Frank Fox

We have seen that a blood-mist has hung over the Balkans during all the centuries that history knows. Nature set up there lists for the great contests of races—on the path from the cold north of Europe to the warm south; on the path from Asia to Europe; and each great campaign left behind it shreds of devastated peoples. These shreds of peoples dwelling in the Balkans to-day have a blood-thirst as an inescapable heritage. Turk, Bulgar, Serb, Roumanian, Greek—they may hold the peace for a time, and some may try to think that they are friends with others; but all have something of hate or fear or contempt for the others, and all prepare in peace for the next fight.

The Fates making the Balkan Peninsula the battle-ground of empires and races, the field of last stands, the refuge of residual fragments of peoples, imposed upon it its bloody tradition. Under other conditions, Serb or Bulgar or Greek or Turk or Roumanian left to themselves might have made happier history. For all these races can be human, reasonable, companionable. I have seen something of all of them in following a Balkan campaign as a war correspondent (not following always as the sheltered guest of an army, but forcing a solitary path through the peasant population), and in watching the wonderful acrobatic lying of a Balkan Peace Conference have seen thus the best and the worst of them. I have been an unofficial member of a Bulgarian court-martial; the guest of a dozen and more Bulgarian and Serbian army outposts, dependent often for food and shelter on the kindness of peasant soldiers; for days have held at the mercy of Balkan peasants my life and my property; have been mistaken for a wandering Turk twice, and have never suffered violence, rudeness, or the loss of a pennyworth. For the peasants, the commonfolk of all the Balkan peoples, I have come thus to a hearty liking; their priests and politicians (with a few exceptions), a different feeling. Knowing that the massacre is the national sport in many districts of the Balkans; that at the outbreak of the 1912 war the death-rate by violence actually decreased in some quarters because the killing was systematised a little and put under a sort of regulation; that always Turks and Exarchate Christians and Patriarchate Christians are plotting against one another new raids and murders, still I maintain that, if left to themselves, if freed from the prompting of priests and politicians the Balkan peasants of any race are quite decent folk. So I wish heartily that there was fair reason to hope for peace and happiness for them. Is there fair reason? To that question a study of the races and the personalities can give clues for an answer.

Albanian tribesmen

Underwood & Underwood

ALBANIAN TRIBESMEN

The Bulgarian is dour, dull, a little greedy, honest, very industrious. He is almost as much a Turk as a Slav. (I was told that during the Turkish occupation a Bulgarian mother finding herself with child after violence by a Turk brought up the child with her family, whilst a Serbian mother under the same circumstances killed the infant at birth.) The Bulgarian is very moral, marrying at an early age.

The Bulgarian peasant soldiers were very honest and loyal. At Mustapha Pasha one night, being short of food, I tried to get bread at the military bakery (all bread and flour having been requisitioned for the army). I offered a soldier up to five francs for a loaf without tempting him to sell it. Finally I had to get bread as a charity by declaring that I was actually in want of it for food. Later, travelling between Silivri and Chatalja, I encountered four Bulgarian foot soldiers who had become separated from their regiment and were starving. They asked for food and I gave them all I could spare, enough for two meals. One of the men produced a purse and took out some coppers wishing to pay.

Travelling across Thrace (then in Bulgarian occupation), I often put up at some military post, being invited to become a member of the little mess—usually an official or two and four or five non-commissioned officers. Nearly always I had the same experience, that I was made free of the stewed goat and rice, or the dish of eggs and flour, or the bread and cheese of the Bulgarians, and when I wished to add from my stores chocolate and biscuits and dates, just a scrap or two would be taken. I could see the men's eyes hungering for the delicacies, but nothing would induce them to take anything material from my stores.

