rd action. A company of infantry posted on a hill could
force a regiment to deploy and attack, and a few miles farther on could
repeat the process. Cavalry could harass the flanks of the attacking
force. Field-guns could get a commanding position above a road, with
safe cover for retreat.

At Mustapha Pasha, twenty miles in front of Adrianople, was a solid old
stone bridge over the Maritza, whose floods in the winter rains would
be a nightmare to engineers who had to maintain a crossing with
pontoons. If ever a corps needed a bridge the second Bulgarian corps
needed this one. They found that a small and badly placed charge of
dynamite had merely knocked out a few stones between two of the
buttresses, leaving the bridge intact enough for all the armies of
Europe to pass over it; and the Turks did not even put a mitrailleuse
behind sandbags in the streets or use field-guns from the adjacent
hills to delay the Bulgars in their crossing.

The soldier who is good only for the defensive can never win. What beat
the Turk was the Turk himself. His army was in the chaos between
old-fashioned organization and an attempt at a modern organization. His
generals were divided in their counsels; his junior officers aped the
modern officer in form, but lacked application. They had ceased to
believe in their religion. Therefore, they did not lead their privates
who did believe. In the midst of the war, captains and lieutenants,
trustworthy observers tell me, would leave their untrained companies of
reservists to march by the road while they themselves rode by train.
They took their soldiers' pay. They neglected all the detail which is
the very essence of that preparation at the bottom without which no
generalship at the top can prevail.

The Bulgarian officers, two-thirds of whom were reservists, enjoyed a
comradeship with their men at the same time that discipline was rigid.
They believed in their God; at least, in the god of efficiency. They
worked hard. They belong in the world of to-day and the Turk does not.
Therefore the Turk has to go.

"We will not make peace without Adrianople!" was the cry of every
Bulgar. Its possession became a national fetish, no less than naval
superiority to the British. Adrianople stood for the real territorial
object of the war. It must be the center of any future line of defense
against the Turk. Practically its siege was set, once there was
stalemate at Tchatalja. With no hope of beating the main B