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 Luele 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.

It was three weeks after Luele Burgas before Demetrief was ready to
attack; three weeks, in which the cholera scare had abated, the panic
in Constantinople had come and gone, reenforcements had arrived