THE BALKAN ARMIES

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 154, 16 November 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE BALKAN ARMIES

THEIR STRONG AND WEAK POINTS. BRILLIANT BULGARIA. The last American mail brought to hand an exceptionally interesting article on the military situation in the Balkans, contributed to the New York Evening Post of October 5. The writer, it will be noted, gave a remarkably accurate forecast of the plan of campaign which has been followed by the Allies. The four nations in the Balkan Confederation, says the New York Post's contributor, have a total population of about 10,500,000, or in the neighborhood of 15,000,000, perhaps, counting in the peoples of the same races in European Turkey, who are in sympathy with their aspirations. They have already, by reliable accounts, placed in the field an effective total of almost 1,000,000 armed men; and to anyone who has studied the military system of these little States this does not seem incomprehensible or unlikely. It is the common idea in this country that a Balkan army exists largely on paper, and that an estimate of mobilisation is simply an array of fancy figures. No more serious mistake could be made. War, or rather military service, is an earnest matter with the Balkan peoples. They take to it naturally, and largely because they have always been ringed around by powerful, troublesome neighbors they are accustomed to a state of constant preparedness. In the Balkans every able-bodied man is a soldier. He has to be, whether he wants to be or not. If he dodges service he has to pay a fine which is heavy enough to make even the laziest citizen stop and think twice. Also, you don't have to be a citizen to be liable to military service. Even outlanders who have settled in the country more than a couple of years are expected to join the colors of their class or else pay the stipulated fine. The result is that the Balkan peasant, with the possible exception of the Greek, takes to war and campaigning with spontaneous ardor, partly a result of natural pleasure in the game and partly of steady practice. The Greeks are the one military weak spot in the new Balkan Confederation. The modern Greeks are a commercial rather than a military people. This is not said in a disparaging sense. Greeks are the traders, bankers, agents and merchants of the Levant. Greece is by far the richest nation of the four. But in military affairs she has never been successful. The short, inglorious campaign of 1897 is too well remembered to require more than passing comment. Turkey thrashed the Greek army soundly, and could undoubtedly have made the thrashing,yet more thorough had it not been for the check-rein applied by the Great Powers. GREEKS ARE WELL ARMED. Until quite recently the Greeks were armed with the miserable, out-of-date Graa rifles, discarded by the French army, whieh were one of the ca.ises of their defeat in 1897. But now they have modern, high-power magazine rifles, and their small artillery is from the Schneider-Gauet works, Greece can probably put from 113,000 to 150,000 men in the field. And if they have officers of a higher calibre than those who botched matters in 1897, the Greeks will probably do themselves credit. They are brave enough. What they have been found to lack is the military sense which makes mere bravery count.

The Serbs are essentially a military people, like all the Slavs. They have a total effective war strength —that is, a strength in men of military age who have received actual training--of 325,000, with 652 pieces of artillery. Thanks to the elastic system of organisation in their army, they can mobilise with great ease. Corps automatically expand to war strength, and each reservist knows exactly where he belongs, his place in the ranks of his company, the regiment it is attached to. and the army corps of which the larger unity forms a part.

A still more effective fighting force is the Bulgarian army. European military observers have cited this army as the best of its size on the Continent. It has even been asserted by German and Russian officers who have inspected it that it could withstand, man for man. the assault of the best-trained troops of any of the Great Powers. Whether this is so or not. of course, one cannot state positively. Certainly, the Bulgarians make verv smart soldiers, and take naturally to their work. The ollicers are an especially fine lot of men. There is no nobility in the country, and the pick of the older boys of every' class arc annually selected for admission to the Ecole Militaire at Sofia, as line an institution of its kind as there is in existence.

Just at present the Unitarian army is said to be in a very higii state of efficiency, because all its company ollicers are men of from twenty to thirty years old, an age which is said by military critics to be the best for the kind of work which should be expected of subordinates in whom it is desirable to find plenty of dnsh. Many of the officers have "seen active service with the Macedonian revolutionists. The infantry is the most efficient arm of the ...ervice, partly because the Huigarian temperament is splendid material for infantry work, but partlv. too. because the poverty of the Balkan States has compelled Bulgaria to concentrate attention rather upon the inexpensive infantry man than upon the costly artillery and cavalry arms.

AM El HON' Mi>l)Kk CAVALRY. \nd yet. notwithstanding this crippling of their ambitions, the Bulgarians have contrived to build up a really remarkable ■irtillory, and a cavalry which is unique in Europe for being drilled solely in the American theorv of mounted tactics. Some years ago the Bulgars recognised the soundness of the American contention that cavalry had become practically useless in the held of shock tactics, and set to work to make their small force as effective as possible for scouting, reconnaissance and mounted infantry work, particularly in the field of military intelligence. As matters stand, the Bulgarian army boasts a peace establishment of 6000 sabres, divided into eleven regiments, constituting, besides the regiment of household troops, known as the Garde Royale, a full division of three brigades, a force amply sullieient to operate in the mountain 'fastnesses of the Rhodope Balkans, where a campaign with Turkey would be fought. On a wor footing, this force is slightly augmented, but expansion is necessarily limited by the lack of horseflesh in Bulgaria. Reliance is had upon Hungary and Russia for cavalry remounts as \vclf as for the artillery stock. The artillery, especially the mountain artillery, is on a plane of efficiency equal to the 'cavalry. It is not supplied with as much equipment as the Bulgarians would like to have for it, but luckily, some five or six years ago, when there was another war'scare on the horizon, the Ministry of War indulged in the luxury of eighty new six-inch batteries, which are understood to be the equal of !any weapons in existence, except possibly the new French and American pieces. Altogether. Bulgaria can put 1080 cannon into the field, aside from rapid-lire guns. Her active army, that is to say, the peace establishment naturally expanded so that its units attain full* strength, numbers 100,000 men, and can be mobilised in twenty-four hours. But the full force of trained men which

