Horace Grant, Console, and I were billeted in a farmhouse a mile or so outside Mustapha Pasha, kept by a tall, bearded Bulgarian peasant with his wife and mother, and three dirty little children. We slept on divans, as hard as boards, and fed on gristly old chickens killed beyond the doorposts. The family regarded us as though we had come from a far planet—mysterious beings, of incomprehensible ways—and our ablutions in the mornings, when we stripped to the waist and washed in a pail, filled them with deep wonderment. It was our local reputation as “The men who wash their bodies” which liberated us from military arrest.
On the way to Mustapha Pasha and back again to our farmhouse, we had to pass a cemetery which was used as a camp. It was never a pleasant journey at night, because we stumbled over loose boulders, fell into three feet of mud, and were attacked by packs of wolflike dogs whose fierce eyes shone through the darkness. One night I felt a prick in the shoulder, and found I had run up against the sword of a Bulgarian officer who was feeling his way along the wall in pitch darkness. But it was when the Bulgarians were suddenly replaced by Serbians that we were challenged by a sentry and arrested by the guard, which rushed out at the sound of his shots. They could make nothing of us, and suspected the worst, until some peasants in the neighborhood came up and identified us as three men strangely addicted to cold water, but under the protection of Bulgarian headquarters.
Along the valley of the Maritza, on the way to Adrianople, which was closely invested, the Turkish villages had been fired, and we saw the smoke rising above the flames, and then tramped through their ruins. Looting was strictly forbidden, under pain of death, but in one village old men and women were prowling about in a ghoullike way, and filling sacks with bits of half-burnt rubbish. Suddenly an old woman began to scream, and we saw her struggling with a Bulgarian soldier who threatened to run his bayonet through her body. The others fled, leaving their sacks behind.
That night, in a dirty little eating house, a Hungarian correspondent protested to his friends against the ruthless way in which the Bulgars had burned those Turkish homesteads. Upon leaving the restaurant he was arrested by military police and flung into a filthy jail, with the warning that he would rot to death there unless he changed his opinion about the burning of the villages, and agreed that the Turks had fired them on their retreat. He decided to change his opinion. Later, however, he was riding alone when he was set upon by Bulgarian police, who seized his horse, flung him into a ditch, and kicked him senseless. It was a warning against careless table conversation.
We soon discovered that, instead of being treated as war correspondents, we were in a position more like that of prisoners of war. Strict orders were issued that we were not to go beyond a certain limit outside Mustapha Pasha, and the severity of the censorship was so great that my harmless descriptive articles about the scenes behind the lines, as well as my feeble sketches, were mostly canceled. I have to confess that I became a rebel against these orders, and, with my two companions, not only broke bounds, day after day, but smuggled through my articles at a risk which I now know was extremely rash. I hired a carriage with three scraggy horses, a chime of bells, and a Bulgarian giant, at enormous expense. It had once belonged to a Bulgarian priest, and was so imposing that when we drove out to the open country, toward Adrianople, we used to be saluted by the Bulgarian army.
I remember driving one day to a spur of hills overlooking the city of Adrianople, from which we could see the six minarets of the Great Mosque, and the high explosives bursting above its domes and rooms. A German—Doctor Bauer—and an Austrian—von Zifferer—accompanied us, and we picnicked on the hill with an agreeable excitement at getting even this glimpse of the “real business.” I played a game of chess with von Zifferer, who carried a pocket set, and this very charming young Austrian accepted my lucky victory with good nature, and then asked a question which I always remembered:
“How long will it be before you and I are on opposite sides of a fighting line?”
It was not very long.
My experiences as a war correspondent in Bulgaria were farcical. I saw only the back wash of the bloody business—and I have a secret and rather wicked suspicion that the war correspondent of the old type did not see so much as his imaginative dispatches and thrilling sketches suggested to the public, nor one-thousandth part as much as that little body of men in the World War, who had absolute liberty of movement, and the acknowledged right of going to any part of the front, at any time. In Bulgaria, all we saw of the war was its slow-moving tide of peasant soldiers, trudging forward dejectedly, the tangled traffic of guns and transport, the misery—unimaginable and indescribable—of the wounded and the prisoners, stricken with cholera, packed, like slaughtered cattle, into railway trucks, tossed in heaps on straw-filled ox wagons, jolted to death over the ruts and boulders of unmade roads: Horrible pictures which gave me a little apprenticeship, but not much, for the sights of the war that was to come.