[Footnote 1:  Reprinted by permission from an article in Everybody’s Magazine.]

Against any one of his little Christian neighbors the Turk had superior numbers, and had only to concentrate on a single section of his many-sided frontier line.  It had never entered his mind that the little neighbors would form an alliance.  He had trusted to their jealousies to keep them apart.  United, they could strike him on the front and both sides simultaneously.  He was due for an attack coming down the main street and from alleys to the right and left.

In this situation he must temporarily accept the defensive.  Meanwhile, he foresaw the battalions of “chocolate soldiers” beating themselves to pieces against the breastworks of his garrisons, and Greek turning on Serb and Serb on Bulgar after a taste of real war.  Against divided counsels would be one mind, which, with reenforcements of the faithful from Asia Minor, would send the remnants of the opera bouffe invasion flying back over their passes.

But the allies fully realized the danger of quarreling among themselves, which would have been much harder to avert if their armies had been acting together as a unit under a single command.  Happily, each army was to make a separate campaign under its own generals; each had its own separate task; each was to strike at the force in front of its own borders.  Prompt, staggering blows before the Turkish reserves could arrive were essential.

The Montenegrins in the northwest, who had the side-show (while Bulgaria, Servia, and Greece had the three rings under the main tent), did their part when they invested the garrison of Scutari.

Advancing northward, the Greeks, with strong odds in their favor, easily took care of the Turkish force at Elassona and continued their advance toward Salonika.

Advancing southward, the Serbs, one hundred thousand strong (that is, the army of their first line), moved on Kumanova among the hills, where the forty thousand Turks defending the city of Uskub would make their stand as inevitably as a board of army engineers would select Sandy Hook as a site for some of the defenses of New York harbor.  Confidently, the Turkish commander staked all on the issue.

The Serbs did not depend alone on mass or envelopment by flank.  They murderously and swiftly pressed the attack in the front as well as on the sides; and the cost of victory was seven or eight thousand casualties.  Two or three fragments of the Turkish army escaped along the road; otherwise, there was complete disintegration.