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 Luele Burgas was fought.

For a month the garrison reported to be starving was drawing in
supplies from a big section of farming country. When the armistice was
signed it still had pasturage within the lines of defense for flocks of
sheep and herds of cattle. The problem for the Bulgars first and last
was to keep this fact masked and to check the savage sorties and spare
all the guns and men they could for the main army. Volunteers from
Macedonia still in native dress, clerks still in white collars, old men
who had perjured themselves about their age in order to get a rifle,
and the young conscripts of twenty years came to take the place of the
regular forces on the investing lines, who moved on to re-enforce
Demetrief. Fifty thousand Servians, two divisions, were spared after
Kumanova, and speeded across Bulgaria on the single-line railway with
an amazing rapidity to assist, according to plan, the Bulgars in the
investment operations.

To the Turk, Adrianople is a holy city. Here is the most splendid
mosque in all the empire, that built by the conqueror Sultan Selim.
With the shadow of the minarets over his shoulder, the Turkish private
in a trench was ready to die for Allah. But death must come for him. He
is not going to hustle intelligently after paradise. In short, he is a
sit-and-take-it fighter. While any delay of the Bulgarian advance was
invaluable in gaining time, he made no use of his opportunities in a
country of hills and transverse valleys and ravines, which nature meant
for rear-gua