THE TRAGEDY OF 1914
When the war between the Balkan States and the Turkish Empire was
brought to a close for the time being by an armistice signed on the
battlefield of Chatalja, to which Bulgaria, Servia, and Turkey were
parties, and by the summoning of the Conference of London, to which
Greece also was a party, the prospects for Bulgaria's future were
singularly bright. As a power in the Balkans Turkey had ceased to exist.
She had been driven out of all Albania, Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace,
except that beleaguered garrisons held the fortresses of Scutari,
Janina, and Adrianople and the Dardanelles forts, whilst behind the
lines of Chatalja a small area of Turkish territory remained under the
Crescent. The area held by the Bulgarian armies was greater at this time
than the territory assigned to her by the Treaty of San Stefano, and
promised to be extended as the result of the peace negotiations. In the
war which had just been waged the exploits of Bulgarian arms had
attracted the widest attention in Europe. Public opinion in most of the
capitals of the world assigned the future hegemony of the Balkan
Peninsula to the Bulgarian nation. But all this fair-seeming prospect
was the prelude to one of the greatest national tragedies in history.
I cannot better preface a relation of the facts of that tragedy than by
giving a summary of the position early in 1914, as it was given
anonymously by a noted Bulgarian diplomat to the _National Review_. He
wrote:
It is too late for pretending that all is well with the Balkan
League. Even in official quarters, where pessimism is generally
discouraged, it is no longer denied that relations between the
Allies have reached a critical stage.... It would form a sad
epilogue to a noble story if what began as a crusade of
liberation were to end in fratricidal strife.... Nominally, the
quarrel turns on the interpretation of treaties and their
bearing on the situation created by the war. But underneath all
these arguments there lurk preoccupations far transcending the
scope of written or oral agreements. The question at stake is
nothing less than the future balance of power in the Balkans.
The map of the Balkans has been transformed beyond recognition,
and Turkey has practically ceased to exist as a European power;
but those who expected it to inaugurate an era of tranquillity
have been disappointed. The failure of the war as an instrument
of pacification is largely due to the very magnitude of its
military success. Had the victories of the Allies been less
decisive, conditions might have arisen more favourable to the
cause of Balkan union. The sudden collapse of Turkey left a void
which has upset the entire scheme of things existing....
[Illustration: A BAGPIPER]
The passions which the war has engendered are only partly due to
lust for territorial aggrandisement. Mere thirst after conquest
would have never produced such perversions of moral sense had it
not been backed by the sentiment of fear and jealousy. This is
clearly proved by the fact that feelings have reached their
highest point of intensity where this latter element loomed
largest. The Bulgarians have exhibited a degree of self-control
which is in marked contrast with the conduct of other Allies.
This equanimity is the more surprising in view of the fact that
the position of Bulgaria is well-nigh desperate. For months
past, the brunt of the war has fallen almost entirely on her. On
every side she is surrounded by an atmosphere of open hostility.
By threats of invasion, Roumania has wrung from her a ransom for
the Balkan victories, while in Macedonia her allies are
preparing to dispute her lawful share and have massed against
her their whole armies. So long as peace with Turkey is not
signed she must remain immobilised in front of Chatalja and
Bulair. For a parallel case one must go back to the dark hours
of Prussia during the Seven Years' War. But in the midst of all
these difficulties Bulgaria has kept a cool head, whereas public
opinion in Servia and Greece has parted company with all
reason. It is not indifference to the issues at stake which
explains this placid demeanour. When the proper time arrives,
the Bulgarians will be found tough bargainers and determined to
claim their full due. They know, however, that the position of
their country as prime factor in the Balkans cannot be seriously
affected by the results of the allotment. Even before the war,
the supremacy of Bulgaria was hardly questioned, and the
formation of the Balkan League would have been impossible but
for this acquiescence in her right to leadership. With the
disappearance of Turkey, this predominance is bound to be
further accentuated and henceforth will have to be reckoned with
as a political axiom.
The reasons which have enabled Bulgaria to envisage the future
with tranquillity are for her allies a source of uneasiness.
Servia and Greece have long watched the rapid and uninterrupted
progress of their pushful neighbour with mixed feelings of fear
and envy. Her seniors in point of time, they have been
outdistanced in the race for Balkan hegemony. In 1885 Servia
made a desperate attempt at grappling with the problem, but had
no reason to be satisfied with the results. The doctrine of
Balkan equilibrium was buried at Slivnitza, and since then
Servia has had to rest contented with a secondary place. But the
galling memory of defeat had never died out and probably plays
in the present anti-Bulgarian agitation a larger part than most
Servians realise or would care to admit.