The Bulgarian peasant soldier and officer I found, in short, to be a gentleman. Yet nationally Bulgaria is not "a gentleman," and has come to its present sorry state, I believe, largely on that account. The old Bulgarian aristocracy was exterminated by the Turks. The surviving Bulgarian peasantry has not yet been able to produce another aristocracy. It is the more cunning rather than the more worthy son of the peasant who wins to a sort of an education—often abroad—and becomes the lawyer, politician, official. In very many cases he carries with him into a higher stratum of society few of his peasant virtues and all of his peasant faults. He gets an overweening pride in his own acuteness. He becomes arrogant, "too-clever-by-half," and intrigue teaches him cruelty. I can contrast vividly two Bulgarian types in a noted diplomat, who fancied himself a Bismarck and had about the wits of an office boy, and an old peasant captain with whom I travelled from Kirk Kilisse to Chorlu. Generalising, the "leading men" in Bulgaria are of a poor type (there are exceptions), the leading priests of a still poorer type; the people themselves are a sound people, and when the ambitious among them contrive to preserve their peasant virtues through the ordeal of education they will become a great people.

The Bulgarian did not seem to me naturally cruel. All the time that I was with the main army I saw no trace of outrage or cruelty. I did see several instances of curt and merciful justice.

I arrived one night at the Tchundra River alone, having gone forward from my ox cart because the miserable Macedonian driver and the still more miserable Bulgarian servant I had (I suspect he was in training for the diplomatic service) could not be induced to do a fair day's march. A vedette outpost of five men held the bridge. They took me—as I judged from their gestures rather than from their language, of which I understood only one word, "Turc"—for a Turk. But they let me stay unmolested at their camp fire for an hour until an officer who spoke French appeared. I could give several similar instances. Never did I feel nervous in the least when making my way alone through the country in Bulgarian occupation (most of the time I was alone, for after a while I dropped my Macedonian and my Bulgarian servant).

Greek infantry

See page 190

GREEK INFANTRY

The Turk I found disappointing. I had pictured a romantic individual with a Circassian harem, a stable of Arab steeds, and a fierce and warlike manner. I found the Turk to be rather a shabby individual; monogamous usually (but with the free and easy ideas as to his rights over Christian women which are almost consequent upon his philosophy of life, and cause most of the trouble when the Turk lives by the side of a Christian population); much addicted to sweetmeats—his shops were full of Scotch lollies and English biscuits. Certainly most of the Turks I have encountered were prisoners or dwelling in conquered country. But, making all allowance for that, the traditional fiery Turk of martial fame no longer exists, I should say, in European Turkey. The Turkish prisoners in the hands of the Bulgarians seemed to be glad to have arrived at a fate which meant regular food. In old Bulgaria I found Turks living quite contentedly under Christian rule, and in many cases following menial occupations. The boot-blacks in the streets were Turks, the porters were Turks.

I had a Turkish driver for five days once from Kirk Kilisse to Mustapha Pasha. The first hour of our acquaintance he won my heart by telling me (through an interpreter) that since his horses had been requisitioned by the Bulgarians, he had not been able to get proper food for them, and he embraced his ponies, which were really in rather good condition. I applauded the noble Turk and his love for horses, and bought tobacco for him which he welcomed with tears of joy, as he had been without it for long. The horses carried the cart a gallant thirty miles that day, and we camped at a burned-out village. Mr. Turk set himself to enjoy a smoke over the fire. My own supper I prepared, and gave him some to eke out his bread and cheese, and then told him to water and feed the horses. Because the well was 400 yards away and the tobacco was sweet and the fire comforting, the Turk had no wish to do this, but was ready to let them go through the night without food or water. I had to threaten to flog him (and to start to do it) before he would attend to the horses. Yet after that incident I slept in the cart without a thought that the Turk would consider himself offended and cut my throat. As a matter of fact the touch of the whip did not rankle with him, and at Mustapha Pasha when, the journey ended, I gave him a little money for himself, Mr. Turk prostrated himself in gratitude.

