From that base line to the Black Sea nearly all European Turkey
(with the exception of the Chalcidician Peninsula, including
Saloniki and its hinterland) had been occupied by the military
forces of Bulgaria. Why then was Bulgaria so insistent on getting
beyond that base line, crossing the Vardar, and possessing herself
of Central Macedonia up to Ochrida and the eastern frontier of
Albania?
The answer, in brief, is that it has been the undeviating policy of
Bulgaria, ever since her own emancipation by Russia in 1877, to free
the Bulgarians still under the Ottoman yoke and unite them in a
common fatherland. The Great Bulgaria which was created by Russia in
the treaty she forced on Turkey--the Treaty of San Stefano--was
constructed under the influence of the idea of a union of the
Bulgarian race in a single state under a common government. This
treaty was afterward torn to pieces by the Congress of Berlin, which
set up for the Bulgarians a very diminutive principality. But the
Bulgarians, from the palace down to the meanest hut, have always
been animated by that racial and national idea. The annexation of
Eastern Roumelia in 1885 was a great step in the direction of its
realization. And it was to carry that programme to completion that
Bulgaria made war against Turkey in 1912. Her primary object was the
liberation of the Bulgarians in Macedonia and their incorporation in
a Great Bulgaria. And the Treaty of Partition with Servia seemed, in
the event of victory over Turkey, to afford a guarantee of the
accomplishment of her long-cherished purpose. It was a strange irony
of fate that while as a result of the geographical situation of the
belligerents Bulgaria, at the close of the war with Turkey, found
herself in actual occupation of all European Turkey from the Black
Sea up to the River Struma and beyond,--that is, all Thrace to
Chataldja as well as Eastern Macedonia--her allies were in
possession of the bulk of Macedonia, including the entire triangle
she had planned to inject between the frontiers of New Servia and
New Greece!
The Bulgarians claimed this triangle on ethnological grounds. Its
inhabitants, they asseverated, were their brethren, as genuinely
Bulgarian as the subjects of King Ferdinand.