Bulgarian Empire

Chapter 124: Declaration of War

As time passed, so did the three-day deadline for the ultimatum!

There is no doubt that Serbia did not choose to compromise and righteously rejected Bulgaria's irrational demands!

All to this point, Ferdinand can not pretend to be weak! He was about to declare war, and Ferdinand remembered the National Assembly at the last minute. He felt that his face was too ugly to the point of feeling and decided to fake a little.

On October 8, 1894, Ferdinand urgently convened the National Assembly and submitted a bill to declare war on Serbia!

Then it passed unanimously, with no abstentions, and even those who could not make it and were forced to be absent telegraphed over to vote, even though they belonged to the invalid vote, but they had to come to the party! There is no denying that these days, fighting Serbia is politically correct in Bulgaria!

On the evening of October 8, 1894, Ferdinand publicly declared war on Serbia on the grounds that Serbia was harboring war criminals!

War has broken out!

It's impossible to cause a sensation in the world. Europeans are used to it! It's normal to fight in the Balkans. It's only a problem if you don't!

Ferdinand, who loves to save face, did not order a sneak attack during the night and was ready to fight fair and square!!!

Well, it was all promoted in the newspapers!

In fact, Ferdinand did not consider a surprise attack, a war without a declaration, but given the relationship between the two countries, it was not an attack! Old rivals, how could they not be prepared?

The most critical thing is that the artillery can not play the power during the night. Easy to mistakenly injure their own people!

Bulgaria has a full advantage this time. There is no need at all to give up their advantage and choose to risk a night attack!

The top brass of the Bulgarian army now, almost all of whom had participated in the last war in Bulgaria-Serbia, knew clearly that the Serbs were not as weak as advertised in the newspapers!

And after the last war, Serbia is crazy to build defensive fortresses on the border. Well, the Serbian government is short of money. The defense line is not yet completed!

As planned by the staff, this time, Bulgaria sent 150,000 troops to attack Serbia at the same time, divided between the left, middle, and right.

The main force was the Middle Army, which attacked from the Tran area intending to destroy the main Serbian military forces in the south of the South Morava River, with three regular divisions and one new division, totaling 70,000 forces that would attack Leskovac.

One standing division of the Left Army and two new divisions, totaling more than 50,000 men, set out from the area around Mount Mijur intending to capture the important Serbian town of Ni in the southern block!

The Right Army is considered to be the smallest number of remote divisions, with only two divisions of more than 30,000 men, but they are all regular divisions, and although their numbers are small, their combat power is not weak at all! It will go straight to the Great Morava River from the Vidin region, aiming directly at the Serbian capital Belgrade!

As soon as the conflict intensified, the Bulgarian 3rd Division commander, Dante Christov, who was based in Mount Mijur, began to worry!

He was not concerned about not winning against Serbia, but Ferdinand's orders to minimize soldier casualties and kill as much of the Serbian living force as possible!

The Third Division, a Bulgarian regular division with proven combat ability, joined the newly formed Tenth and Twelfth Divisions to form the Left Army this time. Dante Christov, under his excellent performance in the last war, became the commander-in-chief of the Left Army!

Dante Christov is not afraid to fight, but how to maximize the potential to weaken the living forces, which will be difficult for him!

Massacre of prisoners?

Massacre of civilians?

It is obviously not possible! Ferdinand wasn't that crazy, and he, Dante Christov, wasn't crazy!

He probably understood Ferdinand's meaning: to beat Serbia once and for all, it is better to learn about Bulgaria so that they can not cause trouble for Bulgaria for decades!

...

When the time returns to three days ago, when the joint warfare meeting was held, all the cadres above the regiment level of the Left Army joined, swarming with hundreds of people.

Dante Christov spoke up and said, "Normally, on October 8, 1894, we would have declared war on Serbia, so you, Chief of Staff, give the overview of the ground situation!

The chief of staff livened up the mood by saying, "The battle plan against Serbia, which the staff began to formulate a long time ago, probably wouldn't fit in this room if it had to be piled up together!"

The crowd roared with laughter. Watching everyone's tension sprang a little relief, the chief of staff again began to introduce the comparison of the strength of an enemy and his own.

"Well, the joke ends here. As you all know, our Left Army this time consists of three divisions plus two artillery regiments, totaling more than 56,000 men.

It has more than fifty-four thousand rifles. The pure Bulgarian Type 1889 (replica of Shui Lianzhu), more than one hundred and fifty machine guns, more than one hundred light and heavy artillery more than three thousand handguns of all kinds combined.

Compared to nine years ago, we have a much stronger base, and the firepower of the Left Army alone is greater than back then!

This time, all of you can put your minds in your hearts. 20 million rounds of ammunition and 80,000 artillery shells are already in place, and there is a constant supply of ammunition to replenish the rear. The material reserves are sufficient. We can start the war at any time!"

After a pause, he added: "And look at the Serbs on the other side, deploying more than 168,000 men in the Ni sector, almost three times as many as we are just by looking at their numbers!

But don't worry, we all know that Serbia is only a little bit of a real fighter, and their standing army is only 110,000. No, it should be more than 90,000. They lost more than 10,000 in the civil war not long ago!

In other words, they are deploying their main force in the Ni area, which is at most 30,000 to 40,000 men, my main opponent this time.

After all, our border with Serbia is so long that everywhere needs to be fortified, and the other hundred thousand or so people are a bunch of peasants who have just put down their hoes and fought with their guns!

Perhaps even the gun is not always everyone has. The intelligence department has found out that their weapons and equipment are very messy, many kinds of the era, they can open a weapons museum!"

The crowd couldn't help but laugh again at the Chief of Staff's snark and mingled and discussed. Although there was no doubt about the outcome of this war, the more than 100,000 troops on the opposite side would seem quite intimidating.

Now that the opponents were found to be just a few tens of thousands of regular troops, and the rest were peasants, the crowd relaxed suddenly. It seems that this mission is not difficult to complete!

Dante Christov seriously slapped the table and said, "Quiet! Look at your happy faces, don't forget our mission this time? Not simply to defeat the enemy and be done with it, but to weaken their living forces as much as possible!

What does it mean? I don't need to explain it! Although we are big old guys, we all went to school or graduated from officer training courses!

I can tell you clearly that it is impossible to complete the mission by killing the prisoners! Military tribunals will not be merciful!

What exactly do I do? I don't know! Anyway, once the war starts, apart from completing the deployed missions, whichever unit takes out more of the enemy is the first to get the merit!

I don't care how you do it, just the results!"