Naturally, Bulgarian generalship had to adapt its plan of campaign to the obstacles between it and its adversary.  For armies are cumbrous affairs.  In all times they have been tied down to roads and bridges.  The main highway and the main railway line from Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, to Constantinople both ran through Adrianople.  Nature meant this city, set in a basin among hills, for defense, and for the center of any army defending Thrace.  On the near-by hills is a circle of permanent forts that commands all approaches for guns or infantry.  In front of it is the turbulent Maritza, and to the northeast lies the town of Kirk-Kilesseh, partly fortified and naturally strong, which formed the Turkish right.  The left rested at Demotika, to the south of Adrianople, in a rough country inaccessible to prompt action by a large force.

The Bulgars must turn one wing or the other.  Foreign military experts thought that Kirk-Kilesseh could be taken only after a long operation, and then only by a force much larger than the Bulgars could spare for concentration at any one point of the line.  Let two weeks pass without a definite victory, and the Turks would have numbers equal to the Bulgars; a month, superior numbers.  As it was, the Turks had altogether, including the Adrianople garrison, a hundred and seventy-five thousand men in strong position against the Bulgars’ first line of two hundred and eighty thousand.

A branch of the Sofia-Constantinople railway line runs northeast to Yamboli, on the Bulgarian frontier.  Between Yamboli and Kirk-Kilesseh is a highway—­the Turkish kind of highway—­and no unfordable streams or other natural obstacles to an army’s progress.  At Yamboli the Bulgars concentrated their third army corps, under General Demetrief, and a portion of their second.  The rest of the second faced Adrianople, while the first corps operated to the south and east.

Swinging around on Kirk-Kilesseh, the third army would not take “No!” for an answer.  The Bulgarian infantry stormed the redoubts in the moonlight.  They knew how to use the bayonet and the Turks did not.  Skilfully driven steel slaughtered Mohammedan fanaticism that fought with clubbed guns, hands, and teeth, asking no quarter this side of Paradise.  Kirk-Kilesseh fell.  The Turkish army, flanked, had to go; Adrianople was isolated.  The Bulgarian dead on the field could not complain; the wounded were in the rear; the living had burning eyes on the next goal.

“Na noj!" ("Fix bayonets!”) had won. “Na noj! Give them the steel!” was the cry of a nation.  Soldiers sang it out to one another on the march.  Children prattled it at home as if it were a new kind of game: 

“Give them the steel and they will go!  Nothing can stop Bulgaria!”

Not more than two Bulgarian soldiers out of twenty ever reached the Turk with a bayonet.  The Turk did not wait for them.  So the bayonet counted no less in the morale of the eighteen than of the two.  Frequently they fixed it at a distance of five or six hundred yards.  Their desire to use it made them press close at all points with the grim initiative that will not be gainsaid.  When they charged, the spirit of cold steel was in their rush.