erals a great deal. The men had bread and cheese, sometimes even
bread alone; and that was accounted a satisfactory ration. When meat and
other things could be obtained, they were obtained; but there were long
periods when the Bulgarian soldier had nothing but bread and water. (The
water, unfortunately, he took wherever he could get it, by the side of
his route at any stream he could find. There was no attempt to ensure a
pure water supply for the army.) I do not think that without the
simplicity of commissariat it would have been possible for the Bulgarian
forces to have got as far as they did. There was an entire absence of
tinned foods. If you travelled in the trail of the Bulgarian army, you
found it impossible to imagine that an army had passed that way; because
there was 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 ox-wagon. 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