Part 3 (1/2)
Whilst Adrianople was in the hands of the enemy, the Bulgarians had practically no line of communication.
My reason for believing that it was not the original plan of the generals to leave Adrianople ”masked” is, that in the first instance I have a high opinion of the generals, and I do not think they could have designed that; but think rather it was forced upon them by the politicians saying, ”We must hurry through, we must attempt something, no matter how desperate it is, something decisive.” In the second instance, after Adrianople had been attacked in a very half-hearted way, and after the main Bulgarian army had pushed on to the lines of Chatalja, the Bulgarians called in the aid of a Serbian division to help them against Adrianople. I am sure they would not have done that if it had not been their wish to subdue Adrianople. To be forced to invoke Serbian aid was a serious wound to their vanity.
The position of the Bulgarian army on the lines of Chatalja, with Adrianople in the hands of the enemy, was this: that it took practically their whole transport facilities to keep the army supplied with food, and there was no possibility of keeping the army properly supplied with ammunition. So if the Bulgarian generals had really designed to carry the lines of Chatalja without first attacking Adrianople, they miscalculated seriously. But I do not think they did; I think it was a plan forced upon them by political authority, feeling that the war must be pushed to a conclusion somehow. Why the Bulgarians did not take Adrianople quickly in the first place is to be explained simply by the fact that they could not. But if their train of sappers had been of the same kind of stuff as their field artillery, they could have taken Adrianople in the first week of the war. The Bulgarians, however, had no effective siege train. A Press photographer at Mustapha Pasha was very much annoyed because photographs he had taken of guns pa.s.sing through the town were not allowed to be sent through to his paper. He sent a humorous message to his editor, that he could not send photographs of guns, ”it being a military secret that the Bulgarians had any guns.” But the reason the Bulgarians did not want photographs taken was that these guns were practically useless for the purpose for which they were intended.
In short, whilst Adrianople stood it was impossible to keep 250,000 men in the field at Chatalja with the guns and ammunition necessary for their work. Therefore the taking of Adrianople should have followed the Battle of Lule Burgas.
A reservation is perhaps necessary. If after Lule Burgas the victorious Bulgarians had been able to push on at once, the fleeing Turks might have been followed to the very walls of Constantinople. If even the flower of the force to the extent of 50,000 men had gone on with all the guns, ammunition, and food possible, the enterprise would probably have succeeded. But one may judge that that too was impossible, in view of the transport position. There was a long pause. Then an attempt was made to do deliberately against an entrenched army what it was thought impossible to do against a fleeing rabble. Reasons of humanity were given to me to explain the hesitation to a.s.sault Adrianople. The Bulgarians shrank from the great expenditure of men necessary, from the sacrifice of the Christian population involved. Such reasons would be admirable if truthful; but they are not war.
When the action against the lines of Chatalja was at last opened the Turks had had time to entrench strongly, to recover their wind, to recognise that they had come to the last ditch. On November 17, after the artillery reconnaissance of the position by the Bulgarians, I had slight hope that success would be possible; it looked as if they were short of ammunition, and not well supplied with food. Sh.e.l.ls were used very sparingly. When a storm was necessary there was a shower. Even on that day infantrymen were asked to do the work of shrapnel, and valuable lives paid for very slight information. Still, the Turkish artillery work was so poor; their sticking to their trenches was so persistent, that I half antic.i.p.ated that the night would see a big Bulgarian success on the left flank, making an effective attack on the centre possible with the morning. But by next morning little had been done.
That day was spent in a heroic display of infantry courage. Men rushed out from trenches against forts the strength of which was unknown, with practically no artillery backing. Certainly the day was misty, and artillery work could not have been properly effective. If the position was--as I guess it was--that there was no adequate supply of ammunition, the choice of the day was good. If it were possible to succeed with infantry alone it would have been possible on that day and with those men. But it was impossible. That night operations were suspended, and negotiations for peace followed.
