a modification was made later either for political or military reasons, or for a mixture of both. Up to the point at which Adrianople was invested from the north, Kirk Kilisse captured, and the cavalry sent raiding south-west to attack the Turk's lines of communication and to feel for his field army, an excellent plan of campaign was followed. If the main Bulgarian army had then swung over from Kirk Kilisse and had made a resolute—and, under the circumstances, almost certainly victorious—effort to rush Adrianople the natural course, from a military point of view, would have been followed. The one risk involved was that the Turkish field army would come up from the south and force a battle under the walls of Adrianople, aided by a sortie from the garrison. But the experience of Kirk Kilisse and the following battles argued against this. There would have been, one may judge, ample time allowed to subdue Adrianople with an army flushed by its success at Kirk Kilisse, operating against a garrison thoroughly despondent at the moment.

Kirk Kilisse, it must be noted in passing, was a vastly overrated fortress. The Turks, I believe, valued it highly. The Bulgarians triumphantly quoted a German opinion that it could withstand a German army for three months. As a matter of fact, whilst it was a valuable base for an enterprising field army, surrounded as it was by natural features of great strength, it was not a real fortress at all. Still, the moral effect of its capture was great, and on the flood of that success the Bulgarian army could have entered Adrianople if it had been willing to make the necessary great sacrifice of infantry.

A second sound—and more enterprising, and therefore probably better course—was that which I thought at the time was being followed, to pursue the Turks fleeing from Kirk Kilisse, to search out their field army, give it a thrashing, and then swing back to subdue Adrianople. But neither of these courses was followed. Kirk Kilisse was not followed up vigorously in the first instance. After its capture the Bulgarian army rested three days. During that time the fleeing Turks had won back some of their courage, had come back in their tracks, recovered many of the guns they had abandoned, and the battles of Ivankeui and Yanina—battles in which the Bulgarian losses were very heavy—were necessary to do over again work which had been already once accomplished. This criticism must be read in the light of the fact that I am totally ignorant of the transport position in the Bulgarian Third Army at the time. General Demetrieff had made a wonderful dash over the wild country between Yamboli and Kirk Kilisse, carrying an army over a track which took a military attaché six days to traverse on horseback, and a hospital train seven days to traverse by ox wagon. He might at the time have been seriously short of ammunition, though Kirk Kilisse renewed his food and forage supplies.