Antagonism between Greeks and Bulgarians is a legacy of the
past. Their history is a long record of ceaseless struggle. When
they could no longer war as freemen, the feud was transferred to
ecclesiastical ground and there continued under the mocking eye
of their new masters. Since their restoration to independent
life, they have not been able to revert to the old tradition
owing to Turkey's presence as buffer state. This involuntary
truce, however, has not turned hatred into love. They are once
more to have a common frontier and will thus be brought in
direct contact.
... The war has widened the gulf between these races by adding
to the old stock of animosities a fresh supply of military
jealousies. It has let loose over the entire Peninsula a flood
of vanity which has upset the balance of a good many heads. A
year ago, no sane Servian would have dreamed of pitting his
country against Bulgaria, and this recognition of inferiority
stood for peace. Now, every Servian officer is convinced that
the result of such a trial of forces would be favourable to
Servia, just as he is persuaded that the issues of the war with
Turkey have been decided mainly by Servian valour....
If this is the way in which Servians are wearing their laurels,
it can be imagined what the effect of recent events has been on
impressionable Greece. To the trepidation with which the war was
entered has succeeded the feeling of boundless self-reliance.
All sense of reality and proportion has been banished, and there
is no exploit which seems beyond the reach of Greek effort.
The outbreak of a fresh Balkan war would, in the present
circumstances, prove little short of a world-wide calamity.
Should, however, Europe succeed in localising such a conflict,
its miseries will, to a certain extent, be compensated by one
very important advantage. A trial of forces between the various
Balkan competitors will clear the atmosphere and settle in the
only efficacious way the sore problem of Balkan hegemony, which
is at the bottom of Balkan unrest. It will fix for a long term
of years the respective positions of the parties. Just as the
Servo-Bulgarian War in 1885 proved a blessing in disguise, so
this time also the arbitrament of the sword might create
conditions more favourable to the political stability of the
Peninsula. And this will be a gain not only to the Balkan
nations, but to the whole of Europe.
The last thing of which that Bulgarian writer dreamt was the actual
result of the fresh Balkan war, which did break out and which ended in
the humiliation of Bulgaria. He contemplated the necessity of palliating
to European minds the enormity of a fratricidal war between allies who
had sanctioned their war against Turkey as a struggle of the Cross
against the Crescent; but he had no idea that there was the barest
possibility that Bulgaria would have to suffer complete defeat instead
of explaining victory.
The Conference of London which endeavoured to arrange a peace after the
first phase of the Balkan war met first in December 1913. I watched
closely its deliberations, had several friends among the delegates, and
was in a position to see at close hand the play of jealousies and
ambitions which made its work futile. From the first the very
desperation of Turkey raised a difficulty to quick peace negotiations.
She had lost so much as to be practically bankrupt, and was in the
position of a reckless man with no more possible losses to suffer,
anxious by any expedient to postpone the day of payment in the hope that
something would turn up in his favour. That anything should turn up
seemed in reason impossible, but Oriental fatalism despises reason; and
in this case Oriental fatalism was right judged by the final event.
The sessions of the London Conference found a vividly contrasting
setting in London. (In Constantinople the meetings would have had an
appropriate stage.) It was a contest of Oriental against semi-Oriental
diplomacy; and staid British officials, who had duties in connection
with the Conference, lived for weeks in an atmosphere of bewilderment,
wondering if they were still in the twentieth century or had wandered
back to the Bagdad of the Middle Ages.
The first effort of the Turkish delegates was to gain time. On any point
that arose they wanted instructions from their government and pressed
for an adjournment. When, after a few days, the Conference assembled
again, the instructions had not arrived, and there was need for another
adjournment. At the next meeting the instructions had arrived; but they
were written so illegibly that they could not be deciphered, and so
there was another adjournment. (This illegible despatches excuse had not
even the merit of being novel--it was used many years before in an
Egyptian negotiation.) To the desperate attempts of the Turks to waste
time the diplomats of the Balkan States replied with but little patience
or suavity. They did not recognise fully that they were present at a
death-bed, and that the patient had some excuse for taking an
unconscionable time in dying. Their patience was not increased by the
knowledge of the fact that the time secured by these evasive excuses was
being used in desperate attempts to sow dissensions among the allies and
to beat up support in some European capital for the forlorn Turkish
Empire.
