All through the night the rain-sodden, wearied troops were arriving at their bivouacs. The front taken up was unduly extended and, notably on the extreme left, there were many gaps. The dawn revealed a scene of desolation and considerable disorder. Soon after sunrise the Turks attacked.
Throughout the first day of battle the Turks pursued offensive tactics, attempting repeatedly to turn the Servian left. More than once the situation on this flank became critical. Reinforcements arrived in driblets and in an exhausted condition; they were at once absorbed in the fighting line, without regard for any other consideration except the saving of a local situation. Of higher leading there was little, it was just a soldier’s battle--hard, brutal fighting, stubborn valour in the front line, chaotic confusion behind.
Late in the evening I saw a small party of horsemen moving rapidly from battalion to battalion immediately behind the front line. Riding by himself, a little in advance of the others, was a young man with a thin, sallow face, wearing _pince-nez_. He stopped frequently and spoke with the officers and men. When he had passed on, they followed him with their eyes and seemed to move more briskly about their business. To these rough men from all parts of Servia this brief visit had a special interest; the young man who rode alone and in front was the Crown Prince Alexander, and most of them were seeing him for the first time.
In more senses than one the Crown Prince was alone that day. His exalted rank had conferred on him the command of an army; his extreme youth made it hard for him to impose his will on a staff of military experts. At the headquarters of the First Servian Army there was the usual percentage of senior officers whose peace training had taken from them any human or imaginative qualities they may ever have possessed; who regarded war as a science, not a drama; men without elasticity of mind, eternally seeking an analogy between their own situation, at any given moment, and some vaguely similar situation in the career of their favourite strategist (usually von Moltke). Since in war, at least, analogies are never perfect, such men lack quick decision and, almost invariably, they take the line of least resistance.