she can put in the field is in the neigh borhood of 450,000 men, or one-tenth of her population, who can be rallied to the colors within a week. And, mind you, all these men have been trained to bear arms, and there are no cripples or children or very old men among them. THE WARLIKE MONTENEGRINS. Coming to the last of the four little nations that have thrown down the gauntlet to Turkey, we find perhaps the world's best example of the nations in arms. Montenegro has a total population of possibly 320,000. This is a liberal estimate. She can put 55,000 armed and drilled men in the field, in as short a space of time as it takes to notify them all, say, from twenty-four to thirty-six hours. Furthermore, they are all used to fighting of an irregular sort, for there i 9 aever peace for long on the Montenegrin and Albanian frontier. Brushes between Moslems and Christians along this line are so common as to attract no attention, not even perfunctory diplomatic representations. The Montenegrins are the only one of the Balkan people who can boast that they have never bent their necks to the Turks. During the centuries that followed the battle of Kossovo, in which the combined might of Servia and Bulgaria was smashed by the Turks, the scant handful of Servian nobles, who had fled to the huddle of black rocks above the Adriatic, maintained a precarious but unbroken independence. Countless armies were sent against them, but they were never defeated or enslaved, and they remain to-day the same proud, warriorlike people, a splendid relic of a bygone age, wholly useless from a commercial point of view, but serving as a stirring reminder of things that were. PAPER ARMY OF THE TURKS. Now consider the comparative weight of Turkey's possible resistance to this assemblage of men of different nations. Individually, and when he is well led, the Turk is one of the best soldiers in the world. He proved that at Shipka Pass in the war with Russia, and more recently in Tripoli. But it is a mistake to suppose that Turkey will be able to concentrate her whole military strength upon the defence of Macedonia. She could not possibly do so, not only because of the difficulties of transportation between the different parts of her unwieldy empire, but because she would not dare to strip her other frontiers and outlying provinces of their garrisons. She is forced to maintain a lare force in the Yemen territory, and other districts of Asia Minor require watching. Besides this the Turkish army is decidedly one of those which bulk large on paper and shrink in actual service. It is doubtful if she can rally more than 400,000 men to the defence of Constantinople. She will be lucky if she gets as many as 500,000. So long ago as 1907, certain Continental military experts picked Bulgaria as able to defeat Turkey by herself, granted that the campaign would be a short one, and begun without giving Turkey too considerable opportunities for preparation. Turkey is in the position of the military commander who has half his forces on one side of an unfordable stream and half upon the other. ■ Tactically, she is at an enormous disadvantage. THE PLAN OF CAMPAIGN'. The plan of campaign which will be followed by the allied Balkan armies, in the event of a regular war with Turkey, has already been determined. In fact, the following description is taken from the plans of the War Office in Sofia. King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, by right of his age and experience, and his position as sovereign of the most puissant of the ' allies, is to be generalissimo of the allied armies. The attack of these armies will be somewhat in the nature of the horn formation practised by the Zulus under their great King Chaka, who, though a savage, was a first-class strategist. A vast enveloping movement of 1,000,000 men, with Constantinople for their final objective, will sweep through Macedonia from all sides. A column of Montenegrins, led by King Nicholas, will march through Albania, aiming to co-operate with the Greek army in a movement to sweep the Turkish troops out of southeastern Macedonia and Albania. Meanwhile, the Servian army, probably operating in two divisions, will have seized Skopia (Uskub), and laid siege to Monastir, which is incapable of prolonged resistance.

Three Bulgarian armies will be formed. One of about 100,000 men will be scattered in various strategic positions to waieli the line of the Danube and guard against any possible treachery on the part of Roumania. Another army of 100.000 men, concentrating in the neighborhood of Dulmitza, ami crossing the frontier at that point, will strike straight through Macedonia for the Aegean Sea and Salonika, crushing all resistance, and aiming to attain its objectives in about two weeks. The third Bulgarian army, of between 100,000 and 200,000 men, which will probably be augmented in time by detachments of troops of the allies, will be destined for the principal service of all, the forcing of the road to Constantinople. THE SEED FOR SPEED. Speed, feverish, insistent, unrelenting speed (concluded the New York Post's contributor) is the chief requisite of the little nations if they go to war. They know this. They know that they must amaze the big Powers by the speed of their movements, by the celerity of their diplomacy. Of course, they are all aiming to grab slices of Macedonia, and Montenegro wants to swallow all Albania, a country many times as large and with a population ten times as numerous. Greece is looking for some of the territory rontiguous to her borders, which is thickly settled by Greeks; Servia wants Old Servia and some additional tracts of territory, upon which Austria has been casting greedy eyes—hence the Austrian opposition; Bulgaria aims for as much as she can carve out of Seres and Ardianople villayets. There are upwards of 2,000,000 Bulgars in Macedonia, and she is ambitious to bring them all under her public school system and conscription law.