It was over the question of the cession of Adrianople to Bulgaria that
the chief trouble arose, and the Turkish delegates made a great point of
the fact that at Adrianople was the parent mosque of Islam in Europe and
the burial-place of the first Sultans. This plea for their holy places
aroused some sympathy in Europe. I suggested to Dr. Daneff, the chief
Bulgarian delegate to the Conference, that he should allow me to
publish that Bulgaria would allow the Turks to retain the holy places in
Adrianople as an extra-territorial area under the control of the Moslem
Caliph. Dr. Daneff liked the proposal, but at first would only allow it
to go out as an unofficial hint that probably Bulgaria would consent to
such an arrangement. Then, finding that the concession was popular, he
fathered it directly, and it was made one of the terms of peace which
the Powers tried to force upon Turkey.
Peace seemed assured when finally the Turkish Porte agreed, under
pressure from the Powers, to a Treaty of Peace, which left to Turkey on
the European mainland only the territory lying south and east from a
line drawn between Media, on the Black Sea, to Rodosto on the Sea of
Marmora. But a revolution in Turkey upset this arrangement, and the
Peace Conference was broken up and the war resumed.
In this second phase of the Balkan war against Turkey (1914), the
efforts of the Balkan League were practically confined to attacks upon
the fortresses still held by the Turks in the conquered territories.
Scutari, Janina, Adrianople fell after fierce battles. The revolution
clearly had done nothing to restore the military strength of the Turks.
Now another effort was made to end the war, and the Peace Conference
resumed its sessions in London.
Whilst during the 1913 session all the delay had been caused by Turkey,
now Turkey shared the willingness of Bulgaria to sign a peace on terms
dictated by the Powers, which left to Turkey the territory behind the
Midia-Rodosto line, and reserved for a European decision the fate of the
Aegean Islands and the boundaries of an independent state of Albania
which was to be set up. But both Servia and Greece were reluctant now to
assent to such peace conditions. Both felt a grievance about the
creation of an independent Albania which deprived them of a great
stretch of territory on the Adriatic which they had hoped to share. Both
felt that yet another war was necessary to settle issues as to the
division of the spoil with Bulgaria.
To the delays for which Servia and Greece were responsible there was an
added complication arising from the attitude of Roumania. That
kingdom--which had taken no active part in the late war, but which had
secretly nursed a boundary grievance against Bulgaria dating back from
the War of Liberation, when Russia robbed Roumania of Bessarabia and
proposed to pay her with Bulgarian territory without actually doing
so--now announced that she must be a party to any new Balkan settlement,
and mobilised her forces to give accent to the demand she had been
making for some time for a territorial concession from Bulgaria.
The diplomacy of Bulgaria under these difficult circumstances was
deplorable. Her statesmen seemed bemused with the intoxication of
Bulgarian military victories, and unable to forget the glowing
calculations of the future Bulgarian Empire which they had made during
the course of the war. Those calculations I gathered from gossip with
all classes in Bulgaria at different times, speaking not only with
politicians but with bankers, trading people, and others. They concluded
that the Turk was going to be driven out of Europe, at any rate, as far
as Constantinople. They considered that Constantinople was too great a
prize for the Bulgarian nation or for the Balkan States, and that
Constantinople would be left as an international city to be governed by
a commission of the Great Powers. Bulgaria was, then, to have of what
had been Turkey-in-Europe, the province of Thrace, and a large part of
Macedonia as far as the city of Salonica.
[Illustration: A YOUNG GIRL OF IRN]
Salonica was desired very much by the Bulgarians, and also very much by
the Greeks; and the decision in regard to Salonica before the war was
that it would be best to make it a free Balkan city, governed by all the
Balkan States in common, as a free port for all the Balkan States. The
frontier of Greece was to extend to the north, and Greece was to be
allowed all the Aegean Islands. The Servian frontier was to extend to
the eastward and the southward, and what is now the autonomous province
of Albania (the creation of which was insisted on by the Powers) was to
be divided between Montenegro and Servia.
