The Balkan Trail

by Frederick Ferdinand Moore

There is some irony in the fact that the explosives supplied to the insurgents by France did most damage to citizens of the country from which they came. The revolutionary attack on Salonica was directed primarily against Europeans and European institutions, ‘as a threat and in punishment for the non-interference of the civilised nations in behalf of the Christians of Macedonia.’ The Imperial Ottoman Bank is owned and conducted largely by Frenchmen and Italians, the Guadalquivir belonged to the Mesageries Maritimes Company, and against these institutions the insurgents accomplished their most successful dynamite work. They began the eventful day with an attempt to blow up a troop train leaving for the interior, crowded with Anatolian soldiers. An ‘infernal machine’ was placed on the railway track over which the train was to pass in the early morning, but it was timed to go off a few minutes too soon, and exploded before the train reached the spot.

Their next exploit was more cleverly contrived. It was the destruction of the French steamer. A Bulgarian, describing himself as a merchant, and possessing the requisite teskeré for travelling in Turkey duly viséd, took second-class passage for Constantinople aboard the Guadalquivir, and went aboard with his luggage a few hours before the ship sailed. He inspected the steamer, pretending mere curiosity, and learned that the state rooms amidships were allotted only to passengers holding first-class tickets; whereupon he paid the difference in fare and shifted a heavy bag into a cabin nearer the engine-room. A few minutes before the ship weighed anchor the Bulgarian hailed a small boat and went ashore, ostensibly to speak to a friend on the quay, leaving all his baggage behind. But he did not return, and the ship sailed without him. She was hardly in motion, however, before a terrible explosion amidships wrecked the engine-room, cut the steering gear off from the wheel-house, and set the vessel afire. The concussion was of such violence that it is said to have shaken the houses on the quay, nearly two miles away. The engineer and several firemen were severely injured, but no one was killed. Another vessel in the harbour went to the assistance of the Guadalquivir, rescued the crew and passengers, and towed the ship back into port. There was a suspicion of foul play, but the cause of the explosion was not definitely fixed until that night.

Crowds soon collected to watch the ship burn, and grew until at evening the whole town was on the quay—little suspecting that this was the day for the long-promised dynamiting. The plot was well planned.

An ‘infernal machine’ placed under a viaduct which carried the gas main over a little gulley, exploded promptly at eight o’clock, and this was the signal for the general attack. Before the lights of the city had finished flickering, a carriage dashed up to each of the principal open-air cafés along the water-front, and several drew up before the bank. In each of them were two or more desperate men, who in some cases jumped out and threaded their way to the midst of the wondering crowds, before hurling their deadly missiles. They made for the places where their bombs would do damage among the foreign element and the most prominent citizens, and attempted to throw them into the thickest groups. But the people, already alarmed, were on the qui vive, and few of the explosions in the cafés did really effective work. The Macedonians are well drilled in scurrying into their houses, and, recognising the attack at last, they did not linger till the troops came. The dynamiters tried to catch some ‘on the wing,’ but a bomb is a poor weapon for use against the individual.

The proprietor of the Alhambra personally pointed out to us the holes made in his curtains and his stage, and gave us pieces of shell he had gathered in his yard; but two tables and three coffee-cups and one man was the complete record of the destruction wrought at his establishment.

Dynamite requires confinement to be thoroughly effective. The destruction of the Imperial Ottoman Bank was thorough. The Bulgarians who had this work in charge were evidently the pick of the band. Four of them alighted from their carriage in front of the building and several others behind it. Those attacking the front, in the guise of gentlemen, succeeded in getting near enough to the two soldiers on guard to overpower them and cut their throats. Then they began casting bombs at the windows. The other insurgents entered the courtyard of the Hôtel Colombo and hurled bombs into the doors of the German skittle club, a low building at the back of the bank. While these two divisions of dynamiters were at this work, and their confederates were elsewhere attacking various places, the charge beneath the bank was set off. A vast hole was rent in the rear wall of the building, the skittle club was demolished and the front of the Hôtel Colombo shattered. The manager of the bank, who lived above the offices, escaped with his family before the building succumbed to the fire, and all but one of thirty Germans who were in the skittle club at the time got out with their lives.

The explosions of the bombs caused the wildest panic everywhere, but they seem to have been remarkably ineffective. They were thin-shelled things (I have seen several), some three and some four inches in diameter, with a hole for loading. The shells and the dynamite were imported separately and put together in various places in the town. The insurgents appear to have had little knowledge in the manipulation of the bomb other than what was contained in the printed instructions. In some cases—in the mountains—they have blown themselves to pieces while loading shells.

The dynamiters escaped in most instances. After doing their work they sought cover, leaving the excited soldiers to wreak their vengeance on the unarmed Bulgar. This is a part of their system, that those who will not join them shall suffer for their weakness. But in one place the insurgents were trapped, and a pretty fight took place ’twixt dynamite and rifle, for the account of which I am indebted largely to the wife of a missionary, who witnessed it through the blinds of one of the mission windows.

The American Mission at Salonica is one block—an Oriental block cut by crooked streets—away from the spot where the Ottoman Bank stood. It was opposite an antiquated Turkish fort, and next door to the German school. On the other side of the school is a little house with a broad balcony overlooking the schoolyard. This little house was one of the insurgent rendezvous, though unknown and unsuspected. About half an hour after the explosions at the bank, while the little party of Americans watched the burning bank from the back of the mission, bombs began exploding, seemingly almost under their door, at the side of the house. The American property was not the object of the attack; it was directed against the German school. The insurgents had, apparently, waited until the troops from the fort were drawn off to other parts of the city before beginning their job. They threw their bombs from the balcony down at a corner of the building, where they exploded. The detonations were deafening, but the whole damage to the school was less than that which a single bomb would have wrought if put into one of the rooms.

But the fort opposite had not been left entirely deserted, and a few minutes after the first report it opened fire from the battlemented walls. The Turks were soon reinforced by two detachments of troops which came up from opposite directions. One force, in the darkness, mistook the other for insurgents and fired into them. For more than two hours the fight continued, during which probably forty bombs exploded and hundreds of rifle cracks rent the air. The missionary’s wife told me she had seen the Bulgarians light their fuses in the room, then dash out on the terrace and throw the bombs into the street below. Several times the Turks attempted to rush the place, but the street was narrow and stoutly walled, and whenever they came up the Bulgarians dropped bombs into them and drove them back. Towards the last the insurgents staggered out and only dropped their bombs. As they lit the fuses the Americans saw one of them bleeding from a wound in the face, and the other from the chest. Finally the defence ceased, and the Turks charged the little fortress successfully. They battered in the door and dragged out the garrison, both undoubtedly beyond earthly suffering.