With this force on the warpath the town became quiet. Such Bulgarians as had not gone to the mountains became Greeks or Servians, and for a time the race disappeared from the streets. Greeks and Vlachs also kept close to their houses, and some days only soldiers selling plunder held the market place. The army commandeered the better pack-animals and teams as they appeared on the streets, paying for them in paper promises--in consequence whereof all fit animals were soon kept stabled. Honest toil ceased, and only the labour of the struggle continued. In the early morning, before the town stirred, detachments of troops started for the mountains with many pack-ponies, each laden with four ample tins of petroleum. At night, when Monastir was still again, the pack-ponies came back--bringing in the wounded of the Turks.
The revolutionary committee had declared the ‘general rising’ of the peasants with less than ten thousand rifles of all patterns,[7] a meagre force with which to contest the Ottoman authority, and a poor result for the price that had been paid in men and morals. The insurgents had been gathering arms for several years. Many murders had been committed in Macedonia in the forced collection of levied assessments, and some had taken place in Bulgaria; many massacres of innocent peasants had been brought about in the Turkish search for arms; many insurgents had given their lives fetching the arms from friendly and hostile frontiers.[8]
The high chiefs of the committee never expected to defeat the Turks with their inadequate force of untrained peasants; their purpose was to provoke the Sultan to set his soldiers upon the Christians. They were willing to pay the lives of many thousands of their brother Macedonians for the accomplishment of their desire--the country’s autonomy. They were fanatics. The Turks called them Christian fanatics, but it was not only the insurgents who were frenzied; probably 40,000 men, women, and children, the entire population of many villages, went to the mountains unarmed. This was the general rising. And all the Bulgarians who remained in their villages, and many other Macedonians, gave their whole sympathy to the cause of the committajis.