One night in Sofia a few of us heard that the Turkish Ambassador had handed in his papers, and driven to the station, where a train was waiting for him. That meant war. A few hours later King Ferdinand signed a manifesto, proclaiming it to his people, and then delayed its publication for twenty-four hours while he stole away from his capital, leaving his flag flying above the palace, to his headquarters at Stara Zagora. It was as though he was frightened of his people.
He need not have been. Those Bulgarian folk, whose sons and brothers were already on their way to the front, behaved as all people do when the spell of war first comes to them, before its disillusion and its horror. They greeted it as joyful tidings. The great bell of the cathedral boomed out above the peals of innumerable bells with vaguely clashing notes. That morning in the cathedral, a Te Deum was sung before Queen Eleanor and all the Ministers of State. It was market day, and thousands of women had come in from the country districts, with market produce and great milk cans slung across their shoulders on big poles, glistening like quicksilver in the brilliant sunlight. In their white headdresses, short embroidered kirtles, and lace petticoats, they made a pretty picture as they pressed toward the great cathedral. The square was filled with Macedonian peasants, in their sheepskins and white woolen trousers, standing bareheaded and reverent before the cathedral doors. There were remarkable faces among them, belonging to young men with long flaxen hair, parted in the middle and waving on each side, like pictures of John the Baptist. Others were old, old fellows, with brown, rugged faces, white beards, and bent backs, who, in their ragged skins and fur caps, looked like a gathering of Rip van Winkles down from the mountains....
After exasperating delays, the correspondents of all countries—a wild horde—who had come to describe this war, as though its bloody melodrama had been staged as a spectacle for a dull world, were allowed to proceed to Stara Zagora, where King Ferdinand had established his headquarters. A special train was provided for this amazing crowd, accompanied by the military attachés, and a large number of Bulgarian staff officers. The journey was uneventful, except for a strange sign in the heavens, which seemed a portent of ill omen for the Bulgarians. As night came over the Rhodope Mountains, there rose a crescent moon with one bright star in the curve of its scimitar. It was the Turkish emblem, and the Bulgarian officers, who had been chatting gayly in the corridor, became silent and moody.
In the town of Stara Zagora, which my humorous friend Ludovic Nodeau called invariably Cascara Sagrada, I came in touch for the first time with the spirit of the Near East. It was Oriental in its architecture, in its dirt, in its smell, and in its human types. Turkish minarets rose above the huddle of houses. Turkish houses, with their lattice casements and ironwork grilles, high up in whitewashed walls, were among the Bulgarian hovels, shops, and churches. Mohammedan women, closely veiled, came into the market place, and young Turks and old squatted round the fountains, sat cross-legged inside their wooden booths, and smoked their narghile in dirty little cafés.
A strange people from the farther East dwelt in a village of their own outside the town—a village of houses so low that I was a head taller than their roofs when I walked down its streets, like Gulliver in Lilliput. Their doorways were like the holes of dog kennels and the inhabitants crawled in and out on their hands and knees. It was a gypsy village, swarming with wild-looking men—black-haired, sunburned to the color of terra cotta, wonderfully handsome—and with women and young girls clad in tattered gowns of gaudy color, with bare arms and legs, and the breast revealed. Children, stark naked, played among heaps of filth, and savage dogs leaped at every stranger, as they did when I went with two friends inside the village. A tall girl, beautiful as an Eastern houri, beat back the dogs and led us to the king of this Romany tribe, an old, old villain who made signs for money and was not satisfied with what I gave him. Presently he called to some women, and they brought out a girl of some fifteen years, like a little wild animal, with the grace and beauty of a woodland thing. She was for sale; and I could have bought her and taken her as my slave, for five French francs. I was tempted to do so, but did not quite know how I should get her back to my little house in Holland Street, Kensington, as a Christmas present to my wife. Also, I was not certain whether my wife would like to adopt her. I declined the offer, therefore, but gave the old man the five francs as a sign of friendship—and as a bribe of safety.
We were surrounded, now, by a crowd of tall young Gypsies with long sticks, and I did not like the way they eyed us. Luckily, a Bulgarian police officer rode through the village, and at the sight of him, the Gypsies scuttled like rabbits in their holes. We kept close to his saddle until we were beyond the village, and by expressive gesticulation the man made us understand that, in his judgment, the place behind us was not a safe spot for Christian gentlemen.
One little trouble of mine, and of friends of mine, in Stara Zagora, was the question of food. There was one pretty good restaurant, set apart for the military attachés and high staff officers, but after they had dined well, while we hung around, sniffing their fat meats, there was nothing left for us. We were reduced to eating in a filthy little place, where the food was vile, and the chief method of washing plates was by the tongues of the hungry serving wenches, as I saw, through the kitchen door. Our billeting arrangements, also, left much to be desired, and with two inseparable companions, Horace Grant, of the Daily Mirror, and a young Italian photographer named Console, I slept in a pestilential house, so utterly foul that I dare not describe it. One little additional discomfort, to me, was the merry gamboling of a tribe of mice, who played hide and seek over my body as I lay in a coffinlike bed, and cleaned their whiskers on the window sill.
We were heartily glad to move forward from General Headquarters to the Turkish village of Mustapha Pasha, on the river Maritza, which had just been captured by the Bulgarians on their way to the siege of Adrianople.
My most dominant memory of this village, which was the headquarters of the Bulgarian Second Army, may be summed up in the two words, mud and oxen. The “roads” were just quagmires, in which endless teams of oxen, with some buffaloes, dragging interminable batteries of heavy guns, ammunition wagons, and forage, wallowed deep. Stones, piled loosely, about a foot broad, at the edge of the track, made the only dry foothold for those who walked. But the Bulgarian army trudged through the slime, battalion after battalion, with flowers on their rifles, led forward by priests, dancing and waving their arms in an ecstasy of war fever, inspired by hatred of the Turk. The oxen snarled and snuffled, and constantly I had to avoid being tramped down by holding on to their curly horns or thrusting myself away from their wet nozzles. Strange groups of volunteers followed the army—family groups, with old grandfathers and grandmothers and grandma-aunties, with uncles and cousins and brothers, laden with tin pots and bundles, and armed with old sporting guns and country knives, and any kind of weapon useful for carving up a Turk.
One night, when the guns were furious round Adrianople, and the sky was lurid with bursting shells, I saw a division of Serbian cavalry pass through Mustapha Pasha. They had traveled far, and every man was asleep on his horse, which plodded on in the track of an old peasant with a lantern. I shall never forget the sight of those sleeping riders in the night.