This was a difficult matter to adjust. Before the war began, as we
have already seen, a Treaty of Partition had been negotiated between
Bulgaria and Servia, but conditions had changed materially in the
interval and Servia now demanded a revision of the treaty and
refused to withdraw her troops from Central Macedonia, which the
treaty had marked for reversion to Bulgaria. In consequence the
relations between the governments and peoples of Servia and Bulgaria
were dangerously strained. The Bulgarians denounced the Servians as
perfidious and faithless and the Servians responded by excoriating
the colossal greed and intolerance of the Bulgarians. The immemorial
mutual hatred of the two Slav nations was stirred to its lowest
depths, and it boiled and sputtered like a witches' cauldron.
In Eastern Macedonia Bulgarians and Greeks were each eagerly pushing
their respective spheres of occupation without much regard to the
rights or feeling of the other Ally. Though the Bulgarians had not
forgiven the Greeks for anticipating them in the capture of Saloniki
in the month of November, the rivalry between them in the following
winter and spring had for its stage the territory between the Struma
and the Mesta Rivers--and especially the quadrilateral marked by
Kavala and Orphani on the coast and Seres and Drama on the line of
railway from Saloniki to Adrianople. They had one advantage over the
Bulgarians: their troops could be employed to secure extensions of
territory for the Hellenic kingdom at a time when Bulgaria still
needed the bulk of her forces to fight the Turks at Chataldja and
Adrianople. Hence the Greeks occupied towns in the district from
which Bulgarian troops had been recalled. Nor did they hesitate to
dislodge scattered Bulgarian troops which their ally had left behind
to establish a claim of occupation. Naturally disputes arose between
the military commanders and these led to repeated armed encounters.
On March 5 Greeks and Bulgarians fought at Nigrita as they
subsequently fought at Pravishta, Leftera, Panghaion, and Anghista.
This conduct of the Allies toward one another while the common enemy
was still in the field boded ill for their future relations. "Our
next war will be with Bulgaria," said the man on the street in
Athens, and this bellicose sentiment was reciprocated alike by the
Bulgarian people and the Bulgarian army. The secular mutual enmities
and animosities of the Greeks and Bulgarians, which self-interest
had suppressed long enough to enable the Balkan Allies to make
European Turkey their own, burst forth with redoubled violence under
the stimulus of the imperious demand which the occasion now made
upon them all for an equitable distribution of the conquered
territory. For ages the fatal vice of the Balkan nations has been
the immoderate and intolerant assertion by each of its own claims
coupled with contemptuous disregard of the rights of others.