THE BALKAN PENINSULA

AGENTS

America The Macmillan Company 64 & 66 Fifth Avenue, New York

Australasia The Oxford University Press 205 Flinders Lane, Melbourne

Canada The Macmillan Company of Canada, Ltd. St. Martin's House, 70 Bond Street, Toronto

India Macmillan & Company, Ltd. Macmillan Building, Bombay 309 Bow Bazaar Street, Calcutta

A BALKAN PEASANT

THE BALKAN PENINSULA

BY

FRANK FOX

AUTHOR OF
"AUSTRALIA," "BULGARIA," "SWITZERLAND," ETC.

PUBLISHED BY A. & C. BLACK, LTD.
4, 5, & 6 SOHO SQUARE, LONDON, W.
1915

PREFACE

This book was written in the spring of 1914, just before Germany plunged the world into the horrors of a war which she had long prepared, taking as a pretext a Balkan incident—the political murder of an Austrian prince by an Austrian subject of Serb nationality. Germany having prepared for war was anxious for an occasion which would range Austria by her side. If Germany had gone to war at the time of the Agadir incident, she knew that Italy would desert the Triple Alliance, and she feared for Austria's loyalty. A war pretext which made Austria's desertion impossible was just the thing for her plans.

It would be impossible to reshape this book so as to bring within its range the Great War, begun in the Balkans, and in all human probability to be decided finally by battles in the Balkans. I let it go out to the public as impressions of the Balkans dated from the end of 1913. It may have some value to the student of contemporary Balkan events.

My impressions of the Balkan Peninsula were chiefly gathered during the period 1912-13 of the war of the Balkan allies against Turkey, and of the subsequent war among themselves. I was war correspondent for the London Morning Post during the war against Turkey and penetrated through the Balkan Peninsula down to the Sea of Marmora and the lines of Chatalja. In war-time peoples show their best or their worst. As they appeared during a struggle in which, at first, the highest feelings of patriotism were evoked, and afterwards the lowest feelings of greed and cruelty, the Balkan peoples left me with a steady affection for the peasants and the common folk generally; a dislike and contempt, which made few exceptions, for the politicians and priests who governed their destinies. Perhaps when they settle down to a more peaceful existence—if ever they do—the inhabitants of the Balkan Peninsula will come to average more their qualities, the common people becoming less simple-minded, obedient, chaste, kind: their leaders learning wisdom rather than cunning, and getting some sense of the value of truth and also some sense of ruth to keep them from setting their countrymen at one another's throats. But at the present time the picture which I have to put before the reader, with its almost unbelievable contradictions of courage and gentleness on the one side and cowardly cruelty on the other, is a true one.

The true Balkan States are Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, and Albania. Roumania is proud to consider herself a Western State rather than a semi-Eastern Balkan State, though both her position and her diplomacy link her closely with Balkan developments. Turkey, of course, cannot be considered in any sense as a Balkan State though she still holds the foot of the Balkan Peninsula. Greece has prouder aspirations than to be considered one of the struggling nationalities of the Balkans and dreams of a revival of the Hellenic Empire. But in considering the Balkan Peninsula it is not possible to exclude altogether the Turk, the Greek, the Roumanian. My aim will be to give a snapshot picture of the Balkan Peninsula, looking at it as a geographical entity for historical reference, and to devote more especial attention to the true Balkan States.

FRANK FOX.

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Sketch Map on page [xii].

SKETCH MAP OF THE BALKAN PENINSULA

THE BALKAN PENINSULA

CHAPTER I

THE VEXED BALKANS

The Fates were unkind to the Balkan Peninsula. Because of its position, it was forced to stand in the path of the greatest racial movements of the world, and was thus the scene of savage racial struggles, and the depositary of residual shreds of nations surviving from great defeats or Pyrrhic victories and cherishing irreconcilable mutual hatreds. As if that were not enough of ill fortune imposed by geographical position, the great Roman Empire elected to come from its seat in the Italian Peninsula to die in the Balkan Peninsula, a long drawn-out death of many agonies, of many bloody disasters and desperate retrievals. For all the centuries of which history knows a blood-mist has hung over the Balkans; and for the centuries before the dawn of written history one may surmise that there was the same constant struggle of warring races.

