Uskub was now undefended.  It was the ancient capital of Servia; and the feelings of the Serbs, as they marched in, approximated what ours would be if our battalions were swinging down Pennsylvania Avenue after a Mexican proconsul had occupied the White House for five hundred years.  Meanwhile, at Monastir were forty thousand more Turks.  So far as helping their comrades at Kumanova was concerned, they might as well have been in jail in Kamchatka.  You can imagine them sitting cross-legged, Turkish fashion, waiting their turn.  They broke the precedent of Plevna, which the garrisons of Adrianople and Scutari gloriously kept, by yielding rather easily.  There must have been a smile on the golden dome of the tomb of Napoleon, who thrashed the armies of Europe in detail.

A Servian division, immediately after Kumanova, started southwest over the mountain passes in the snow and through the valleys in the mud to clinch the great Servian object of the war with the nine points of possession.  To young Servia, Durazzo, the port of old Servia, is as water to the gasping fish.  It stands for unhampered trade relations with the world; for economic freedom.  When that division, ragged and footsore, came at last in sight of the blue Adriatic—­well, it may safely be called a historic moment for one little nation.

Now we turn from the side lines, where the Serbs and the Greeks were occupied, to the neck of the funnel through which the Turkish reenforcements from Asia Minor were coming.  There the Bulgars had undertaken the great, vital task of the war against the main Turkish army.

The Bulgarian army was little given to gaiety and laughter, but sang the “Shuma Maritza” on the march.  This is the song of big men in boots—­big white men with set faces—­making the thunder of a torrent as they charge.  “Roaring Maritza” is the nearest that you can come to putting it into English.  The Maritza is the national river, and the song pictures it swollen and rushing in the winter rains or when the snows on the Balkans melt, on its way past the Bulgarian border into Turkey; and the gray army was now to follow it to the Aegean, in the spirit of its flood, and make the harbor at its mouth Bulgarian.

Yes, a gray army, bent on a grim business in a hurry, in gray winter weather and chill mountain mists, with the sun showing through overcast skies—­something of the kind of weather that bred the Scotch.  Cromwell or Stonewall Jackson would have felt at home, saying his prayers at the double-quick, in such company.  As mementos from home, the soldiers wore in their caps and buttonholes withered flowers and sprigs of green which their womenfolk had given in farewell.  The women were just as Spartan as the Spartans; perhaps more so.  If any soldier lacked innate courage, the spur of public opinion drove him forward in step with his comrades.