I believe that the warlike virtues have died out of the Turk in Europe. Of other nation-making and nation-maintaining qualities he has none. In all Turkey from the borders of Bulgaria to the lines of Chatalja, I found no roads, no street lamps, no drainage, no water supply (I was not in Adrianople). Except for a few agricultural peasants I found nowhere the Turk doing any useful work. In a characteristic Turkish town the shops were kept by Greeks, the industries carried on by Greeks, Macedonians, and Bulgarians. The Turk was the tax-collector, the official, the soldier, and did none of these things well. That acute observer of the Turkish character, Mr. L. March Phillips, in his book In the Desert upholds that the Turk is impossible as a civilising force:

Or, for a third example, come to the craggy hills of Southern Albania, and mix, if but for half an hour, with the armed shepherds, as wild and intractable as their own crags, or as the gaunt dogs which guard their flocks from the wolves, and whose attentions to strangers you are apt to find such a nuisance. You will understand from the first glance at the men more of the interminable Balkan difficulty than newspapers and books can ever teach you. These are the fellows who swoop down from their peaks on the mixed races of the plains and carry fire and slaughter through village and valley. Their natural aptitude for fighting and foraging, for bearing things with a strong hand, for cowing the weak and feeble, for vindicating the old "might is right" theory, is written all over them. You see it in their gait, glance, walk, and manner, you hear it in every accent of their voice, you feel it in their individuality and presence.

These are specimens of the Moslem type, the type that stops short at the virile virtues, that makes the best host and worst neighbour in the world, that has many splendid qualities to recommend it, but to which all that makes life profound and inexhaustible is a dead letter. It is the most strongly marked and salient type I have ever met with. There is the Moslem walk, the Moslem scowl, the Moslem courtesy, the Moslem dignity, the Moslem carriage and attitudes and features, the Moslem composure, and the Moslem fury. All these traits and characteristics, inspired by the same temper, expressing the same ideal, conspire to depict a figure so notable that you must be a dull observer indeed if you cannot pick him out from a mixed crowd as you would pick out a Chinaman in the London streets.

Some people say it is the religion that creates the type. "There," they say of Mohammedanism, "is a religion that breeds men." It would be truer, I think, to say that Mohammedanism recommends itself to men at a certain stage of their development, and has for that stage a natural affinity. Every race goes through a time when the virile estimate of life and the splendour of self-assertion seem the finest things possible. It is at this time it is open to the attack of El Islam. The Moslem religion answers all its needs at this stage, and lays good hold of it, and having once laid hold of it, it sanctifies the ideas belonging to this stage, and so tends to restrict the race to it. There is no instance on record of a people having embraced Mohammedanism and afterwards achieving a complete, or what gives promise of ever becoming a complete, civilisation.

During my stay in the Balkans I found no certain evidence of Turkish cruelty. There was plenty of evidence offered by the Bulgarians, but it usually smelt of the lamp of some patriotic journalist of Sofia. Once near Mustapha Pasha—when all the war correspondents were cooped up under strict censorship, prevented from seeing any of the operations around Adrianople—the Bulgarians found it necessary to burn a village for strategic reasons. The chance was offered to the Press photographers of seeing this, if it were represented in their pictures as the atrocious burning of a village by the Turks. I believe that the offer was accepted by some. The "atrocities" by Turks, regularly recorded by the Bulgarian Press Bureau were, as far as the main theatre of operations was concerned, founded on similar evidence. During its first phase I believe that the war was very humanely conducted on all sides. In Macedonia, of course, there were some deplorable atrocities, but I believe the normal massacre conditions there were rather bettered than otherwise by the outbreak of war.

To sum up the Turk, I do not think he will survive for long in Europe. As a matter of hard fact there really are not many real Turks left in Europe.

The Serbian, with his highlander the Montenegrin, is a far more engaging personality than the Bulgarian. He lacks the stubborn, dour courage of his neighbour, but he has more Élan. In military life the Bulgarian would supply incomparable infantry, the Serbians be superior in artillery and cavalry. In social life the Serbian is convivial and hospitable. Whilst the Bulgarian wishes to go to bed early that he may get up early and push the road he is making along a little farther, the Serbian will keep you at his dinner-table drinking and singing until far into the morning. He is not troubling about a road.

When the Serbian army came to help the Bulgarians in the siege of Adrianople, the contrast between the two armies and the two camps was great. The Serbian men were smarter, better equipped, their quarters cleaner, and from their mess tents would come by night the sound of revelry. One might imagine Roundheads and Cavaliers camping side by side.