It seems fairly certain that when the Northern peoples moved down from their gloomy forests towards the Mediterranean littoral to mingle their blood with the early peoples of the Minoan civilisation and to found the Grecian and the Roman nations, the chief stream of these fierce hordes moved down by the valley of the Danube and debouched on the Balkan Peninsula. Doubtless they fought many a savage battle with the aborigines in Thessaly and Thrace. Of these battles we have no records, and no absolute certainty, indeed, that the Mediterranean shore was colonised by a race from the North, though all the facts that we are learning now from the researches of modern archaeologists point to that conclusion. But whatever the prehistoric state of the Balkan Peninsula, the first sure records from written history show it as a vexed area peopled by widely different and mutually warring races, and subject always to waves of war and invasion from the outside. The Slav historian Jireček concludes that the Balkan Peninsula was inhabited at the earliest times known to history by many different tribes belonging to distinct races—the Thraco-Illyrians, the Thraco-Macedonians, and the Thraco-Dacians. At the beginning of the third century, the Slavs made their first appearance and, crossing the Danube, came to settle in the great plains between the river and the Balkan Mountains. Later, they proceeded southwards and formed colonies among the Thraco-Illyrians, the Roumanians, and the Greeks. This Slav emigration went on for several centuries. In the seventh century of the Christian era a Finno-ugric tribe reached the banks of the Danube. This tribe came from the Volga, and, crossing Russia, proceeded towards ancient Moesia, where it took possession of the north-east territory of the Balkans between the Danube and the Black Sea. These were the Bulgars or Volgars, near cousins to the Turks who were to come later. The Bulgars assumed the language of the Slavs, and some of their customs. The Serbs or Serbians, coming from the Don River district had been near neighbours of the Volgars or Bulgars (in the Slav languages "B" and "V" have a way of interchanging), and were without much doubt closely allied to them in race originally. Later, they diverged, tending more to the Slav type, whilst the Bulgars approached nearer to the Turk type.

There may be traced, then, in the racial history of the Balkans these race types: a Mediterranean people inhabiting the sea-coast and possessing a fairly high civilisation, the records of which are being explored now in the Cretan excavations; an aboriginal people occupying the hinterland of the coast, not so highly cultivated as the coast dwellers (who had probably been civilised by Egyptian influences) but racially akin to them; a Northern people coming from the shores of the Baltic and the North Sea before the period of written history and combining ultimately with the people of the coast to found the Grecian civilisation, leaving in the hinterland, as they passed towards the sea, detachments which formed other mixed tribes, partly aboriginal, partly Nordic; various invading peoples of Semitic type from the Levant; the Romans, the Goths and the Huns, the Slavs and the Tartars, the Bulgars and the Serbs, the Normans, Saracens, and Turks. Because the Balkan Peninsula was on the natural path to a warm-water port from the north to the south of Europe; because it was on the track of invasion and counter-invasion between Asia and Europe, all this mixture of races was forced upon it, and as a consequence of the mixture a constant clash of warfare. There was, too, a current of more peaceful communication for purposes of trade between the Levant and the Black Sea on the one side and the peoples of the Baltic Sea on the other side, which flowed in part along the Balkan Peninsula.

In Italy and her Invaders Mr. T. Hodgkin suggests:

During the interval from 540 to 480 b.c. there was a brisk commercial intercourse between the flourishing Greek colonies on the Black Sea, Odessos, Istros, Tyras, Olbia and Chersonesos—places now approximately represented by Varna, Kustendjix, Odessa, Cherson, and Sebastopol—between these cities and the tribes to the northward (inhabiting the country which has been since known as Lithuania), all of whom at the time of Herodotus passed under the vague generic name of Scythians. By this intercourse which would naturally pass up the valleys of the great rivers, especially the Dniester and the Dnieper, and would probably again descend by the Vistula and the Niemen, the settlements of the Goths were reached, and by its means the Ionian letter-forms were communicated to the Goths, to become in due time the magical and mysterious Runes.

