The main force of the Russian army had shifted to Wallachia, something Pasha Omar could never have conceived even if he cracked his head over it. In theory, the two sides should have been locked in a stalemate.
Yet according to Russian observations, the Ottomans appeared to have built breastworks only across a very limited stretch of the front.
Thus, the Russians turned all their attacks in the north into feints, while their true main force had quietly entered Wallachia in separate batches and crossed the Danube River amid the chaos.
Of course, the more than two hundred thousand Ottoman New Army soldiers were no pushovers. But with the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Greece advancing triumphantly all along the line, Pasha Omar did not dare force a head-on clash.
After a bout of bloody slaughter, the Ottoman New Army retreated into Bulgaria.
The first phase of the war appeared to have ended in a sweeping victory for the Holy Alliance, but in truth, aside from the Austrian Empire suffering relatively minor losses, both Russia and Greece had paid a considerable price.
Greece in particular, though it had easily pushed into Macedonia, had occupied only a handful of cities. Most regions still remained loyal to the Ottoman Empire.
Not to mention the bloody battle in West Thrace. In merely two weeks, the Greeks had lost more than twenty thousand men.
Twenty thousand might not have seemed like much to the other nations in the war, but for Greece, whose population was under 1.7 million, it was an exceptionally terrifying figure. It meant they had lost nearly 2% of their population.
Having lived through the Chios Massacre, the Greeks understood that choosing to shrink back now would be truly terrifying.
During the Chios Massacre, beneath the Ottoman butcher's blade, fewer