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Updated: June 12, 2025
There was great enterprise shown in this second line of advance and it was responsible for all the great victories won. Taking Kirk Kilisse by surprise the Bulgarian forces kept the Turkish vanguard on the run until Lule Burgas, where the Turkish main army made a stand and the decisive battle of the campaign was fought.
Coming back from the lines of Chatalja towards the end of 1912, I had, for one stage of five days, between Kirk Kilisse and Mustapha Pasha, a Turkish driver. At first with some aid from an interpreter, afterwards mostly by signs and broken fragments of language, I got to be able to converse with this Turk.
Returned to Kirk Kilisse from the Bulgarian lines at Chatalja, I amused myself in an odd hour with burrowing among a great pile of newspapers in the Censor's office, and reading here and there the war news from English, French, and Belgian papers. Dazed, amazed, I recognised that I had seemingly mistaken the duties of a war correspondent.
To crown her misfortunes, the Turks moved up against the prostrate country, recaptured, without an effort, Adrianople, which had been won with such terrible cost of Bulgarian blood, and also Kirk Kilisse. In the final result Bulgaria was left with but little net gain as the price of her enormous sacrifices of blood and of treasure. To the north she actually lost some of her old territory.
And then it was necessary to use bullock or horse transport from Mustapha Pasha to Kirk Kilisse. That journey I took twice; once with an ox-wagon, and afterwards with a set of fast horses, and the least period for the journey was five days. From Kirk Kilisse there was a line of light railway joining the main line.
Their strategy was, in the first instance, to deceive the Turks as to where the blow was to come from. And in that they succeeded admirably. No one knew where the main attack on the frontier would be made. It was made unexpectedly at Kirk Kilisse, when all expectation was that it would be made through Mustapha Pasha and towards Adrianople.
From Kirk Kilisse to the rail-head at Seleniki, close to Chatalja, they could come not by railway but by a tramway, a very limited railway. If Adrianople had fallen, the railway would have been open.
But, Adrianople being in the hands of the enemy, supplies coming from Yamboli had to travel to Kirk Kilisse by track, mostly by bullock wagon, and that journey took five, six, or seven days. The British Army Medical Detachment travelling over that road took six days. If one took the other road one got to Mustapha Pasha comfortably by railway.
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