One fact which lends great probability to this theory is that undoubtedly, from very early times, the amber deposits of the Baltic, to which allusion has already been made, were known to the civilised world; and thus the presence of the trader from the South among the settlements of the Guttones or Goths is naturally accounted for. Probably also there was for centuries before the Christian Era a trade in sables, ermines, and other furs, which were a necessity in the wintry North and a luxury of kings and nobles in the wealthier South. In exchange for amber and fur, the traders brought probably not only golden staters and silver drachmas, but also bronze from Armenia with pearls, spices, rich mantles suited to the barbaric taste of the Gothic chieftains. As has been said, this commerce was most likely carried on for many centuries. Sabres of Assyrian type have been found in Sweden, and we may hence infer that there was a commercial intercourse between the Euxine and the Baltic, perhaps 1300 years before Christ.

A few leading facts with dates should give a fairly clear impression of the story of the Balkan Peninsula. About 400 b.c. the Macedonian Empire was being founded. It represented the uprise of a hinterland Greek people over the decayed greatness of the coast-dwelling Greeks. At that time the northern part of the Balkan Peninsula was occupied by the Getae or Dacians. Phillip of Macedon made an alliance with the Getae. Alexander the Great of Macedonia thrashed them to subjection and carried a great wave of invasion into Asia from the Balkan Peninsula.

TRAJAN'S COLUMN IN ROME
Commemorates the victories which brought all the Balkan Peninsula under the Roman sway

About the year 110 b.c. the Romans first came to the Balkan Peninsula, finding it inhabited as regards the south by the Greek peoples, as regards the north by the Getae or Dacians. The southern people were quickly subdued: the northern people were never really subdued by the Romans until the time of Trajan (the first century of the Christian era). He bridged the Danube with a great military bridge at the spot now known as Turnu-Severin, and Trajan's Column in Rome commemorated the victories which brought all the Balkan Peninsula under the Roman sway. Trajan found that the manners and customs of the Dacians were similar to those of the Germans. These sturdy Dacians were conquered but not exterminated by the Romans. Dacia across the Danube was made into a Roman colony, and the present kingdom of Roumania is supposed to represent the survival of that colony, which was a mixture of Roman and Dacian blood.

In the third century of the Christian era the Goths made their first appearance in the Balkan Peninsula. The Roman Empire had then entered into its period of decline. The invasions of the Visigoths, the Huns, the Vandals, the Ostrogoths, and the Lombards were to come in turn to overwhelm the Roman civilisation. The Gothic invasion of the Balkan Peninsula was begun in the reign of the Roman Emperor Phillip. Crossing the Danube, the Goths ravaged Thrace and laid siege to Marcianople (now Schumla) without success. In a later invasion the Goths attacked Philippopolis and captured it after a great defeat of the Roman general, Decius the younger. Then the Roman Emperor (Decius the elder) himself took the field and was defeated and killed in a great battle near the mouth of the Danube (a.d. 251). That may be called the decisive date in the history of the fall of the Roman Empire. It was destined to retrieve that defeat, and to shine with momentary glory again for brief intervals, but the destruction of the Emperor and his army by the Goths in 251 was the sure presage of the doom of the Roman Power.

One direct result of the battle in which Decius was slain was to bring the headquarters of the Roman Empire to the Balkan Peninsula. It was found that a better stand could be made against the tide of Gothic invasion from a new capital closer to the Scythian frontier. Constantinople was planned and built, and became the capital of the Roman Empire (a.d. 330), and thus brought to the Balkan stage the death throes of the mightiest world-power that history has known. From that date it is wise for the sake of clearness to speak of the Roman Empire as the Greek Empire, though it was some time after its settlement in Constantinople before it became rather Greek than Roman in character.

