Bulgaria begins mobilisation

The British chronology of the war records under 25 September 1915 the beginning of the mobilisation of the Bulgarian army. According to Bulgarian sources the first day of mobilisation was 24 September, that is, 11 September by the Julian calendar, as set in the decree signed two days earlier. In the last days of September hundreds of thousands of reservists poured into barracks all over the country. Mobilisation took 17–18 days. During that time only the border guard separated Bulgaria from Serbia.

The government of Vasil Radoslavov went on assuring its neighbours of its peaceful intentions. In the last days of September the prime minister declared that Bulgaria had no intention of attacking Greece, which had itself announced mobilisation on 23 September. Earlier he had given assurances that the mobilisation was not directed against Serbia. These words no longer carried much weight, because the deployment of the troops told a different story.

Three armies

Bulgaria fielded three armies. The First Army of General Kliment Boyadzhiev, with four divisions, was concentrating on the old border with Serbia and, under the military convention, was to come under the orders of Field Marshal August von Mackensen. The Second Army of General Georgi Todorov was to strike at Serbian Macedonia and remained under direct Bulgarian command. The Third Army of General Stefan Toshev guarded the border with Romania, and two divisions covered the border with Greece. The commander-in-chief of the field army was the minister of war, General Nikola Zhekov, an advocate of war on the side of the Central Powers, and his chief of staff was General Konstantin Zhostov.

The Bulgarian divisions were huge. Most of them numbered over 40,000 men, as many as an army corps in other armies. By the end of mobilisation, according to Bulgarian figures, nearly 16,000 officers and over 600,000 soldiers were under arms, 12–13 per cent of the country’s population. More than 19,000 reservists failed to report.

Without the zeal of 1912

Mobilisation went smoothly, but everything was in short supply. The army had fewer than 373,000 rifles, although the plans called for more than 521,000. There were about 500 shells per gun, and uniforms, boots, horses and wagons were all lacking. The country had not yet recovered from the Balkan Wars, in which it had suffered about 176,000 casualties in killed, wounded and missing and lost fertile Southern Dobruja.

Eyewitnesses agreed that the enthusiasm with which the Bulgarians had gone to war with Turkey in 1912 was missing. Socialists and some activists of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union campaigned against the war, and in some places there were attempted mutinies. The American envoy in Sofia, Lewis Einstein, wrote nevertheless that the mobilisation, though carried out without enthusiasm, had almost everywhere proceeded in good order, and that rumours of officers being shot for refusing to fight the Russians were unfounded. Morale was raised above all by soldiers from Macedonia, for whom war with Serbia was a personal matter. By the beginning of October the army was ready. In the middle of the month the Bulgarians attacked Serbia.