ese Macedonians have been used to
all the ways of guerrilla fighting. Roaming through their mountains
in small bands they have harassed the Turkish soldiers continuously.

The Bulgarian ruler Ferdinand had through many years by means of
committees and church jugglery striven to Bulgarize this population,
preparatory to the contemplated seizure of the territory which he has
now been able with the help of the Germanic powers to accomplish.
But in reality the Bulgar population in what was European Turkey was
found only eastward of the Struma in Thracia including Adrianople.
Those regions formed the ample and legitimate field of ambition
for the unification of the Bulgars.

When hostilities broke out in 1914, when Serbia was defending herself
against the Austrians, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the secret ally
by treaty of Austria, did everything possible to forward his designs
against the Serbs and sent armed Bulgar bands into Serb Macedonia.

Shortly below the city of Monastir in the west begins the Greek
frontier, running over eastward to Doiran, where it touches the
Bulgarian frontier. Here the railroad, coming down along the Vardar
River, emerges into the swamp lands and over them passes into the
city of Saloniki.

Here is the old territory of Philip of Macedon, the father of the
conqueror. For some forty or fifty miles these swamps stretch out
from Saloniki, overshadowed by Mt. Olympus on their southern edge.
While not quite so extensive as the Pinsk Swamps, they are quite
as impassable, from a military point of view. In the center of
this region of bulrushes and stunted forests is an open sheet of
shallow water, Lake Enedjee.

Nearly all this swamp land is submerged, but here and there are
small islands. For some years the Turkish soldiers garrisoned these
islands during the mild winter months, living on them in rush huts.
In the summer they would withdraw into the near-by foothills. But
one summer several hundred Comitajis descended into the swamps
and took possession.

The stunted forests and the bulrushes here are traversed by a maze
of narrow waterways, just wide enough for a punt to pass along.
When the soldiers returned in the fall, they started out for their
islands in strings of punts. Presently they were met by volleys of
bullets that seemed to come from all directions out of the bulrushes.
Some, in their panic, leaped out into the shallow water and sunk
in the mire. The rest retired.

For years the