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Updated: September 12, 2025
At the mouth of the Vardar the fresh-water fowls were starting up with noisy cries, or standing on the edge of the bank immovable upon their long legs. Opposite the prow, a city was rising up out of the albuminous waves of fog. In a bit of the clear, blue sky appeared various minarets, their peaks sparkling with the fires of Aurora.
But the enemy failed to cut off the retreat, and by the 12th both the French and British forces were on Greek territory fortifying a magnificent position which stretched from the mouth of the Vardar round to the Gulf of Orphano and enclosed the Chalchidice peninsula.
A few fortified cities held out, Adrianople on the Maritsa continued to cover Constantinople; Salonika at the mouth of the Vardar survived a two hundred years siege; while further south Athens, Korinth, and Patras escaped extinction. But the tide of invasion surged around their walls.
Submarine mines, stored as if ready to be launched, were discovered at the mouth of the Vardar River, and the fort at the entrance to the upper Gulf of Saloniki had been secretly strengthened and heavy guns mounted. The port swarmed with German and Austrian and Bulgarian spies; its atmosphere was heavy with hostility to the Allies.
A still narrower chance intervened between the French and the Serbs who were fighting at the Babuna Pass to bar the way to Prilep and Monastir, and at one time the French flung out their left to within ten miles of the Serbian position. But their own communications were threatened all down the narrow line of the Vardar, and they were hopelessly outnumbered by the Bulgarian forces.
They also entered into a convention with Roumania by which that power agreed to intervene in case of war between the late Allies. And war having been declared, Roumania seized Silistria at midnight, July 10. Meanwhile the Servian and Greek forces were fighting the Bulgarians hard at Kilkis, Doiran, and other points between the Vardar and the Struma.
Already her victorious armies had occupied Macedonia from the Albanian frontier eastward beyond the Vardar River to Strumnitza, Istib, and Kochana, and southward below Monastir and Ghevgheli, where they touched the boundary of the Greek occupation of Southern Macedonia.
Now what the military forces of King Peter did during the war of the Balkan states with the Ottoman Empire was to occupy all European Turkey south of Servia between the prolongation of that boundary line and the new Kingdom of Albania till they met the Hellenic army advancing northward under Crown Prince Constantine, when the two governments agreed on a common boundary for New Servia and New Greece along a line starting from Lake Presba and running eastward between Monastir and Florina to the Vardar River a little to the south of Ghevgheli.
He reports that the position now held by the Allies is impregnable. The perimeter held by them is fifty miles in length and stretches from the Vardar River on the west to the Gulf of Orplanos on the east. There are three lines of defense. To assist the first two on the east are Lakes Beshik and Langaza, on the west the Vardar River.
To the north again the ground falls abruptly to the level of Lake Langaza, thence turns eastward to the height of Dautbaba, after which the lines could be stretched to the borders of the swampy region at the mouth of the Vardar, ground which is as impassable as the Pripet Marshes on the Russian front and which were formerly occupied by the Bulgarian comatjis, in spite of all the efforts of the Turks to eject or capture them.
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