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Updated: May 8, 2025
With twelve thousand Turkish reenforcements a day arriving from Asia, even hours counted. As yet, the Turks were not decisively beaten; only the right that fought at Kirk-Kilesseh had been really demoralized. On the line of Bunar Hissar to Lüle Burgas they formed to receive the second shock. They were given scant time to prepare for it. "Na noj!"
J. Ellis Barker, the noted English authority on Turkey, here gives a brief account. The tale of the first glorious campaign, with its big battles of Kirk-Kilesseh and Lule-Burgas, is then told by Mr. Frederick Palmer, the foremost of American war correspondents upon the scene. The confused negotiations for peace are then detailed by Prof.
Skilfully driven steel slaughtered Mohammedan fanaticism that fought with clubbed guns, hands, and teeth, asking no quarter this side of Paradise. Kirk-Kilesseh fell. The Turkish army, flanked, had to go; Adrianople was isolated. The Bulgarian dead on the field could not complain; the wounded were in the rear; the living had burning eyes on the next goal. "Na noj!" "Na noj!
The rest of the second faced Adrianople, while the first corps operated to the south and east. Swinging around on Kirk-Kilesseh, the third army would not take "No!" for an answer. The Bulgarian infantry stormed the redoubts in the moonlight. They knew how to use the bayonet and the Turks did not.
Nature meant this city, set in a basin among hills, for defense, and for the center of any army defending Thrace. On the near-by hills is a circle of permanent forts that commands all approaches for guns or infantry. In front of it is the turbulent Maritza, and to the northeast lies the town of Kirk-Kilesseh, partly fortified and naturally strong, which formed the Turkish right.
The first week of the campaign closed with the dramatic fall of Kirk-Kilesseh, fully revealing for the first time the disorganization, bad morale and inefficient commissariat of the Turkish army. Ten days later that army was defeated and routed, within fifty miles from Constantinople, forcing it to retreat within the capital's line of defenses.
The left rested at Demotika, to the south of Adrianople, in a rough country inaccessible to prompt action by a large force. The Bulgars must turn one wing or the other. Foreign military experts thought that Kirk-Kilesseh could be taken only after a long operation, and then only by a force much larger than the Bulgars could spare for concentration at any one point of the line.
There was a splendid audacity in General Demetrief's next move after Kirk-Kilesseh. He did not pause to surround Adrianople. To the east was a wide gap in the investing lines. Through this the garrison might have made a sortie with telling effect. But Demetrief knew his enemy. He took it for granted that the garrison was settling itself for a siege.
A branch of the Sofia-Constantinople railway line runs northeast to Yamboli, on the Bulgarian frontier. Between Yamboli and Kirk-Kilesseh is a highway the Turkish kind of highway and no unfordable streams or other natural obstacles to an army's progress. At Yamboli the Bulgars concentrated their third army corps, under General Demetrief, and a portion of their second.
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