In two weeks the Bulgars had made their dispositions and fought two battles, each lasting three days. They had advanced seventy-five miles over a rough country where the roads were sloughs. The loss in killed and wounded was sixty thousand; one man out of five was down. When officers and men had snatched any sleep it was on the rain-soaked earth. The bread in their haversacks was wet and moldy. When they lay in the fire zones they were lucky if they had this to eat. By day they had dug their way, trench by trench, up to the enemy's position, crouching in the mud to keep clear of bullets. By night they had charged. They were an army in a state of auto-intoxication, bent on the one object of driving the Turkish army back to the narrow line of the peninsula. This accomplished, all the isolated forces in European Turkey, whether at distant Scutari or near-by Adrianople, were without hope of relief. The neck of the funnel was closed; the war practically won. All the world knows now, and the Bulgarian staff must have known at the time, that for a week after Lüle Burgas the utter demoralization of the Turkish retreat left the way open to Constantinople. Why did not General Demetrief go on? Why did that army which had proceeded thus far with such impetuous and irresistible momentum suddenly turn snail? For the reason that the Marathon winner when he drops across the tape is not good for another mile. The Bulgar was on his stomach in the mud, though he was facing toward the heels of the Turk. Food and ammunition were not up. A fresh force of fifty thousand men following up the victory might easily have made its own terms at the door of Yildiz Palace within three or four days; but there was not even a fresh regiment. It was three weeks after Lüle Burgas before Demetrief was ready to attack; three weeks, in which the cholera scare had abated, the panic in Constantinople had come and gone, reenforcements had arrived and been organized into a kind of order, while they built fortifications. The Turkish cruisers supported both of Nazim Pasha's flanks with the fire of heavier guns than the Bulgars possessed. There was an approachable Turkish front of only about sixteen miles. Without silencing the Turkish batteries, Demetrief sent his infantry against the redoubts. He lost five or six thousand men without gaining a single fort. Against a stubborn and even semi-intelligent foe there is no storming a narrow frontal line of fortifications when you may not turn the ends. Adrianople lay across the straight line of transportation by railroad and highway to the peninsula. All munitions for Demetrief's army had to go around it in the miserable, antiquated ox-carts. It was the rock splitting the flood of the Bulgarian advance. While the world was hearing rumors of the city's fall, the truth was that it was not really invested until a month after Lüle Burgas was fought.