The Bulgarian peasant soldiers were very honest and loyal. At Mustapha Pasha one night, being short of food, I tried to get bread at the military bakery (all bread and flour having been requisitioned for the army). I offered a soldier up to five francs for a loaf without tempting him to sell it. Finally I had to get bread as a charity by declaring that I was actually in want of it for food. Later, travelling between Silivri and Chatalja, I encountered four Bulgarian foot soldiers who had become separated from their regiment and were starving. They asked for food and I gave them all I could spare, enough for two meals. One of the men produced a purse and took out some coppers wishing to pay.
Travelling across Thrace (then in Bulgarian occupation), I often put up at some military post, being invited to become a member of the little mess--usually an official or two and four or five non-commissioned officers. Nearly always I had the same experience, that I was made free of the stewed goat and rice, or the dish of eggs and flour, or the bread and cheese of the Bulgarians, and when I wished to add from my stores chocolate and biscuits and dates, just a scrap or two would be taken. I could see the men's eyes hungering for the delicacies, but nothing would induce them to take anything material from my stores.
The Bulgarian peasant soldier and officer I found, in short, to be a gentleman. Yet nationally Bulgaria is not "a gentleman," and has come to its present sorry state, I believe, largely on that account. The old Bulgarian aristocracy was exterminated by the Turks. The surviving Bulgarian peasantry has not yet been able to produce another aristocracy. It is the more cunning rather than the more worthy son of the peasant who wins to a sort of an education--often abroad--and becomes the lawyer, politician, official. In very many cases he carries with him into a higher stratum of society few of his peasant virtues and all of his peasant faults. He gets an overweening pride in his own acuteness. He becomes arrogant, "too-clever-by-half," and intrigue teaches him cruelty. I can contrast vividly two Bulgarian types in a noted diplomat, who fancied himself a Bismarck and had about the wits of an office boy, and an old peasant captain with whom I travelled from Kirk Kilisse to Chorlu. Generalising, the "leading men" in Bulgaria are of a poor type (there are exceptions), the leading priests of a still poorer type; the people themselves are a sound people, and when the ambitious among them contrive to preserve their peasant virtues through the ordeal of education they will become a great people.