That division would have left the Bulgarians with the greatest spoil of
the war. They would have had entry on to the Sea of Marmora; they would
have controlled, perhaps, one side of the Dardanelles (but I believe
they thought that the Dardanelles might also be left to a commission of
the Powers). Now, with the clash of diplomacy, it was sternly necessary
to curtail that ambition considerably, and to decide to seek a friend
among the different rivals. Bulgarian diplomats could not be made to
see that. They were firm with Turkey: wisely enough, for Turkey had no
power left to wound or to help. But at the same time they refused to
make any concessions either to Servia, to Greece, or to Roumania, all of
whom were determined to have a share of the plunder which Bulgaria had
assigned for herself. "A leonine partnership" as the lawyers call it,
that is to say, a partnership in which one party takes the lion's share
of the spoil, is a very satisfactory arrangement for the lion. But one
wants to be sure before attempting to enforce leonine arrangements that
one is the lion. Bulgaria blundered on into a position which left her
exhausted army to face at once Greece, Servia, Montenegro, and Roumania.
That it was not necessary for her to get into that position I can say
with some confidence. A more judicious handling of her relations with
Servia would have kept the friendship of that kindred nation, and
Montenegro would have followed Servia. The united Slav peoples of the
Balkans would then have been strong enough to withstand any attempt to
enforce unfair conditions by Roumania or Greece. But Bulgaria made no
attempt to conciliate Servia. Between the two peoples there had existed
before the war a very close treaty of alliance. This treaty had arranged
for the division of the spoil of the war on a basis which had not
foreseen that the European Powers would create an independent Albania;
and Servia had not imagined that Turkey would be so weak, and that the
booty in Thrace would have been so considerable. Bulgaria thus had more
than was expected in one quarter, whilst Servia was bitterly
disappointed in another direction. Friends, under the circumstances,
would have struck another bargain. Bulgaria insisted upon the strict
letter of the old bargain.
Servia was thus forced into the arms of Greece; reluctantly, I think. If
she could have made a fair arrangement with Bulgaria she would have
preferred that. But it seemed to be destined that Bulgaria should add
another to the long list of her frustrated hopes.
The early part of 1914 saw the Balkans in the throes of a war which
eclipsed in bitterness and bloodshed the campaign of 1913. Greece and
Servia fought against Bulgaria, and Roumania marched down from the north
towards the Bulgarian capital, her army unopposed because there was no
means of opposing it. Stopping short of entering Sofia, Roumania took
up the position of the chief Power in the Balkans and insisted upon
dictating terms of peace. Those terms Bulgaria, perforce, accepted after
her army had been defeated with terrible slaughter by the Servian and
Grecian forces. She was forced to give up territory in all directions:
to Roumania on the north; to Servia on the west; to Greece on the south.
To crown her misfortunes, the Turks moved up against the prostrate
country, recaptured, without an effort, Adrianople, which had been won
with such terrible cost of Bulgarian blood, and also Kirk Kilisse. In
the final result Bulgaria was left with but little net gain as the price
of her enormous sacrifices of blood and of treasure. To the north she
actually lost some of her old territory. From the Turk she secured a
fragment of Thrace, and a part of Macedonia which gave her access to the
Aegean Sea, but no decent port there, and no possibility of carrying out
her grandiose scheme of canalising the River Maritza and making a
Bulgarian Adrianople a port for trade. Further, she had the
mortification of seeing all three of her rivals in the Balkans
aggrandised, and Roumania left with the hegemony of the Peninsula.
Only a few months before, Mr. Noel Buxton had written the "Io triumphe"
of the Bulgarian cause:
The blight that had lain on the Balkan lands was healed, the fog
dispelled. Even the prestige of military despotism was gone like
a pricked bubble. The tyranny that rested on delusion and not on
power was vanished like an empty nightmare that fades when the
sleeper wakes. The establishment of Europe's freedom was
fulfilled; the final step taken. A great and notable nation had
obtained recognition through the war. Its persistence, its
purpose, its deep reserve, now stood revealed, added to the
world's stores of national character.
For centuries the Bulgarian refused to compromise with the Turk.
Other nations sought to lighten the weight of the yoke by taking
service with the tyrant or bowing the head. The maxim, "The
sword never strikes when the head is bowed," undermined the soul
of other nations, never of this. Influence and wealth went to
others; all seemed lost by the policy of defiance. Bulgarians
would not balance advantages. A kind of faith made them ready to
pay even death for ultimate gain. The spirit wins at last: and
the indomitable spirit of the Bulgars has come by its just
reward.
Three months after that the Turk was back in Thrace, and the national
life of Bulgaria had touched its lowest point since the war of
Liberation, with only her justified hope in the future as a consolation.