The Great Events by Famous Historians

Meanwhile at Lakhanas an equally sanguinary two days' conflict had been in progress. The Greeks attacked and finally captured the Bulgarian entrenched positions. Time after time their charges failed to reach, but eventually their persistent courage and inimitable élan won home, and the Bulgarians fled in utter rout and panic, leaving everything, even many of their uniforms, behind them.

King Constantine, speaking in Germany recently, attributed the success of the Greek armies to the courage of his men, the excellence of the artillery, and to the soundness of the strategy, but I think he overlooked the chief factor that made for victory—the unspeakable horror, loathing, and rage aroused by the atrocities committed upon the Greek wounded whenever a temporary local reverse left a few of the gallant fellows at the mercy of the Bulgarians. I have seen an officer and a dozen men who had had their eyes put out, and their ears, tongues, and noses cut off, upon the field of battle during the lull between two Greek charges. And there were other worse, but nameless, barbarities both upon the wounded and the dead who for a brief moment fell into Bulgarian hands.

This was during the very first days of the war; later, when the news of the wholesale massacres of Greek peaceable inhabitants at Nigrita, Serres, Drama, Doxat, etc., became known to the army, it raised a spirit which no pen can describe. The men "saw red," they were drunk with lust for honorable revenge, from which nothing but death could stop them. Wounds, mortal wounds, were unheeded so long as the man still had strength to stagger on; I have seen a sergeant with a great fragment of common shell through his lungs run forward for several hundred yards vomiting blood, but still encouraging his men, who, truth to tell, were as eager as he. It is impossible to describe or even conceive the purposeful and aching desire to get to close quarters regardless of all losses and of all consequences. The Bulgarians, in committing those obscene atrocities, not only damned themselves forever in the eyes of humanity, but they doubled, nay, quadrupled, the strength of the Greek army. Nothing short of extermination could have prevented the Greek army from victory; there was not a man who would not have a million times rather died than have hesitated for a moment to go forward.

The days of those first battles were steaming hot with a pitiless Macedonian sun. The Greek troops were in far too high a state of spiritual excitation to require food, even if food had been able to keep pace with their lightning advance. All that the men wanted, all they ever asked for, was water and ammunition; and here the greatest self-sacrifice of all to the cause was frequently seen; for a wounded man, unable to struggle forward another yard, would, as he fell to the ground, hastily unbuckle water-bottle and cartridge-cases and hand them to an advancing comrade with a cheery word, "Go on and good luck, my lad," and then as often as not he would lay him down to die with parched lips and cleaving tongue.

I was myself, at the pressing and personal invitation of King Constantine, the first to visit Nigrita, where the Bulgarian General, before leaving, had the inhabitants locked into their houses, and then with guncotton and petroleum burned the place to the ground. Here 470 victims were burned alive, mostly old folk, women, and children. Serres, Drama, Kilkis, and Demir Hissar (all important towns) have similar tales to tell, only the death-roll is longer. Small wonder that these stories of ferocity are not given credence, for they are incredible, and it is only when one studies the Bulgarian character that one can understand how such orgies of carnage were possible.