At my table one, who spoke English, raised his glass and said, “Here’s to our first meal in Constantinople!” Later, having drunk much wine, he confided to me in a whisper, that he was deeply anxious. No one knew the power of the Turk, and he added gloomily, “War is an uncertain thing.”
There was an immense rally of correspondents, photographers, and cinema men in Belgrade, all desperate to get to the front with the Serbians, or the Bulgarians, or the Greeks. Some of the “old guard” were there, like Frederic Villiers, Henry Nevinson, and Bennett Burleigh, who had been in many campaigns before I was born. Frederic Villiers had a wonderful kit, with a glorious leather coat, and looked a romantic old figure. His pencil, his pocket knife, his compass, were fastened to his waist belt by steel chains. He still played the part of the war correspondent familiar in romantic melodrama. Among the younger crowd was Percival Phillips, afterward my comrade from first to last in a greater and longer war. It was then that I first become acquainted with his rapid way on a typewriter, on which he rattled out words like bursts of machine-gun fire.
After waiting about Belgrade for some days, I left Serbia and traveled to Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, where I hoped to be attached to the Bulgarian army. It was a horrible experience. Before the train started there was a wild stampede by a battalion of reservists and Bulgarian peasants. I narrowly escaped getting jabbed by long bayonets, as the men scrambled on to the train, storming the doorways and clambering on to the roof. When at last I got on board, I found myself wedged in the corridor between piles of baggage, peasants, and soldiers. I had only a piece of cheese and a little drop of brandy, and I cursed myself for my folly when I found that the journey was likely to take two days. We stopped at every wayside station, and were then turned out at night on the platform at Sarabrot, hungry, chilled to the bone, with a biting wind and hard frost, and without a place in which to lay our heads.
Here we waited all night till dawn, and the one room in which there was shelter from the wind was crowded to suffocation by peasants lying asleep on their bundles, and was filled with a foul, sickening heat. One fantastic figure stood among the Serbians with their peaked caps, leather coats, and baggy white breeches. He wore a frock coat and tall hat, and looked as though he had just stepped out of the Rue de Rivoli. He was a French journalist on his way to the front!
Outside the station door there was, all night long, the tramp of soldiers, as battalion after battalion of Serbian troops marched up to entrain for the front. Officers moved up and down the ranks with lanterns which threw pallid rays of light upon these gray-clad men. Presently a long troop train came into Sarabrot, and the soldiers were packed into open trucks, so tightly that they could not move. Their bayonets made a quickset hedge above each truck. They were utterly silent. There was no laughing or singing now. These young peasants were like cattle being carried to the slaughterhouses.
It was a night of queer conversations for me. One man slouched up in the dim light, and said, “I guess you’re an Englishman, anyhow?” I returned the compliment, saying, “You’re an American, of course?” But I was wrong. He was a Bulgarian who had been in America for a few years and had now come back, in a thin flannel suit, and a straw hat, from a township in the Western states.
“I heard the call,” he told me, “and I’m ready to take my place in the firing line. I’ll be glad to give hell to the Turks.”
I was as dirty as a Bulgarian peasant, and exhausted with hunger, when at last I reached Sofia.
Still war had not been declared, but its spirit reigned in Sofia. Outside the old white mosque, with its tall and slender minaret—the one thing of beauty which had been inherited from the Turks—there passed all day long companies of soldiers, heavily laden in their field kit, and bands of Macedonian volunteers. Through the streets there was the rumble of bullock wagons and forage carts, drawn by buffaloes. On the plain of Slivnitza, the old battle ground between the Bulgars and Serbians, there were great camps of the Macedonians who drilled all day long, and at intervals shouted strange war cries, and flung up their fur caps, while, from primitive bagpipes, there came a squealing as though a herd of pigs were being killed. In the ranks stood many young girls, dressed in the rough sheepskin jackets and white woolen trousers of their men folk, and serving as soldiers. Bullocks and buffaloes roamed in the outskirts of their camps, and when darkness crept down the distant mountains the light of camp fires turned a lurid glare upon the scene.