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Moreover, M. Pashitch, the Servian prime minister, maintained that whereas by the preliminary treaty Bulgaria was to send detachments to assist the Servian armies operating in the Vardar valley, the reverse had been found necessary and Adrianople had only been taken with the help of 60,000 Servians and by means of the Servian siege guns.
Serbia was tacitly given a free hand in her attempt to reach the sea in Northern Albania. The action of Austria-Hungary in vetoing her access to the Adriatic forced Serbia to turn her eyes from west to south and to seek her economic outlet to the sea down the valley of the Vardar to Salonica and the Aegean.
On October 12th, the French General Serrail arrived and moved with the French forces, as has already been said, to the Serbian aid. They met with a number of successes. On October 19th they seized the Bulgarian town of Struminitza, and occupied strong positions on the left bank of the Vardar.
The importance of this point was greatly emphasized by the existence of the Nish-Salonika railway, which is Serbia's only direct outlet to the sea, and runs through Macedonia from north to south, following the right or western bank of the river Vardar.
On the 10th the French announced that they were now occupying a new front, along the Bojimia, a branch of the Vardar, and that they were in touch with the left flank of the British. Meanwhile, on the east side of the Vardar, General Todoroff was continuing his attack on the British. He had massed together about 100,000 men.
As a slight offset to the disheartening news that the Bulgarians had at last definitely joined hands with the Teutonic forces, came the tidings that France and England had declared war on Bulgaria and that their forces, which had been landing in Saloniki, were already advancing up the Vardar with the intention of making a junction with the southern Serbian forces.
On the morrow the front widened to twenty-two miles, and the advance increased to twelve; and within a week the Serbians had cleared the angle between the rivers and crossed the Tcherna on their left and the Vardar above Demir Kapu on their right.
The cession of Monastir, Ochrida, and the Vardar Valley to Bulgaria would have rendered this impossible, for it would not merely have driven a wedge between Serbia and Greece, but would have placed two customs frontiers, the Bulgarian and the Greek, between Serbia and the sea, instead of only one, the Turkish, as hitherto.
Macedonia to the west of the Vardar and Bregalnitza Rivers was the only part of Turkey which adjoined Greece and Servia. Thrace, on the other hand, marched with the southern boundary of Bulgaria from the sources of the Mesta River to the Black Sea, and its eastern half was intersected diagonally by the main road from Sofia to Adrianople and Constantinople.
In this concentration-area it gathered momentum during the earlier part of the seventh century A.D., and then burst out with irresistible force in all directions, eastward across the Maritsa basin till it reached the Black Sea, and southward down the Vardar to the shores of the Aegean. Beneath this Slavonic flood the Greek race in Europe was engulfed.
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