Meanwhile in other quarters of the theatre of war the Balkan Allies had been doing as well or even better. True, the Montenegrins were not very successful against Scutari (it did not fall until the second phase of the war), and the Greeks had been held up at Janina. But the Serbians had swept the Turks from Old Serbia and from Northern Macedonia in fine style, and had carried through an expedition of great gallantry over the mountains to the Adriatic. As the Bulgarians and Turks stood at bay on opposite ranges of hills within 25 miles of Constantinople, all that was left of Turkish territory in Europe was the little peninsula on which Constantinople stood, the peninsula of Gallipoli, and the towns of Adrianople, Scutari, and Janina. It was certainly high time for the Turk to talk of peace.
War was now interrupted for a time to allow the Balkan Allies who had shown themselves so gallant in war to show their mettle as statesmen and negotiators. It is one of the established facts of history that warlike prowess alone has never made a nation securely great. Within the Balkan Peninsula that was made plain during the invasions of the Goths and the Huns. There was now to be a melancholy modern proof. At the end of 1912 the Balkan States, united and victorious, were in the position to take the Balkan Peninsula for themselves and keep out European interference for the future. They had soon dissipated all this advantage with mutual jealousies and blundering negotiations. Already, before the Peace Conference had actually begun its work, charges and counter-charges of atrocities were bandied about between Bulgar and Greek. A Greek official account set forth the following accusations:
The detailed inquiry with regard to excesses and crimes committed by the Bulgarian army shows that they const.i.tute a cause for the disturbances reported during the first days after the surrender of Salonica. According to this inquiry, the excesses of the Bulgarians can be divided into three categories: (1) damage to property; (2) crimes against the life and honour of private persons, especially Turks; and (3) offences--and these were the less frequent--due to misconceived political interest. In the majority of cases Bulgarian soldiers and peasants gave themselves up to pillaging. At Va.s.silika, Agiaparaskevi, Apostola, Alihatzilar, Serres, Langada, Asvestohori, Baroritza, Tohanli, Karaburnu, Vardar, Doiran, and Salonica pillaging and thefts of all kinds were committed, the stolen articles including horses, goats, sheep, barley, hay, jewels, and other articles of value, large sums of money, carpets, furniture, clothes, and arms. Attacks were made on Austrian subjects, and the Austrian Consulate in consequence, lodged an energetic protest. Unspeakable outrages were committed at Serres and at the other towns and villages mentioned above. At Doiran, despite the protests of the munic.i.p.ality, the Bulgarians seized and imprisoned the rich Turkish residents, who after having secured their liberty by the payment of enormous ransoms, were ambushed by the Bulgarians and ma.s.sacred, sixty of them being killed.
The political crimes were of little importance, as the greater number of the Bulgarians ardently desire the maintenance of the Balkan Alliance, especially a Greco-Bulgarian _entente_, safeguarding their political interests.
[Ill.u.s.tration: _Exclusive News Agency_
ADRIANOPLE
A general view, showing the Mosque of Sultan Selim on the left and the Old Mosque on the right]
On the Bulgarian side just as positive charges against the Greeks were made. It is not my province to attempt to judge as to the truth of the Salonica events, but I quote this official charge as ill.u.s.trative of the spirit which had come over the Balkan League before the close of 1912.
CHAPTER V
A CHAPTER IN BALKAN DIPLOMACY
Watching through many exciting weeks the course of a Balkan Peace Conference, I had the opportunity of seeing another phase of the Near Eastern character in its various sub-divisions--the Turkish, the Grecian, the Roumanian, the Bulgarian, and the Serbian. It was in certain general characteristics the same character with certain points of difference, ranging from almost purely Oriental through various grades until it reached to a phase which was rather more than half European. In various aspects it was nave, wily, deceitful, vainglorious, truculent, servile, stubborn, supple. At times it was very trying. Usually it was distinctly amusing. There were some exceptions among the Balkan statesmen, but as a rule they were men of very ordinary ability and very extraordinary conceit. Close a.s.sociation with them dissipated for a time the extremely good impression that Bulgarian, Serbian, Grecian, and Roumanian peasants and officials and traders had made on me, meeting them as soldiers or as wayside hosts.
