Almost completely he succeeds, but not quite completely. The Turkish sweetmeats, the Turkish coffee keep their hold on the taste of the people, and away from the towns, among the peasants who till rich fields with wooden ploughs, there remain traces of the Eastern disregard for time. But even in the country the people are waking up to modern ideas, aroused in part by the American "drummer" selling agricultural machinery. But in his city of Sofia, "the little Paris," as he likes to hear it called, and in his towns the Bulgarian has become keen and bustling. He rather aspires to be thought Parisian in manner. A "middle class" begins to grow up. The Bulgarian prospers mightily as a trader, and when he makes money he devotes his son to a profession, to the staff of the army, the law, to public life. Also the Bulgarian is keen to add manufacturing industries to his agricultural resources, and there are cotton mills and other factories springing up in different places. The Bulgarian has a great faith in himself. Thinking over what he has done within forty years, it is easy to share that belief and to think of him one day with a great seaport on the Mediterranean aspiring to a place in the family council of Europe.
Afterwards, when by dint of hard begging, hard travelling, hard living, and some hard swearing, I had forced my way through to the front, I concluded that with the exception of Mustapha Pasha--where the Second Army had failed at its task and was set to work on a dull siege, and was consequently very bad-tempered--the famous censorship of the Bulgarian Army was not so vexatious to the correspondents as to their editors. The censors were usually polite, and tried to make a difficult position agreeable.
When the correspondents were despatched it was thought that the Balkan States, needing a "good Press," would be fairly kind. The expectation was realised in the case of the Montenegrins and the Greeks. The Serbians allowed the correspondents to see nothing. The Bulgarian idea was to allow nothing to be seen and nothing to be despatched except the "Te Deums." It was an aggravation of the Japanese censorship, and if it is accepted as a model for future combatant States the "war correspondent" will become extinct. I am not disposed to claim that an army in the field should carry on its operations under the eyes of newspaper correspondents; and there were special circumstances in regard to the campaign of the Bulgarian army (which was a desperate rush against a big people of a little people operating with the slenderest of resources) that made a severe censorship absolutely necessary. But, that allowed, there are still some points of criticism justified.