The artillery work of the Bulgarians was very good indeed; they had an
excellent field-piece, practically the same field-piece as the French
army. Their work was very fine with regard to aim and to the bursting of
shrapnel, and their firing from concealed positions was also good. But I
never saw enterprising work on their part; I never saw them go into the
open, except during a brief time at Chatalja. They seemed to dig
themselves in behind the crest of a hill, where they could fire,
unobserved by the enemy.
Now, with regard to the conduct of the troops. Much has been said about
outrages in this war. I believe that in Macedonia, where irregular
troops were at work, outrages were frequent on both sides; but in my
observation of the main army there was a singular lack of any excess.
The war, as I saw it, was carried out by the Bulgarians under the most
humane possible conditions. At Chundra Bridge I was walking across
country, and I had separated myself from my cart. I arrived at the
bridge at eight o'clock at night, and found a vedette on guard. They
took me for a Turk. I had on English civilian green puttees, and green
was the colour of the Turks. It was a cold night, and I wished to take
refuge at the camp fire, waiting for my cart to come. Though they
thought I was a Turk, they allowed me to stay at their camp fire for two
hours. Then an officer who could speak French appeared, and I was safe;
the men attempted in no way to molest me during those two hours. They
made signs as of cutting throats, and so on, but they were doing it
humorously, and they showed no intention to cut mine. Yet I was there
irregularly, and I could not explain to them how I came to be there.
The extraordinary simplicity of the commissariat helped the Bulgarian
generals a great deal. The men had bread and cheese, sometimes even
bread alone; and that was accounted a satisfactory ration. When meat and
other things could be obtained, they were obtained; but there were long
periods when the Bulgarian soldier had nothing but bread and water. (The
water, unfortunately, he took wherever he could get it, by the side of
his route at any stream he could find. There was no attempt to ensure a
pure water supply for the army.) I do not think that without the
simplicity of commissariat it would have been possible for the Bulgarian
forces to have got as far as they did. There was an entire absence of
tinned foods. If you travelled in the trail of the Bulgarian army, you
found it impossible to imagine that an army had passed that way; because
there was none of the litter which is usually left by an army. It was
not that they cleared away their rubbish with them; it simply did not
exist. Their bread and cheese seemed to be a good fighting diet.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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