[Illustration: The first King to fly. Ferdinand with Delamines, at Brussels, in 1910. _By courtesy of “The Daily Mirror.”_] The stories of his prowess as Commander-in-Chief of the Bulgarian Army reveal him as a pitiful mixture of craven cowardice and arrogant self-sufficiency. He hovered continually on the fringe of the field of action in his luxurious train, and exercised a restraining influence on the enterprise of his generals and on the courage of his troops. His tongue was forever dripping cant phrases about humanity, he was all composed of compunction as timorous as it was base. But he never lost sight of his one object in waging war; everything was subordinated to his overwhelming desire to enter Constantinople at the head of a victorious army. The first Balkan war was begun as a war of liberation. In a few months Ferdinand had converted it into a war of conquest. His punishment was reaped in the result, for those operations that might reasonably be ascribed to a desire to rescue the Balkan Christians from the Turkish yoke were crowned with success; while his attempts at conquest ended in a humiliating reverse. The climax of his unworthy terrors came when the Bulgarians were encamped opposite the Turks at Chatalja, and the uncleanliness and neglect of both armies resulted in a visitation of cholera. Before that scourge Ferdinand fled, still insisting on maintaining control of the operations. But he would receive no message from the infected camp, and adopted precautions that made the lips of his very toadies curl with scorn. His timorous precautions prevented his generals from capturing Adrianople months before that stronghold really fell, while his explanation that he wished to avoid unnecessary bloodshed deceived no one. During all this fighting he had to bear the contrast afforded by his heir, who, to do him justice, bore his part in the war as became a prince and the heir to a throne. His experience at the siege of Adrianople afforded him the luxury of a new terror. At that siege, as the history of warfare will tell, bombs were for the first time dropped from aeroplanes upon troops and buildings beneath. The practice appealed to Ferdinand’s lively imagination, and struck a new terror into his cowardly soul. He lived in daily dread of an attack from the sky, for the elaborate precautions he took to avoid any contact with King Death did not cover the risk of death from above. The sequel was witnessed when Ferdinand and his Bulgars arrayed themselves in the Great War on the side of the Teuton Powers and on that of Bulgaria’s hereditary enemy, Turkey. The haunting dread of an aeroplane raid upon Sofia was with him night and day. He lost no time in appealing to the Germans for a Zeppelin to aid the Bulgarian operations, and his request was granted.