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Updated: May 12, 2025
Here was a country which only thirty-five years earlier had been an unknown and despised province of Turkey in Europe now overwhelming the armies of the Ottoman Empire in the great victories of Kirk Kilisse, Lule Burgas, and Chorlu. In a few weeks the irresistible troops of King Ferdinand had reached the Chataldja line of fortifications.
In the Bulgarian camps sanitary precautions were absolutely lacking, and on the battlefields the provision for dealing with the wounded was shockingly inadequate. When I came back from Chatalja to Kirk Kilisse, King Ferdinand sent his private secretary for me as an independent witness of the state of things at the front.
I'll bet you they'll send Turkey to hell at Kirk Kilisse or thereabouts before the week's out." He had been ticking these points off on his fingers, much astonishing Sabre by his marshalling of scattered incidents that had been merely rather pleasing newspaper sensations of a couple of days. He presented the ticked-off fingers bunched up together. "There, there's concrete facts for you, Sabre.
Thus Bulgaria was compelled to cede back to the Asiatic enemy not only Adrianople but the battlefields of Kirk Kilisse, Lule Burgas, and Chorlu on which her brave soldiers had won such magnificent victories over the Moslems. The Treaty of Bukarest marked the predominance of Roumania in Balkan affairs. And of course Roumania had her own reward.
That was the view that they took of the possibilities of the campaign. And they kept their programme as far as Chatalja fairly closely. Having declared war, the Bulgarians invaded Turkey along two main lines, by the railway which passed through Adrianople to Constantinople and by the wild mountain passes of the north between Yamboli and Kirk Kilisse.
But four days later I was marching out of Mustapha Pasha on the way to Kirk Kilisse by way of Adrianople, a bullock-wagon carrying my baggage, an interpreter trundling my bicycle, I riding a small pony. Persuasion was necessary to force the driver to undertake the journey, and a friendly transport officer had, with more or less legality, put at my command this means of argument.
At a little village outside Kirk Kilisse a young civil servant, an official of the Foreign Office, spoke of the war whilst we ate a dish of cheese and eggs. "It is a war," he said, "of the peasants and the intellectuals. It is not a war made by the politicians or the soldiers of the staff. That would be impossible. In our nation every soldier is a citizen and every citizen a soldier.
I had an ox-wagon coming from Mustapha Pasha to Kirk Kilisse, and we went over the hills and down through the valleys, and stopped for nothing we never had to unload once. And one can sleep in those ox-wagons. There is no jumping and pulling at the traces, such as you get with a harnessed horse. The ox-wagon moved slowly; but it always moved.
That night I gave the Macedonian driver some jam and some meat to eke out his bread and cheese. "That is better than having a bayonet poked into your inside," I said, by pantomime. He understood, grinned, and gave no great trouble thereafter, though he was always in a state of pitiable funk when I left the wagon to take a trip within the lines of the besieging forces. So to Kirk Kilisse.
The effect of leaving Adrianople in the hands of the enemy was that supplies for the army in the field coming from Bulgaria could travel by one of two routes. They could come through Yamboli to Kirk Kilisse, or they could come through Novi Zagora to Mustapha Pasha by railway, and then to Kirk Kilisse around Adrianople.
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