Ermenikioi, _November 19_.--Operations have been suspended. Yesterday's cold and bitter weather has fanned to an epidemic the choleraic dysentery which had been creeping through the trenches. The casualties in the fighting had been heavy. "But for every wounded man who comes to the hospitals," Colonel Jostoff, the Chief of the Staff, tells me, "there are ten who say 'I am ill.'" The Bulgarians recognise bitterly that in their otherwise fine organisation there has been one flaw, the medical service. Among this nation of peasant proprietors--sturdy, abstemious, moral, living in the main on whole-meal bread and water--illness was so rare that the medical service was but little regarded. Up to Chatalja confidence in the rude health of the peasants was justified. They passed through cold, hunger, fatigue, and kept healthy. But ignorant of sanitary discipline, camped among the filthy Turkish villages, the choleraic dysentery passed from the Turkish trenches to theirs. There are 30,000 cases of illness, and the healthy for the first time feel fear as they see the torments of the sick. The Bulgarians recognise that there must be a pause in the fighting whilst the hospital and sanitary service is reorganised.
Kirk Kilisse, _December 1_.--It seems certain now that peace must be declared, and that the dream of driving the Turk right out of Europe must be abandoned. These peasant peoples of the Balkans have done wonderful things, but they have stumbled on one point--the want of knowledge of sanitary science. I have seen only one attempt at a clean camp since I have been in the field, and that was a Serbian camp, north of Adrianople.
With the Bulgarian army there was not, at any stage of the campaign up to the Battle of Chatalja--that is, until after the outbreak of cholera--any precaution, to my knowledge, taken to secure a clean water supply, or clean camping-grounds, or to take the most elementary precautions against the outbreak of disease in the army. The medical service was almost as bad. I have seen much of the hospital work at Kirk Kilisse after the armistice; and it has been deplorable to see the fine fellows whose lives were sacrificed, or whose limbs were sacrificed, through neglect of medical knowledge. I am sure the Bulgarians would have saved many hundreds of lives if there had been anything like a proper medical service at the front.
