It was three weeks after Luele Burgas before Demetrief was ready to attack; three weeks, in which the cholera scare had abated, the panic in Constantinople had come and gone, reenforcements had arrived 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-guard action.  A company of infantry posted on a hill could force a regiment to deploy and attack, and a few miles farther on could repeat the process.  Cavalry could harass the flanks of the attacking force.  Field-guns could get a commanding position above a road, with safe cover for retreat.