The Great Events by Famous Historians

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. 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. 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!" ("Fix bayonets!") had won. "Na noj! Give them the steel!" was the cry of a nation. Soldiers sang it out to one another on the march. Children prattled it at home as if it were a new kind of game:

"Give them the steel and they will go! Nothing can stop Bulgaria!"

Not more than two Bulgarian soldiers out of twenty ever reached the Turk with a bayonet. The Turk did not wait for them. So the bayonet counted no less in the morale of the eighteen than of the two. Frequently they fixed it at a distance of five or six hundred yards. Their desire to use it made them press close at all points with the grim initiative that will not be gainsaid. When they charged, the spirit of cold steel was in their rush.

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. 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!" For three days this battle, the Waterloo of the war, raged. The advancing Bulgarian infantry went down like ninepins; but it did not give up, for it knew that "they would go when they saw the steel." Again the turning movement in flank crushed in the end. This time the Turkish main army was shattered. It hardly had the cohesiveness of a large mob. It was many little mobs, hungry, staggering on to the rear, where the ravages of cholera awaited.

In two weeks the Bulgars had made their dispositions and fought two battles, each lasting three days. They had advanced seventy-five miles over a rough country where the roads were sloughs. The loss in killed and wounded was sixty thousand; one man out of five was down.

When officers and men had snatched any sleep it was on the rain-soaked earth. The bread in their haversacks was wet and moldy. When they lay in the fire zones they were lucky if they had this to eat. By day they had dug their way, trench by trench, up to the enemy's position, crouching in the mud to keep clear of bullets. By night they had charged. They were an army in a state of auto-intoxication, bent on the one object of driving the Turkish army back to the narrow line of the peninsula. This accomplished, all the isolated forces in European Turkey, whether at distant Scutari or near-by Adrianople, were without hope of relief. The neck of the funnel was closed; the war practically won.

All the world knows now, and the Bulgarian staff must have known at the time, that for a week after Lüle Burgas the utter demoralization of the Turkish retreat left the way open to Constantinople. Why did not General Demetrief go on? Why did that army which had proceeded thus far with such impetuous and irresistible momentum suddenly turn snail?

For the reason that the Marathon winner when he drops across the tape is not good for another mile. The Bulgar was on his stomach in the mud, though he was facing toward the heels of the Turk. Food and ammunition were not up. A fresh force of fifty thousand men following up the victory might easily have made its own terms at the door of Yildiz Palace within three or four days; but there was not even a fresh regiment.