When the Bulgarian progress towards Constantinople was stopped at Chatalja, the Bulgarian authorities favoured negotiations for peace. To this Greece very strenuously, and Serbia more gently, objected. They offered as an alternative suggestion to send aid to the Chatalja lines to help Bulgaria to force things to a conclusion there. But by this time the Balkan Allies were at least as much suspicious of one another as they were hostile to the Turk. The troubles after the fall of Salonica had given a picturesque ill.u.s.tration of the hollowness of the Balkan League. Greece and Bulgaria had raced armies down for the capture of that city, and the Greeks had won in the race by bribing the Turkish commander to surrender to them--the Bulgarians said sourly (an absurd accusation!). Now Bulgarian and Greek were at the point of open war in Salonica, and were doing a little odd killing of one another to keep their hands in practice. Around Adrianople Bulgarian and Serbian were growling at one another, the Bulgarians treating their friends rather badly, so far as I could judge. Both racial sections of the army of siege were inclined to do very little, because each was waiting for the other to begin. Bulgaria, too, was extremely anxious to have no more friendly allied troops in the areas which she had marked out for herself. She was aware that the Greek population of Thrace was agitating for an autonomous Thrace instead of a Bulgarian annexation, and feared that the presence of a Greek army in the province would strengthen this movement.
In the upshot Serbia and Montenegro supported Bulgaria in the signing of an armistice. Greece refused to sign an armistice, but joined in the negotiations for a final peace which opened at the Conference of St.
James's, London, in December 1912. This Conference quickly resolved itself into a wonderful acrobatic display of ground and lofty fiction, of strange childish ”bluffs,” of complicated efforts at mystery which would not deceive a Punch-and-Judy show audience.
In the East and the Near East, the man who wants to buy a horse goes to the market-place in the first instance, and curses publicly all horses and thoughts of horses. He proclaims that he will see his father's tomb defiled before he will ever touch a horse again. Hearing of this, a man who wishes to sell a horse appears in public, and proclaims that the horse he has in his stall is the sun and the moon and the stars of his life: that sooner than part with it he would eat filth and become as a dog. At this stage the negotiations for a bargain are in fair progress.
After some days--the East and the Near East is not very thrifty with time--a satisfactory bargain is struck.
The Balkan Peace Conference was carried on very much on those lines. In a London winter atmosphere, among the unimaginative and matter-of-fact London population, the effect was strangely fantastic. In an early stage of the negotiations the Turkish delegates (who were out to gain time in the desperate hope that something would turn up) said one day that they must ask for instructions on some point, about which they were as fully instructed as it was possible to be: said the next sitting day that unfortunately their instructions had not arrived: and the next sitting day that their instructions had arrived but unfortunately they could not decipher some of the words, and must refer to Constantinople again!
With all this it was difficult to believe that we lived in a civilised age of telegraphs and newspapers and railway trains. The mind was transported back insensibly to the times of the great Caliph of Bagdad.
Whilst the Turks dallied in the hope that something would turn up, and devoted a painstaking but painfully obvious industry to the task of trying to sow dissensions among the Balkan Allies, these Balkan Allies engaged among themselves in a vigorous Press campaign of mutual abuse and insinuation. The seeds of dissension which the Turk was scattering refused to germinate, because already the field which was sown had a full-grown crop. But the Balkan Allies had one point of elementary common sense. They were resolved to take from the Turk all that was possible before they fell out among themselves as to the division of the spoil. (As it happened, they forgot to take into account the contingency that after the division it would still be within the power of the Turk to seek some revenge if they abandoned their League of Alliance, which alone had made the humiliation of the Turkish Empire possible.)
The first squabble between the Allies was over the appointment of a leader or chief spokesman of the Balkan delegates. If there had been a touch of imagination and real friendliness between them they would have selected the senior Montenegrin delegate in acknowledgment of the gallantry which had kept Montenegro during all the centuries unsubdued by the Turkish invader. Or there were reasons why the chief Greek delegate should have been chosen, as he was Prime Minister in his own country, and therefore the senior delegate in official position. But there was not enough good feeling among the Allies to allow of any such settlement. The delegation was left without an official spokesman and there had to be a roster of Presidents in alphabetical order as the only way to soothe the embittered jealousies of rival allies. That was the first of a series of childish incidents.