The Turkish Retreat at Lüleburgaz

For six days at the end of October 1912, Bulgarian and Ottoman armies fought around the town of Lüleburgaz in Thrace. In sheer numbers it was the largest battle Europe had seen since the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and it would keep that grim record until the summer of 1914. The outnumbered Bulgarians broke the Ottoman line and drove the retreat you see here back toward Constantinople, to within about 30 kilometres of the Ottoman capital. Věšín was no distant witness to this. As the painter attached to the Bulgarian war ministry he travelled with the army, and he worked the scene into this long canvas in 1914, the very year a far bigger war swept across the continent. He gives the moment its grey weather and its worn-out men rather than any flag-waving triumph.