For the reason that the Marathon winner when he drops across the tape is not good for another mile. The Bulgar was on his stomach in the mud, though he was facing toward the heels of the Turk. Food and ammunition were not up. A fresh force of fifty thousand men following up the victory might easily have made its own terms at the door of Yildiz Palace within three or four days; but there was not even a fresh regiment.
It was three weeks after Lüle Burgas before Demetrief was ready to attack; three weeks, in which the cholera scare had abated, the panic in Constantinople had come and gone, reenforcements had arrived and been organized into a kind of order, while they built fortifications. The Turkish cruisers supported both of Nazim Pasha's flanks with the fire of heavier guns than the Bulgars possessed. There was an approachable Turkish front of only about sixteen miles. Without silencing the Turkish batteries, Demetrief sent his infantry against the redoubts. He lost five or six thousand men without gaining a single fort. Against a stubborn and even semi-intelligent foe there is no storming a narrow frontal line of fortifications when you may not turn the ends.
Adrianople lay across the straight line of transportation by railroad and highway to the peninsula. All munitions for Demetrief's army had to go around it in the miserable, antiquated ox-carts. It was the rock splitting the flood of the Bulgarian advance. While the world was hearing rumors of the city's fall, the truth was that it was not really invested until a month after Lüle Burgas was fought.
For a month the garrison reported to be starving was drawing in supplies from a big section of farming country. When the armistice was signed it still had pasturage within the lines of defense for flocks of sheep and herds of cattle. The problem for the Bulgars first and last was to keep this fact masked and to check the savage sorties and spare all the guns and men they could for the main army. Volunteers from Macedonia still in native dress, clerks still in white collars, old men who had perjured themselves about their age in order to get a rifle, and the young conscripts of twenty years came to take the place of the regular forces on the investing lines, who moved on to re-enforce Demetrief. Fifty thousand Servians, two divisions, were spared after Kumanova, and speeded across Bulgaria on the single-line railway with an amazing rapidity to assist, according to plan, the Bulgars in the investment operations.
To the Turk, Adrianople is a holy city. Here is the most splendid mosque in all the empire, that built by the conqueror Sultan Selim. With the shadow of the minarets over his shoulder, the Turkish private in a trench was ready to die for Allah. But death must come for him. He is not going to hustle intelligently after paradise. In short, he is a sit-and-take-it fighter. While any delay of the Bulgarian advance was invaluable in gaining time, he made no use of his opportunities in a country of hills and transverse valleys and ravines, which nature meant for rear-guard action. A company of infantry posted on a hill could force a regiment to deploy and attack, and a few miles farther on could repeat the process. Cavalry could harass the flanks of the attacking force. Field-guns could get a commanding position above a road, with safe cover for retreat.
At Mustapha Pasha, twenty miles in front of Adrianople, was a solid old stone bridge over the Maritza, whose floods in the winter rains would be a nightmare to engineers who had to maintain a crossing with pontoons. If ever a corps needed a bridge the second Bulgarian corps needed this one. They found that a small and badly placed charge of dynamite had merely knocked out a few stones between two of the buttresses, leaving the bridge intact enough for all the armies of Europe to pass over it; and the Turks did not even put a mitrailleuse behind sandbags in the streets or use field-guns from the adjacent hills to delay the Bulgars in their crossing.
The soldier who is good only for the defensive can never win. What beat the Turk was the Turk himself. His army was in the chaos between old-fashioned organization and an attempt at a modern organization. His generals were divided in their counsels; his junior officers aped the modern officer in form, but lacked application. They had ceased to believe in their religion. Therefore, they did not lead their privates who did believe. In the midst of the war, captains and lieutenants, trustworthy observers tell me, would leave their untrained companies of reservists to march by the road while they themselves rode by train. They took their soldiers' pay. They neglected all the detail which is the very essence of that preparation at the bottom without which no generalship at the top can prevail.
The Bulgarian officers, two-thirds of whom were reservists, enjoyed a comradeship with their men at the same time that discipline was rigid. They believed in their God; at least, in the god of efficiency. They worked hard. They belong in the world of to-day and the Turk does not. Therefore the Turk has to go.
"We will not make peace without Adrianople!" was the cry of every Bulgar. Its possession became a national fetish, no less than naval superiority to the British. Adrianople stood for the real territorial object of the war. It must be the center of any future line of defense against the Turk. Practically its siege was set, once there was stalemate at Tchatalja. With no hope of beating the main Bulgarian army back, there was no hope of relieving the garrison, whose fate was only a matter of time.
At the London Peace Conference the allies stood firm for the possession of Adrianople. The Turkish commissioners, after repeating for six weeks that they would never cede it, had finally agreed to yield on orders from Constantinople, when the young Turks killed Nazim Pasha, the Turkish commander-in-chief, and overthrew the old cabinet. "You can have Adrianople when you take it!" was the defiance of the new cabinet to the allies.