With the issue between the Goths and the Greek Empire, in which peaceful agreements often interrupted for a while fierce campaigns, I cannot deal here at any length. It soaked the Balkan Peninsula deep in blood. But it was only the first of the horrors that were to mark the death of the Empire. Late in the fourth century of the Christian Era there burst into the Balkans from the steppes of Astrakhan and the Caucasus—from very much the same district that was afterwards to supply the Bulgars and the Serbs—the Tartar hordes of the Huns. Of these Huns there is a vivid contemporary Gothic account.

We have ascertained that the nation of the Huns, who surpassed all others in atrocity, came thus into being. When Filimer, fifth king of the Goths after their departure from Sweden, was entering Scythia, with his people, as we have before described, he found among them certain sorcerer-women, whom they called in their native tongue Haliorunnas (or Al-runas), whom he suspected and drove forth from the midst of his army into the wilderness. The unclean spirits that wander up and down in desert places, seeing these women, made concubines of them; and from this union sprang that most fierce people [of the Huns], who were at first little, foul, emaciated creatures, dwelling among the swamps, and possessing only the shadow of human speech by way of language.

Sébah & Joaillier

THE WALLS OF CONSTANTINOPLE FROM THE SEVEN TOWERS

With the Alani especially, who were as good warriors as themselves, but somewhat less brutal in appearance and manner of life, they had many a struggle, but at length they wearied out and subdued them. For, in truth, they derived an unfair advantage from the intense hideousness of their countenances. Nations whom they would never have vanquished in fair fight fled horrified from those frightful—faces I can hardly call them, but rather—shapeless black collops of flesh, with little points instead of eyes. No hair on their cheeks or chins gives grace to adolescence or dignity to age, but deep furrowed scars instead, down the sides of their faces, show the impress of the iron which with characteristic ferocity they apply to every male child that is born among them, drawing blood from its cheeks before it is allowed its first taste of milk. They are little in stature, but lithe and active in their motions, and especially skilful in riding, broad-shouldered, good at the use of the bow and arrows, with sinewy necks, and always holding their heads high in their pride. To sum up, these beings under the form of man hide the fierce nature of the beast!

Not a lovable people the Huns clearly: and the modern peoples who have some slight ancestral kinship with them hate to be reminded of the fact. I remember the fierce indignation which a French war correspondent aroused in Bulgarian breasts by his description—which had eluded the censor—of the passage of a great Bulgarian train of ox wagons because he compared it to the passage of the Huns.

The Huns were, with the exception of the Persians who had vainly attacked the Greek States at an earlier period, the first successful Asiatic invaders of Europe. For a full century they ravaged the Empire, and the Balkan Peninsula felt the chief force of their barbarian rage. By the fifth century the waves of the Hun invasions had died away, leaving distinct traces of the Hunnish race in the Balkans. The Gepidae, the Lombards, and later the Hungarians and the Tartars then took up the task of ravaging the unhappy land which as the chief seat of power of the Greek Empire found itself the first objective of every invader because of that dignity and yet but poorly protected by that power. Constantinople was never taken by these barbarians, but at some periods little else than its walls stood secure against their ravages.

Meanwhile the first Saracens had appeared in the Peninsula, curiously enough not as invaders nor as enemies, but as mercenary soldiers in the army of the Greek Empire fighting against the Goths. To a Gothic chronicler we are again indebted for a vivid picture of these Saracens, "riding almost naked into battle, their long black hair streaming in the wind, wont to spring with a melancholy howl upon their chosen victim in battle and to suck his life-blood, biting at his throat." Perhaps the Gothic war correspondent of the day studied picturesqueness more than accuracy, like some of his modern successors. But, without a doubt, the first contact with Asiatics, whether Huns or Saracens, gave to the European peoples a horror and a terror which had never been inspired by their battles among themselves—battles by no means bloodless or merciful. As the Asiatic waves of invasion later developed in strength the unhappy Balkan Peninsula was doomed to feel their full force as they poured across the Bosphorus from Asia Minor, and across the Danube from the north-eastern Asiatic steppes.

