outbreak of the war.

CHAPTER VII

A WAR CORRESPONDENT'S TRIALS IN BULGARIA

A sense of grievance was the first fruits of my experience as a war
correspondent in Bulgaria. It was the general policy of the Bulgarian
army and the Bulgarian military authorities to prevent war
correspondents seeing anything of their operations. They wished nothing
to interfere with the secrecy of their plans. There were only three
British journalists who succeeded, in the ultimate result, in getting to
the front and seeing the final battle of the first phase of the war, at
Chatalja. There were over a hundred correspondents who attempted to go.
Perhaps as I was one of three who succeeded, I do not think I,
personally, have any reason to complain. But I found a good deal of
vexation in the Bulgarian policy, which was to prevent any knowledge of
their plans, their dispositions, their strategy, and their tactics,
from getting beyond the small circle of their own General Staff. Even
some of their generals in the field were kept in partial ignorance.
Officers of high standing, unless they were on the General Staff, knew
little of the general plan; they were informed only about the particular
operations in which they were engaged.

This policy of secrecy was, however, a good thing from the point of view
of getting to know the Bulgarian people. If the military authorities had
given me facilities to go with the army and see its operations I should
have become familiar with the Headquarters Staff, perhaps with a few
regimental officers, but not with the great mass of the army nor with
the Bulgarian people generally. But the refusal of facilities to
accompany the army cast upon me the responsibility of trying to get
through somehow to the front, and in the process of getting through I
won to knowledge of the peasant soldiers and their home life.

Ultimately the residuum of my grievance was not with the secretive
methods of the Bulgarians--they were wise and necessary--but with the
wild fictions which some correspondents thought to be the proper
response to that policy of secretiveness.

Returned to Kirk Kilisse from the Bulgarian lines at Chatalja, I amused
myself in an odd hour with burrowing among a great pile of newspapers in
the Censor's office, and reading here and there the war news from
English, French, and Belgian papers.

Dazed, amazed, I recognised that I had seemingly mistaken the duties of
a war correspondent. For some six