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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.
The transport was, naturally, the great problem which faced the
generals. I have already said something about the extreme difficulty
of that transport. I have seen at Seleniki, which is the point at which
the rail-head was, within thirty miles of Constantinople as the crow
flies, ox-wagons, which had come from the Shipka Pass, in the north
of Bulgaria. I asked one driver how long he had been on the road; he
told me three weeks. He was carrying food down to the front.
The way the ox-wagons were used for transport was a marvel of
organisation to me. The transport officer at Mustapha Pasha, with
whom I became very friendly, was lyrical in his praise of the oxwagon.
It was, he said, the only thing that stuck to him during the
war. The railway got choked, and even the horse failed, but the ox
never failed. There were thousands of ox-wagons crawling across
the country. These oxen do not walk, they crawl, like an insect, with
an irresistible crawl. It reminded me of those armies of soldier ants
which move across Africa, eating everything which they come across,
and stopping at nothing. I had an ox-wagon coming from Mustapha
Pasha to Kirk Kilisse, and we went over the hills and down through
the valleys, and stopped for nothing—we never had to unload once.
And one can sleep in those ox-wagons. There is no jumping and
pulling at the traces, such as you get with a harnessed horse. The
ox-wagon moved slowly; but it always moved. If the ox-transport
had not been so perfectly organised, and if the oxen had not been so
patiently enduring as they proved to be, the Bulgarian army must
have perished by starvation.
And yet at Mustapha Pasha a Censor would not allow us to send
anything about the ox-wagons. That officer thought the ox-cart was
derogatory to the dignity of the army. If we had been able to say that
they had such things as motor transport, or steam wagons, he would
have cheerfully allowed us to send it.
After Lule Burgas the ox-transport had to do the impossible. It was
impossible for it to maintain the food and the ammunition supply of
the army at the front, which I suppose must have numbered 250,000
to 300,000 men. That army had got right away from its base, with
the one line of railway straddled by the enemy, and with the ox as
practically the only means of transport.
The position of the Bulgarian nation towards its Government on
the outbreak of the war is, I think, extremely interesting as a lesson
in patriotism. Every man fought who could fight. But further, every
family put its surplus of goods into the war-chest. The men marched
away to the front; and the women of the house loaded up the surplus
goods which they had in the house, and brought them for the use
of the military authorities on the ox-wagons, which also went to the
military authorities to be used on requisition.
The Shipka Pass