The Allies did not fraternise. For that I blamed the Bulgarians. The positions in regard to the Serbian aid at Adrianople, as I understood it, was this: that originally the Bulgarians engaged to help the Serbians in their campaign, but this was found not to be necessary: that the Bulgarians, later, asked for aid against Adrianople, and it was promptly given without any conditions being imposed, though there then already existed in the Serbian mind a desire to modify the territorial partition arrangement they had with Bulgaria and this request for aid might have been taken as a good opportunity for raising that question. I believe those to be the facts, but since in Balkan diplomacy it is always a matter of finding out the truth of comparing and weighing and deducing from a series of lies, I cannot state them with absolute certainty. If they are true, the Serbians behaved like gentlemen in not raising against an ally an awkward question at a time when help was asked. Quite certainly the Bulgarian authorities behaved like boors to their Serbian friends. Things were made as unpleasant as was reasonably possible for them in all kinds of niggling ways around Adrianople. The Serbians behaved well under great provocation.

During the first sessions of the Balkan Peace Conference I had opportunities of observing the same good behaviour on the part of the Serbians. Bulgarian diplomacy was, as usual, very exasperating. It was not only that Bulgaria was insisting on having the hide, horn, and hoofs of Turkey, but also on rubbing salt into her bare carcase. The Turkish delegates approached the Serbians—whose territorial demands as far as Turkey was concerned were satisfied, but who had a pending controversy with the Bulgarians—hoping to get some moral support against Bulgaria and being prepared to offer something in return. The Serbian attitude was sharply loyal, to stand by Bulgaria absolutely in regard to the Turkish frontier. Serbians have not been always popular in Great Britain, I know; but I am not alone among those who have come into recent contact with Balkan affairs who found them to be the best of the Balkan peoples.

See page 194

PODGORICA, UPON THE ALBANIAN FRONTIER

The Greek is even more engaging and hospitable than the Serbian; but his fluent, flexible, subtle nature does not inspire full confidence. At the outset of the last Balkan war there was one thing that all were sure of: that the Greeks would not fight. All were wrong. The Greeks did exceedingly well in the field, even allowing that they sometimes shaped their campaign quite as much by considerations of jealousy of their allies as of hostility to the common enemy. But it is a fact that the Greek has usually more stomach for politics than for fighting, and that his subtle nature allows him to live comfortably in a state of subjection, which would irk a more robust mind. He is by instinct a trader: and a trader is not an uncompromising patriot as a rule.

The Greeks live side by side with the Turks in Turkey with fair comfort. At Kirk Kilisse, after the Bulgarian occupation, a deputation came to me from the Greeks to assure me that they would much prefer to live under the Turk than under the Bulgar: and asking that England should be urged to support autonomy for Thrace. Well, the Turks are back at Kirk Kilisse, and I suppose my Greek friends are happy. Eloquent, courteous, kind folk they were. I stayed in the house of one for some days, and will remember always the gracious kindness of the man and his wife. I had to leave one morning at four to catch a troop train which would carry me a few miles towards the front. The couple were up and had a fire and tea ready for me. As I had a fever at the time, and a long laborious journey ahead, the whole Greek race seemed good that morning.

Later at Chorlu after I had got permission from the military commandant to go forward to Chatalja, and he had helped me to hire a cart and horses and to stock up my provisions, the permission was withdrawn because Bashi-Bazouks were raiding along the line of communication. I might go later, he said, when a body of troops was moving. I objected that time was precious; and I had my revolver, and there was the driver.

"Ah," he said sweetly, "he is a Greek. He will run away."

After that manner the Bulgarians always spoke of the Greeks. In this case the Bulgarian was possibly right. I finally coaxed permission to go forward, on condition that I took a patrol of one Bulgarian soldier, and I was allowed to borrow a rifle and some ammunition. We met no Bashi-Bazouks: but whilst the Bulgarian palpably was quite content to enter into a plan to give the Bashi-Bazouks a chance of showing themselves at nightfall, the Greek liked the adventure not at all. (Perhaps on the whole he was justified. But I was desperately eager for a "story," and with the Turkish regulars running away so consistently, to encounter irregulars suggested no real danger.)

