At the military hospital of Nish I saw many of the wounded. The wounds inflicted by bullets were clean, and the doctors said that they were such that the wounded either recovered and were up and about in a week, or else they died. There were cases of tetanus, and I saw many men who had received severe bayonet wounds and fractures at the battle of Perlepe, where some of the severest fighting had taken place.
At the beginning of this battle somebody on the Servian side must have blundered. A regiment was advancing, expecting to meet reinforcements on both sides. In front of them, on a hill, they saw what they took to be their own men, and halted. Immediately a hot fire rained on them from all sides. The men they had seen were not their own men but Turks. The Servians had to get away as fast as ever they could go, otherwise they would have been surrounded; as it was, they incurred severe losses.
You had only to be a day in Servia to realise the spirit of the people. They were full of a concentrated fire of patriotism. The war to them was a matter of life and death. They regarded their access to the sea as a question of life and death to their country. They had been the driving power in the war. They had had to make the greater sacrifices; and the part they had played certainly was neither realised nor appreciated. The Servians were less reserved than the Bulgarians, but they had the same singleness of purpose and the same power of cleaving fast to one great idea.
I only spent four or five days at Uskub, and as there seemed to be no chance of getting within range of any fighting, I went back to Sofia. I stopped on the way to Nish, where I visited the military hospital, and there I met once more the Servian poet, and received my lost trunk from his hands. Just outside the Servian hospital there was a small church. This church was originally a monument built by the Turks to celebrate the taking of Nish, and its architecture was designed to discourage the Servians from ever rising against them again, for the walls were made almost entirely of the skulls of massacred Servians.
CHAPTER XXIII
CONSTANTINOPLE ONCE MORE (1912)
As soon as I got back to Sofia I found that there would be nothing of interest for me to do or see there, and no chance of getting to the Bulgarian front. I might perhaps have got to Headquarters, but that would have been of little use, and the Times, for whom I was writing, already had one correspondent with the Bulgarian army. So I settled to go to Constantinople via Bucharest.
I spent a night at Bucharest, and I arrived at Constantinople on a drizzly, damp, autumn day in November.
Many people have recorded the melancholy they have felt on arriving at Constantinople for the first time, especially in the autumn, under a grey sky, when the kaleidoscopic, opalescent city loses its radiance, suffers eclipse, and seems to wallow in greyness, sadness, dirt, and squalor. A man arriving at Constantinople on November 19, 1912 would have received this melancholy impression at its very intensest. The skies were grey, the air was damp, and the streets looked more than usually squalid and dishevelled. But in addition to this, there was in the air a feeling of great gloom, which was intensified by the chattering crowds in Pera, laughing and making fun of the Turkish reverses, by the chirping women at the balconies, watching the stragglers and the wounded coming back from the front, and listening, in case they might hear the enemy sullenly firing. In the city you felt that every Turk, sublimely resigned as ever, and superficially, at least, utterly expressionless and indifferent as usual, was walking about with a heavy heart, and probably every thinking Turk was feeling bitterly that the disasters which had come were due to the criminal folly of a band of alien and childishly incompetent political quacks. You felt also above everything else the invincible atmosphere of Byzantium, which sooner or later conquers and disintegrates its conquerors, however robust and however virile. Byzantium, having disintegrated two great Empires, seemed to be ironically waiting for a new prey. One remembered Bismarck’s saying that he could wish no greater misfortune to a country than the possession of Constantinople.