It would be vain to attempt to chronicle even in the barest outline all the horrors inflicted upon the Balkans from the date of the first invasion of the Huns in the fourth century to the first invasion of the Turks in the fourteenth century. To say that those ten centuries were filled with bloodshed suffices. But they also saw the development of the Balkan nationalities of to-day, and cannot therefore be passed over without some attention. Let us then glance at each Balkan nation during that period.

Roumania, inhabited by the people of the old Roman-Dacian colony, stood full in the way of the Northern invasions of Goths, of Huns, of Hungarians, of Tartars. It was almost submerged. But in the thirteenth century the country benefited by the coming of Teutonic and Norman knights. The two kingdoms or principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia (which, combined, make up modern Roumania) were founded in this century.

Bulgaria.—In the seventh century Slavs had begun to settle in Bulgaria. The Bulgars or Volgars followed. They were akin to the Tartars and the Turks. Together Slavs and Bulgars formed the Bulgarian national type and founded a very robust nation which was almost constantly at war with the Greek Empire (with its capital at Constantinople). At times Bulgaria seriously threatened Constantinople and the Greek Empire. A boastful inscription in the Church of the Forty Martyrs at Tirnovo, the ancient capital of Bulgaria, records:

In the year 1230, I, John Asên, Czar and Autocrat of the Bulgarians, obedient to God in Christ, son of the old Asên, have built this most worthy church from its foundations, and completely decked it with paintings in honour of the Forty holy Martyrs, by whose help, in the 12th year of my reign, when the Church had just been painted, I set out to Roumania to the war and smote the Greek army and took captive the Czar Theodore Komnenus with all his nobles. And all lands have I conquered from Adrianople to Durazzo, the Greek, the Albanian, and the Serbian land. Only the towns round Constantinople and that city itself did the Franks hold; but these too bowed themselves beneath the hand of my sovereignty, for they had no other Czar but me, and prolonged their days according to my will, as God had so ordained. For without him no word or work is accomplished. To him be honour for ever. Amen.

The wars were carried on under conditions of mutual ferocity which still rule in Bulgarian-Grecian conflicts. An incident of one campaign was that the Greek Emperor, Basil, the Bulgar-slayer, having captured a Bulgarian army, had the eyes torn out of all the men and sent them home blinded, leaving, however, one eye to every centurion, so that the poor mutilated wretches might have guides. In the early part of the fourteenth century a Bulgarian Czar, Michael, almost captured Constantinople. He formed a league with the Roumanians and the Greeks against the Serbs, who were at the time promising to become the paramount power of the peninsula. But Czar Michael was defeated by the Serbs and Bulgaria became dependent upon Serbia, which was the position of affairs at the time of the first serious Turkish invasion of the Balkan Peninsula.

Serbia.—Invading tribes of Don Cossacks began to come in great numbers to the Balkan Peninsula in the sixth century. In the seventh century they were encouraged by the Greek Empire to settle in Serbia, on condition of paying tribute to Constantinople. They set up a kind of aristocratic republic of a Slav type. In the ninth century they began to fight with the neighbouring and kindred Bulgarians. Early in the tenth century (a.d. 917) the Bulgarians almost effaced Serbia from the map; but the Serbs recovered after half a century, only to come shortly afterwards under the sway of the Greeks. In the eleventh century the Serbians held a very strong position and were able to harass the Greek Empire at Constantinople. They entered into friendly relations with the Pope of Rome, and for some time contemplated following the Roman rather than the Eastern Church. In the twelfth century King Stephen of Serbia was a valued ally of the Greek Empire against the Venetians. He established Serbia as a European "Power," and the Emperor Frederick Barbarossa visited his court at Belgrade. This king was the first of a succession of able and brave monarchs, and Serbia enjoyed a period of stable prosperity and power unusually lengthy for the Balkans. Except for the strife between the Eastern and Roman Catholic Churches for supremacy in Serbia, the nation was at peace within her own borders, and enjoyed not only a military but an economic predominance in the Balkans. Mining and handicrafts were developed, education encouraged, and the national organisation reached fully to the average standard of European civilisation at the time. By 1275 the Serbs were the chief power in the Balkans. They defeated the Greeks, marched right down to the Aegean and reached the famous monastery of Mount Athos, to which the first King Stephen (Nemanya) had retired in 1195 when he abdicated.

