Here is a letter from Aunt Susie Blow to Nelka in 1913:
"Nothing I can say suggests what I feel. The picture of you with those awful bombs bursting above you, before you, to right and left of you and the other picture of you plunging knee deep in mud and battling with mud and rain, as you made your way from tent to tent will never leave me. And what pictures of horror must move in ghastly procession in your mind. You have always wanted first hand experience. Now you have had such experience of famine, of war, of religious enthusiasm, of patriotic devotion. How will it all affect the necessary routine of life?"
Sofia 1913.
"I know I have written since the fall of Adrianople and I think I sent you a word from there. Did I tell you that the Consulate was in several places shattered by shells? What I noticed the most was the air of proprietorship of the soldiers in the town and how one felt the immediate transformation of the Turkish town into a Bulgarian one."
Sofia 1913.
"I do not know what I think about the Turks. I only know that I abhor the 'Young Turks' (political party). In general I suppose they are more civilized than the Bulgars. I do not care for them as a nation, but I wish nevertheless that the war would continue until they get to the very door of Constantinople. About occupying the city itself I do not know, because it is so complicated. Of course I wish it might belong to one of the Balkan states and I simply can't endure the mixing in of 'powers.' Powers—by what I would like to know, except size and force alone. I wish they would fight it out and take Constantinople and be done with it and the whole Balkan peninsula as well. I hate threats and tyranny based on the power to destroy if they want. Either gobble it up or leave it alone, but not dictate!!!"
"It is very strange, but it seems to me that everything that makes for terrestrial power makes for spiritual defeat."
"I am crazy to go to Tchatalja but a definite attack does not seem imminent."
"I am well and, as result of feeding on air and no sleep, had to move the buttons of my apron which had become tight. I can speak quite a little Bulgarian."
"I understand fully what is meant by 'A la Guerre, comme a La Guerre.' It is extraordinary how every preconceived notion and habit is thrown to the winds. I like it very much. Everyone acts as the immediate occasion seems to necessitate and it is so much more simple. Everything is changed and I see that it is just so everywhere in time of war because one thing is so very much more important than all the rest. It is when nothing is supremely important that life is simply impossible and that you are baffled at every step."