The war with the Turks was a short one. Yet the war with the Bulgars was
still shorter. The Bulgars attacked us in a dark night. Austria
suggested such an attack, and this quite suited the Bulgarian spirit. It
is a slavish spirit, full of slavish ambitions and slavish abject
methods.
When I tell you that, believe me, I tell it neither as a chauvinist nor
even as a Serbian patriot, but as a man who has studied very carefully
the history and psychology of the Balkan peoples.
The Bulgarian attack against the Serbian army was resisted not only by
the Serbs, as the Bulgars hoped, but by the Greeks and Roumanians as
well. I visited the battlefield afterwards. I have been in Stip, a town
on the Bregalniza river, where the attack began. I saw the tree on the
bank of the river, under which the Serbian and Bulgarian officers rested
together the very day before the treacherous night. The Bulgarians
smiled and chatted with their Serbian colleagues; they spoke about the
everlasting brotherhood between the Serbian and Bulgarian nations; they
ate and drank from the same plates and glasses with the Serbs, their
allies, while the order of the night attack lay in their pockets. It
happened nineteen hundred years after a treacherous apostle ate and
drank in the same manner with his Master.
The unnatural ambitions of the Bulgars were repudiated by all the Balkan
nations. Therefore the Bulgars saw one day against them, not one enemy
as they expected, but three. Serbs, Greeks and Roumanians marched
together towards Sofia. The Bulgars asked for peace. In the conference
of Bucharest, as you remember, the new frontiers of the Balkan States
were marked. Serbia came out from this war victorious, it is true, but
with a broken heart, for she had been forced to fight against her ally
of yesterday--with a broken heart, with many thousands of her best sons
killed and crippled, and with still many more swept away by cholera,
which was raging in the summer of 1913.