On that journey, at a little village which I cannot name between Silivri and Chatalja, the population was largely Greek. Some of the Greeks, after the Turks had fled before the Bulgarians, had discarded the fez and were wearing Bulgarian caps. Others held to the fez, but had marked on it with white chalk a cross. I formed the opinion that if by the fortune of war the Turks came back, those crosses would be rubbed out. The Greek can be very pliant undoubtedly, when he is in contact with a dominant people. The other side to his character—that of a hot-headed, argumentative, boisterous Donnybrook Fair patriotism—is developed in his own country where it is fed with memories of the historic greatness of his race.

The Roumanian—the fourth national type in the Balkans to which I shall refer—very closely resembles the Greek in most respects. Like the Greeks the Roumanians are subtle, flexible, engaging. They are a singularly good-looking race, and Roumanian girls are sought after in marriage a great deal. A Serbian politician explaining to me what he called "a nice national balance," pointed out that the Serbians rather despised trade and finance. The Roumanian, therefore, came into Serbia to make money as shopkeeper and financier. Then the young Serbian man married the rich Roumanian's daughter and thus the Serbian money was still kept in the country.

The instinct for trade has a very marked effect on the politics of the Balkans. The Serbian has no love for trade: the Montenegrin despises it quite. The Greek and the Roumanian are very keen traders with an inclination to escape from manual work as soon as they can. The Bulgarian is a trader and also fond of productive industry. So "as two of a trade never agree," neither Greek nor Roumanian can get on as well with the Bulgarian as with the Serbian.

The Roumanian national polity differs greatly from the Greek, though the two racial types are very similar. Whilst Greece has a stormy and disorderly democracy, Roumania is ruled practically by an oligarchy—an oligarchy which during the past twelve months has won to an achievement which would have delighted the old Florentine Republic. Without losing a soldier, almost without spending a crown, Roumania has won a great tract of territory and established herself as the paramount power of the Balkans. It was a victory of unscrupulous and patient resoluteness which is a classic of its kind, and it was made possible by the oligarchic system of Roumania. The Montenegrin does not need to be considered separately: he is the "Highlander" of the Serbian and shares Serbian language, customs, and character with such modifications as the conditions of his mountain life impose. But the Albanian, the largely Mohammedan mountain type to which the jealousies of Europe have agreed to give a separate nationality and a separate kingdom, calls for some attention. The Albanian is the wildest of the Balkan types, and his country the most primitive. It has had no period of civilisation, and can hardly be said to promise to have. Its existence as a nation in 1914 was due to the fact that the German Powers wished to have a footing in the Balkans for intrigue. "The creation of Albania dealt a death-blow to the Balkan League," said a cynical Austrian diplomatist recently. He was right: and the creation of Albania undertaken at the instance of Austria had no other purpose from the first, though it was disguised under the plea of anxiety for the national rights of the Albanians, wild catamarans of the hills, odd specimens of whom one may encounter in many parts of the Balkans acting as dragomans. The Albanian has many savage virtues. He is a picturesque fellow as he swaggers about with a silver-decorated armoury stuck in his waist-belt: and he is truly faithful to a master. But he has not the barest elements of a national organisation; and the Austrian Prince of Albania did not find a single house within all his dominion which would satisfy the housing needs of a respectable London clerk.

Describing the march across Albania to the Adriatic coast during the recent war a Serbian officer wrote:

It is only by travelling as we did that real facts can be learned. We who had only known the Turks by hearsay had a certain respect for them. At present I feel but contempt and disgust. To think that they should have held these lands for five hundred years, and kept them absolutely wild and uncultivated! Prishtina, Jakovitsa, and Prizrend are in every respect behind Mirigevo [a village some miles outside Belgrade]. There are neither bridges nor roads, nor decent dwellings to be met with in the Sanjak. Of the dirt I cannot trust myself to speak. The "Ujumat" (Prefecture) of Prizrend, residence of the Mutessarif, is in such a filthy condition that I could not sit there for more than five minutes together. All around the sofras (tables) were rags, remnants of food, tufts of dogs' hair, etc., for these ate and slept with their masters....

