nk they
could have designed that; but I think rather it was forced upon them by
the politicians saying, "We must hurry through, we must attempt
something, no matter how desperate it is, something decisive." But,
apart from the high opinion I have of the Bulgarian generals, the fact
remains that after Adrianople had been attacked in a very half-hearted
way, and after the main Bulgarian army had pushed on to the lines of
Chatalja, the Bulgarians called in the aid of a Servian division to help
them against Adrianople. I am sure they would not have done that if it
had not been their wish to subdue Adrianople.

The position of the Bulgarian army on the lines of Chatalja with
Adrianople in the hands of the enemy was this, that it took practically
their whole transport facilities to keep the army supplied with food,
and there was no possibility of keeping the army properly supplied with
ammunition. So if the Bulgarian generals had really designed to carry
the lines of Chatalja without first attacking Adrianople, they
miscalculated seriously. But I do not think they did. It was probably a
plan forced upon them by political authority, feeling that the war must
be pushed to a conclusion somehow. Why the Bulgarians did not take
Adrianople quickly in the first place is, I think, to be explained
simply by the fact that they could not. But if their train of sappers
had been of the same kind of stuff as their field artillery, they could
have taken Adrianople in the first week of the war.

The Bulgarians had no effective siege-train. A press photographer at
Mustapha Pasha was very much annoyed because photographs he had taken of
guns passing through the towns were not allowed to be sent through to
his paper. He sent a humorous message to his editor, that he could not
send photographs of guns, "it being a military secret that the
Bulgarians had any guns." But the reason the Bulgarians did not want
photographs taken was that these guns were practically useless for the
purpose for which they were intended.

The main excellence of the Bulgarian army was its infantry, which was
very steady under punishment, admirably disciplined, perfect in courage,
and which had, I think, that supreme merit in infantry, that it always
wanted to get to work with the bayonet. The Bulgarian soldiers had a
joke among themselves. The order for "Bayonets forward!" was, as near as
I could get it, "_Nepret nanochi_." Arguing by similarity of sound, the
Bulgaria