Naturally, the Bulgarian peasant is wonderfully healthy. His food is rough whole-meal bread and cheese; his occasional luxuries, a dish of the sour milk which is so well known in London, a little alcohol on Sunday, some sweet stuff, and, rarely, grilled meat or meat soup with vegetables. It is possible to judge that his alimentary tract differs widely from that of the Western European. I should say he was almost immune from enteric, unless attacked by a very virulent infection. He can live on bread and water alone without serious inconvenience for lengthy periods. His blood is very pure, and ordinarily heals in a way that astonished the British surgeons.
Here, then, was the best of material from an army medical point of view. Given the roughest food, the simplest sanitary precautions, and ordinarily good field dressing, and the army would have marched without disease and the wounded would have dropped out of the firing line for a few days only. But there were no sanitary precautions; hence disease. The hospital service as regards the first aid in the field was pitiably deficient; hence serious and unnecessary losses of wounded. Without seeking to pile up a record of horrors, I cite a few individual instances to illustrate bad methods. At the front, punctured bayonet wounds were closely bandaged—in some cases stitched up—without provision for irrigation, without even proper cleansing. This led to gangrene and often caused the sacrifice of a life or of a limb (which, to these peasants, was almost as great a loss as that of life: their feeling against amputations was very strong, and if they understood that amputation was intended, they sometimes begged to be "killed instead"). Bullet wounds also were often plugged up on the field. When proper treatment was at last available, it was sometimes too late to avoid death or amputation. No treatment at all on the field would have been preferable to this well-intentioned but shocking ignorance.
Of the purely Bulgarian hospitals those at Kirk Kilisse are very deficient: at Philippopolis, however, there were excellent Bulgarian hospitals, and also at Sofia. The Russian hospital at Kirk Kilisse is very good. The British Red Cross Hospital, under Major E. T. F. Birrell, of the R.A.M.C., is excellently organised, has the fullest possible equipment, and tries to specialise in serious cases. It is subjected locally (as is the Russian hospital) to the criticism that by insisting on perfection of system it unduly restricts its salvage work: that, in short, it could deal with far more patients if it consented to more "rough-and-ready" methods. I record this criticism, and acknowledge that it is based on facts. Yet it may be urged on the other side that it was ultimately far more useful to have a model hospital to show how things should be done than to sacrifice that valuable lesson for the sake of striving to cope in rough-and-ready fashion with the flood of wounded. This hospital gives interesting proof that Great Britain is an Empire, not an island nation. I first encountered three of its doctors in a café. One was from the Mother Country, one from the West Indies, one an Australian friend, who set at once to talking of gum trees and of Melbourne University. Then a non-commissioned officer attached to the hospital—most of its Staff are army men—is a Canadian, who had had war experience in South Africa. His comments on the Bulgarian wounded are full of sympathy. "These chaps," he said, "take their gruel better even than the Tommies. The Tommy takes his all right, but he 'grouses' about it. These chaps never grumble. One of them had to have a very painful dressing. He winced a little. A comrade at once laughed at him. 'Ah,' he said, 'you learn new kinds of dancing here.'" Nurses endorse this evidence about the Bulgarian soldiers' patience, though one stated that she found the officers sometimes to be rather neurasthenic.
On the whole, the Bulgarian army is not strong on science. In spade work it was not good. I saw no perfect trenches—never a drained trench. Undrained trenches caused some increase of mortality and of sickness. It is uncomfortable to stay for days, or even hours, in a trench which the rain has partly filled with water. In no case that I saw were there trenches with overhead protection against howitzer fire. Except at the Chatalja lines and around Adrianople the trenches were, of course, intended to be of a very temporary use, and would naturally not be elaborate. Gun-pits and emplacements were usually fairly good. It was the custom to dig a pit, or to put up a little sod wall for the gun-limber (most of the artillery work was from concealed and prepared positions). At Chatalja the trenches were masked with the stalks of the Turkish tobacco plants—about the only instance I saw of masking. It was rare to see a trench zigzagged as a precaution against enfilading fire. The Turkish trenches I saw were hopelessly bad.
Sofia, December 6, 1912.—Sofia, in spite of the great victories which have been won, is neither joyous nor contented. The failure of the siege of Adrianople seems to rest heavy upon the people: and there are gloomy stories of the extent of the losses of the nation's manhood. So far no lists of killed and wounded have been published. "The Mass at St. Sofia," which was the battle-cry of the first days of the war, is clearly not a possibility now. Some mystery attaches to the movements of the king. It is said that he had made a vow that he would not return to Sofia until a victorious peace was signed. The embittered relations with the Greeks, the signs of disagreement with the Serbians, suggest gloomy possibilities of future troubles.
Belgrade, December 8, 1912.—With the exception of the army before Adrianople, the Serbians have finished their share of the war with Turkey. Belgrade is satisfied, but not over-elated. Across the Danube, a broad gloomy waste of dun waters under the winter mists, a division of the Austrian army is mobilised. There is a fear, almost an expectation, that Austria will make war. But there seems neither panic nor war-fever in the city.
Business is creeping back to the normal state. At the Ministry for War there are to be seen pathetic scenes as parents and other relatives seek tidings of the soldiers. An old father, himself a captain of reserves, hears that his only son, a lieutenant, has been killed, and bursts into tears and tells to all around his sorrow. But generally tragic news is received stoically. Amid the congratulations on the results of the Allies' efforts there is an under-current of resolution to make a better bargain with Bulgaria than the ante bellum partition treaty proposed. Reports of envious and rude treatment of the Serbian army before Adrianople are current in the street: and there is some talk of recalling the men. This is the irresponsible talk of men in the street only: the authorities are very correct in their attitude towards "our friend and ally," and express themselves as confident that Bulgaria of her own volition will suggest better terms for her partner in the war.
A Serbian politician, who patiently endures my bad French or makes a brave effort to talk in English, a tongue which he is learning to speak and can read quite well, politely excuses the English for being such bad linguists. "For you English who have all the poetry, all the romance, all the science, all the philosophy a man may want in your own language, it is not necessary to learn any other. For us in the Balkans, we must learn other languages or remain ignorant of much that goes on in the world."
In truth the Balkan peoples are astonishing linguists. It is not at all a rare thing to find that a man can speak Bulgarian, Serbian, Greek, Turkish, and French. Often he adds either English or German to this list. Bulgarian and Serbian, of course, are but differing dialects of Russian—a Russian can make himself understood in both tongues though he knows only Russian. But the grammar of one differs from that of the other, and many of the words are different. The Balkan people who know Turkish know it usually in its colloquial and spoken form and not the literary language, which is very difficult to understand thoroughly because it is really a blending of three languages.