The Great Events by Famous Historians [Volumes 1-14]

To the Turk, Adrianople is a holy city. Here is the most splendid mosque in all the empire, that built by the conqueror Sultan Selim. With the shadow of the minarets over his shoulder, the Turkish private in a trench was ready to die for Allah. But death must come for him. He is not going to hustle intelligently after paradise. In short, he is a sit-and-take-it fighter. While any delay of the Bulgarian advance was invaluable in gaining time, he made no use of his opportunities in a country of hills and transverse valleys and ravines, which nature meant for rear-guard 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 Bulgarian army back, there was no hope of relieving the garrison, whose fate was only a matter of time.

At the London Peace Conference the allies stood firm for the possession of Adrianople. The Turkish commissioners, after repeating for six weeks that they would never cede it, had finally agreed to yield on orders from Constantinople, when the young Turks killed Nazim Pasha, the Turkish commander-in-chief, and overthrew the old cabinet. "You can have Adrianople when you take it!" was the defiance of the new cabinet to the allies.