But the allies fully realized the danger of quarreling among themselves, which would have been much harder to avert if their armies had been acting together as a unit under a single command. Happily, each army was to make a separate campaign under its own generals; each had its own separate task; each was to strike at the force in front of its own borders. Prompt, staggering blows before the Turkish reserves could arrive were essential. The Montenegrins in the northwest, who had the side-show (while Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece had the three rings under the main tent), did their part when they invested the garrison of Scutari. Advancing northward, the Greeks, with strong odds in their favor, easily took care of the Turkish force at Elassona and continued their advance toward Salonika. Advancing southward, the Serbs, one hundred thousand strong (that is, the army of their first line), moved on Kumanova among the hills, where the forty thousand Turks defending the city of Uskub would make their stand as inevitably as a board of army engineers would select Sandy Hook as a site for some of the defenses of New York harbor. Confidently, the Turkish commander staked all on the issue. The Serbs did not depend alone on mass or envelopment by flank. They murderously and swiftly pressed the attack in the front as well as on the sides; and the cost of victory was seven or eight thousand casualties. Two or three fragments of the Turkish army escaped along the road; otherwise, there was complete disintegration. Uskub was now undefended. It was the ancient capital of Servia; and the feelings of the Serbs, as they marched in, approximated what ours would be if our battalions were swinging down Pennsylvania Avenue after a Mexican proconsul had occupied the White House for five hundred years. Meanwhile, at Monastir were forty thousand more Turks. So far as helping their comrades at Kumanova was concerned, they might as well have been in jail in Kamchatka. You can imagine them sitting cross-legged, Turkish fashion, waiting their turn. They broke the precedent of Plevna, which the garrisons of Adrianople and Scutari gloriously kept, by yielding rather easily. There must have been a smile on the golden dome of the tomb of Napoleon, who thrashed the armies of Europe in detail. A Servian division, immediately after Kumanova, started southwest over the mountain passes in the snow and through the valleys in the mud to clinch the great Servian object of the war with the nine points of possession. To young Servia, Durazzo, the port of old Servia, is as water to the gasping fish. It stands for unhampered trade relations with the world; for economic freedom. When that division, ragged and footsore, came at last in sight of the blue Adriatic--well, it may safely be called a historic moment for one little nation.