The people are humble, cowed, moving out-of-doors rarely, and then huddled together like a herd of cattle.... The peasants run to kiss our hands, and bow down to the ground, but they are too frightened to give a sensible answer to a plain question. They speak Serbian, it is true, and cross themselves as Christians, but otherwise bear little resemblance to our peasant folk. They have lived no better than their masters, for themselves and their pigs share the same apartment! If the pigs were let loose the Turks were sure to kill them, so they were hidden indoors. The first use they made of the liberty we gave them was to hunt the pigs into the open air, and how the poor beasts enjoyed it! One could not help laughing at their antics as they chased each other, while the children ran to keep them from escaping to the woods. But the cows and oxen defy description. They are like our calves, only the shape is queer. I saw no vegetables anywhere. The staple diet is maize. From our frontier to the sea it is the same tale of misery, helplessness, and dirt. In Prizrend, after every rainfall, the people drink muddy water in which none of our soldiers would care to wash. When we boiled it a thick scum came on the top, which we skimmed off! This is the water used by a town of 40,000 citizens; and really one felt that authorities like the Turks should not be allowed to live any longer. Now we feel that it is a disgrace to us to have delayed so long in coming to the deliverance of our brothers in bondage just outside our doors. Better late than never.

As for the independence of Albania, it would be a comical, if it were not a sinister, idea. Whoever speaks of a national sense in these savage hordes is either untruthful or ignorant. The Serbians of this region make no distinction, as we do, between the Turks and the Mohammedan Albanians. I could not get them to understand that the latter were in reality brethren of the Christian Albanians with whom they live in amity. I pointed out that these Mohammedans could not speak a word of Turkish, but that did not help. The Serbians insist that they are Turks all the same. And for all practical purposes they are right. The Christian Albanians are called by their race brethren "Catholics," and are hated and persecuted by them just as the Serbians are hated and persecuted. The "Catholics" loathe the Mohammedans and deny that they are of the same nationality. But the fact remains that they speak the same language. The Catholics welcomed us with joy, rendered us every possible service, and often refused to accept payment. They are eager to assist in our operations, acted as scouts for us, and brought us precious information. Sometimes they acted on their own initiative, captured, and killed their Mohammedan co-nationalists without first consulting us.... The priests are the most embittered. These jealous "fratres" told us they longed for a Christian Government, and that the project of a united Albania was insensate.... Ismail Kemal's proclamation has irritated the priests about here. They will not for a moment consider a union with the Mohammedan tribes or submission to a Moslem leader like Ismail. On the other hand, if we evacuate this country, a terrible fate awaits the Catholics....

Here I have made acquaintance with the Montenegrin troops, rather different from ours! They get leave to go home and see after their wives and children whenever they ask it, and lax discipline does not seem to affect their heroism. They fight like lions, but do nothing else except shoot birds and fish in the interval. Every ship that touches here is greeted with a volley, though ammunition is sometimes scarce, but the Montenegrin can better spare bread than shot. He will do nothing but fight, and ships often remain unladen here for days, because there are few Albanians in the place to do the work. My soldiers carry sacks and burdens of all kinds to and from the ships, and the Montenegrins laugh at them and say: "Is that how you fight, Brother Shumadinats?" [Shumadia is a forest in the centre of the Kingdom of Serbia.] They are amused to see our men one day unshaven; they are most particular themselves to shave each day whatever happens. The priests alone wear a beard, for they are not supposed to fight.... The Montenegrin soldiers' wives come once a week to look after their husbands, wash the linen, and help to clean up....

There is, of course, a certain amount of Serb intolerance in that letter, but it represents on the whole the truth.

So much for the different nations of the Balkans. The personalities of the Peninsula might provide a happy solution for the problems which the conflict of these mutually antipathetic racial elements create: for there is no fact more clear than that the general interest of the countries could best be served by a wise policy of compromise and co-operation, bringing its different elements together as the Swiss were brought together by a geographical rather than a racial reason. But unfortunately there are no personalities alike honest in outlook and great in power.

