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1912] REVERSE AT CHATALDJA 121
hurriedly armed, guns were brought in, the garrison
made up to strength, and on both sides of the fortified
line, in the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara, the
battleships of the Ottoman Fleet with their guns prevented
the Bulgarians creeping along the shores. When the
Bulgarian Army began nevertheless to attack the line
of Chataldja, the enterprise was found to be too much
even for the indomitable courage of the Bulgarians:
one after the other the hosts of brave men who rushed
to the attack were mown down and littered the ground
with their corpses ; and after two days of deadly effort,
only one Turkish redoubt had been taken, only to be
lost the next day, for the Turks concentrated the fire
from their other forts on to it. No, the line of
Chataldja was absolutely impregnable without the
assistance of big guns or of ships of the line, if it were only
from the Black Sea side; and the Bulgarians possessed
neither.
Checked and thrown back at Chataldja, the Bulgarian
Army spread over the whole of Thrace, with the
exception of the narrow peninsula of Gallipoli, where it also
was stopped by the formidable positions of Bulair;
moreover, the Bulgarians had no interest in occupying
the European shore of the Dardanelles. The Bulgarian
sphere established itself on the whole of the northern
shore of the Sea of Marmara, and Ferdinand had his
headquarters sometimes at Kavala on the ^Egean Sea,
sometimes at Rodosto on the Sea of Marmara. But his
dreams about Constantinople were decidedly shattered.
Ferdinand realised this himself, and from that moment
all his efforts were concentrated on securing to Bulgaria
all the country just occupied by his Army, plus that
part of Macedonia which was due to the Bulgarians by
virtue of the agreement with Serbia.
It would be difficult to say to what extent the
Bulgarian people shared or did not share the dreams of
their master about Constantinople. On the one hand,
there existed in Bulgaria—and ever since the eighties
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