n 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
ma