Four able and far-seeing men I have met in the Balkans: M. Nikolitch, President of the Serbian Parliament; General Demetrieff, Commander of the Third Army (which won the most notable Bulgarian victories), now commanding a Russian army; M. Venizuelos, Prime Minister of Greece; M. Take Jonescu, of the Roumanian Cabinet. All men of power, none seemingly has sufficient strength to impose his will not alone on his own country, but on the other Balkan States, and weld them into a Confederation which would be held together by a sense of common interests and common dangers.

King Ferdinand of Bulgaria has kept for years the centre of the Balkan stage to the European onlooker; and is still a great enough figure to give pause to those Bulgarian Nationalists who would exact from him reprisal for the terrible misfortunes of their country. But he is a man of audacity rather than of courage, and his ambition has been always more personal than national—to be Czar of the Balkans rather than to be the maker of a Balkan nation. Gifted with a great deal of diplomatic ability and with a soaring imagination, King Ferdinand has a serious obstacle in his personal timidity. To play a gambler's game one must be prepared at times to take the great risk. But King Ferdinand has many fears. He fears, for instance, infectious diseases morbidly, and the thought of a germ in the track could turn him from the highest of enterprises. Perhaps it was the fear of disease rather than of wounds that kept him so much in the rear of his army during the 1912 campaign against Turkey. But whatever the cause, his absence from the front showed a serious weakness of character in a man who aspired to carve out an empire for himself. The Bulgarian authorities, deceiving the Press almost as assiduously for the purpose as for the false representation that all the destruction of the Turkish forces was ascribable to the Bulgarian arms, gave to Europe inspiriting pictures of His Majesty following close on the heels of his soldiers in a military train which served him as a palace. The fact was that the ambitious but timid king kept very well to the rear, at Stara Zagora first and afterwards at Kirk Kilisse, with a great entourage of secret police. And when armistice negotiations were in progress he kept separate from his Cabinet as well as from his army. Affable in manner, industrious, pertinacious, well aware of the advantage of advertisement (my first meeting with His Majesty was due to the fact that he mistook my map case for a camera, and sent for me to photograph him while he stood on the bridge over the Maritza at Mustapha Pasha), of high ability, King Ferdinand did great things for his adopted country, but showed a fatal weakness of character when he had drunk deep of the wine of success. It is the fashion to blame him wholly now for the wild attack on Serbia and Greece. He may have been in part the victim of his advisers' folly in that. But without much doubt he could have vetoed the fatal move, if he had known his army from personal observation, if he had been down to the lines at Chatalja, and had looked closely into the besieging forces around Adrianople. Common sense would have told him that the attack on his allies was hopeless, if strength of character had not told him that it was wicked. But he neither knew the facts nor understood the ethics of the position.

General Demetrieff, Commander of the Third Bulgarian Army, the victor of Kirk Kilisse and of Lule Burgas, the reluctant attacker at Chatalja, impressed me as a man of fine character. For some few days I was a member of the officers' mess at Erminekioi, which was the headquarters of the Staff before the lines of Chatalja, and had the chance of seeing much of the general. He struck one as a frank, courageous man. He answered questions truthfully or not at all, and was notably kind to the very small group of correspondents who had got through to the front. His personal staff worshipped him, and told with pride that most of the staff work with him on the battle-field was under fire. When it was clear that the attack at Chatalja had failed, General Demetrieff neither attempted to tell falsehoods nor shut himself off from visitors. He ascribed the cessation of the attack to the outbreak of cholera in the Bulgarian lines (and the statement was probably in his mind not only the truth but all the truth: in any case one could not expect him to disclose the shortage of big gun ammunition): was avowedly disconsolate but not in the least discouraged. I cannot imagine General Demetrieff having any hand in the making of the second Balkan war against the Serbians and Greeks, and think that the Bulgarians had in him a man of honesty and courage as well as of great military skill. No other general of the Bulgarian Army impressed me in the same way, certainly not General Savoff.

