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The Turks were confident of an early and easy victory, and hoped to reach Sofia, not from Constantinople and Thrace, but pushing up north-eastwards from Macedonia. The rapid offensive of the Serbian army, however, took them by surprise, and they were completely overwhelmed at the battle of Kumanovo in northern Macedonia on October 23-4, 1912. On November 9 the Greeks entered Salonika.
As the Greeks had pressed into southern Macedonia, so the Servian armies advanced through old Servia into northern and central Macedonia. In their great victory over the Turkish forces at Kumanovo they avenged the defeat of their ancestors at Kossovo five hundred years before.
But come what might, Serbia and Montenegro, by having linked up their territory and by forming a mountain barrier from the Danube to the Adriatic, made it far more difficult for the invader to push his way through to the East than it would have been before the battles of Kumanovo and Bregalnica. From Ancient to Modern Greece The name of Greece has two entirely different associations in our minds.
For us, it is necessary to note that, as the hand of Pan-Germanism became more evident, the Slovenes began to draw nearer to the Croats and the Serbs. It remained only for the Serbs to electrify the Jugo-Slavs "to avenge Kossovo with Kumanovo" in order to cement their loyalty to the regenerated Serbs.
Religious differences, political rivalries, linguistic quibbles, and the petty foibles of centuries appeared to be forgotten in the three short years which elapsed from Kumanovo to the destruction of Serbia in 1915. The Greater Serbia idea had really perished in 1915, as had the Greater Croatia idea in 1878.
"The Turkish fortress of Kirk Kilisseh has fallen . . . The Serbs, it is officially announced, have taken Kumanovo . . . The fortress of Kirk Kilisseh lost, Kumanovo taken by the Serbs, these are tiding for Constantinople resembling something out of Shakspeare's tragedies of the kings . . . The neighbourhood of Adrianople and the Eastern region, where the great battle is now in progress, will not reveal merely the future of Turkey, but also what position and what influence the Balkan States are to have in the world."
Slivnitsa was avenged by the battle of the Bregalnica, just as Kosovo was by that of Kumanovo. After a triumphant campaign of one month, in which the Serbs were joined by the Greeks, Bulgaria had to bow to the inevitable.
During the war with Turkey the Servian armies had paid no attention to the Ochrida-Golema Vreh line. The great victory over the Turks at Kumanovo, by which the Slav defeat at Kossovo five hundred years earlier was avenged, was, it is true, won at a point north of the line in question.
The Great Powers cannot overlook the fact that a people that has tasted victory will not let itself be driven back again within its former limits. Turkey has lost to-day not only Kirk Kilisseh and Kumanovo, but Macedonia also." Luitpold Wolkenstein drank his coffee, but the flavour had somehow gone out of it.
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