Of the Bulgarian politicians, M. Gueshoff, Prime Minister at the outbreak of the first war, and M. Daneff, chief Bulgarian delegate at the Peace Conference and Prime Minister at the outbreak of the second war, had the chief parts in the glories and tragedies of 1912-13. M. Gueshoff seemed a well-meaning but weak man. He was fond of insisting upon his English education and of advancing that as a proof of his complete candour. I imagine that he played no directing part in the drama of his country's sudden rise to power and more sudden fall, but did just as his king directed, sometimes probably under protest. M. Daneff was a more virile man, and his force of character, with little guidance from experience, of liberal education, or from wise purpose, had much to do with the downfall of Bulgaria. Of the Balkan Peace Conference which met first in London in December 1912, M. Daneff attempted from the outset to be dictator. He never lost a chance of being rude to an opponent or fulsome to a supporter. He diplomatised by pronunciamento and made a vigorous use of the minor newspaper Press with the idea of overawing the chancelleries of Europe. I am sure that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had nearly as much amusement as chagrin from the incidents of the Conference. Just when the Turkish delegates were being gently coaxed up to drink the hemlock, Bulgaria would publicly dance a wild triumph of joy, and announce that the very last drop had to be absorbed or Bulgaria would not be satisfied. When the Turkish delegates were thus startled away and all the pressure of European diplomacy was being brought to bear upon the Turkish Government to bring them back to the point, Bulgaria threatened publicly to break up the Conference and resume the war. Europe was given a short time-limit in which to act.

M. Venizuelos, Prime Minister of Greece, has proved in his own country a great capacity for good government and wise diplomacy. There was a strong movement made at the outset of the Balkan Peace Conference to have him appointed head of the Balkan delegation. Success in that would have made the chances of peace better; and probably he had an expectation of being chosen as being the senior in official rank of all those present. But the jealousy and distrust of Greece was great: and M. Venizuelos did not prove himself the man of genius who could overcome the handicap which his nationality imposed. True, the task was almost impossible. But still nearer to the impossible would it be now to unite again the warring factions in the Balkans. M. Venizuelos, of the highest talent though he be, will not be the maker of a Balkan Confederation.

M. Nikolitch, President of the Serbian Parliament, is an amiable and clever man with far more culture than is usual in the Balkans. He has translated English classics into the Serbian tongue, and is an industrious student of social and political philosophy. But he has nothing of the brute force that is needed to control the warring passions of the Balkan States. As the Minister of a Balkan Union to a great Power he would be admirable, for he has tact and wit, and a knowledge of the value of truth. When it was made plain that Austria was to have her way and Serbia no territory on the Adriatic, the disappointment of Serbia was bitter: and there was some special blame of Great Britain that she "had not considered her obvious interests," and brought this friendly little state to the sea. M. Nikolitch had the diplomat's faculty of taking a defeat smilingly. "The most unhappy thing about it," he said to me, "is that now Serbia will not have England on her frontier." It was a neat touch to speak of the sea as British territory.

There remains to be considered M. Take Jonescu, who is credited with the chief share in the unscrupulous diplomacy which has made Roumania for the while paramount in the Balkans. It was certainly a masterpiece of Machiavellianism, applying the tenets of "The Prince" with cold precision, and marks its author as the master mind of the Balkans to-day. Give such a man a good soldier people to follow him and an honest purpose, and a Balkan Confederation might be achieved, with some further blood-letting perhaps. But it is not possible to believe that the Roumanians, frivolous, pleasure-loving, untenacious, could impose their will for long upon the coarser-fibred but more virile Slavs of the Peninsula.

No, there is not a personality in the Balkans to-day at once forceful enough, honest enough, and skilful enough to give the Peninsula a union which would enable it by means of a bold decision now to ensure internal peace and freedom from outside interference. A great man could build up a greater Switzerland, perhaps, of the Slavs, the Greeks, and the Roumanians in the Balkan Peninsula with Great Britain, Russia, and France as joint sponsors for the freedom of the new Federation. But one hardly dares to hope for such a happy ending to the long miserable story of the Balkans.