In 1303 the Serbians forgot their quarrel with the Greeks and helped them against the Turks, undertaking an invasion of Asia Minor. In 1315 they again saved the Greek Empire from the Turks. When in 1336 Stephen Dushan, the greatest of Serbian kings, who has been compared to Napoleon because of his military genius and capacity for statesmanship, came to the throne, Bulgaria was under the suzerainty of Serbia, and the Serb monarch ruled over all that area comprised within the boundaries of Bulgaria, Serbia, Albania, Montenegro, and Greece by the recent treaty of Bucharest (1913). King Stephen Dushan was not only a great military leader, he was also a law-maker and a patron of learning. His death on December 13, 1356, at the Gates of Constantinople—he is said to have been poisoned—opened the way for the Turkish occupation of the Balkan Peninsula. That occupation was made possible in the first instance by the mutual jealousies of the Christian peoples of the Balkans. It was kept in existence for centuries by the same weaknesses arising from jealousy. In 1912 it was swept away in a month because in a spasm of common sense the Balkan Christian peoples had united. In 1913 it was in part restored because internecine strife had broken out again among the Balkan natives recently allied. It will probably continue until the lesson of unity is learned again.

CHAPTER II

THE TURK IN THE BALKANS

It seems to be difficult to speak without violent prejudice on the subject of the Turk in the Balkans. One school of prejudice insists that the Turk is the finest gentleman in the world, who has been always the victim and not the oppressor of the Christian peoples by whose side he lives, and whose territories he invaded with the best of motives and with the minimum of slaughter. The other school of prejudice credits the Turk with the most abominable cruelty, treachery, and lust, and will hear no good of him. In England the issue is largely a political one. A great Liberal campaign was once founded on a Turkish massacre of Bulgarians in the Balkans. That made it a party duty for Liberals to be pro-Bulgarian and anti-Turk, and almost a party duty for Conservatives to find all the Christian and a few ex-Christian virtues in the Turk. Before attempting to judge the Turk of to-day, let us see how he stands in the light of history. It was in the fourth century that the first Saracens came to the Balkan Peninsula as allies of the Greek Empire against the Goths. They were thus called in by a Christian Power in the first instance. It was not until the fourteenth century that the Turks made a serious attempt to occupy the Balkan Peninsula. They were helped in their campaign considerably by the Christian Crusaders, who, incidentally to their warfare against the Infidel who held the Holy Sepulchre, had made war on the Greek Empire, capturing Constantinople, and thus weakening the power of Christian Europe at its threshold. Bulgaria, too, refused help to the Greeks when the Turkish invasion had to be beaten off. The Turks' coming to the Balkans was thus largely due to Christian divisions.

Sébah & Joaillier

SANCTA SOPHIA, CONSTANTINOPLE

Built by Justinian I, consecrated 538, converted into a Mohammedan mosque 1453. It is now thought that the design of its famous architect, Anthemius of Tralles, was never completed. The minarets and most of the erections in the foreground are Turkish

Without being able at the time to capture Constantinople, the invading Turks occupied soon a large tract of the Balkan Peninsula. By 1362 they had captured Philippopolis and Eski Zagora, two important centres of Bulgaria. It was not a violence to their conscience for some of the Bulgarian men after this to join the Turkish army as mercenaries. When the sorely-beset Greeks sent the Emperor John Paleologos to appeal for help to the Bulgarians, he was seized by them and kept as a prisoner.

A united Balkan Peninsula would have kept off the Turks, no doubt. But a set of small nations without any faculty of permanent cohesion, and hating and distrusting one another more thoroughly than they did the Turk, could do nothing. The Balkan nations of the time, though united they would have been really powerful, allowed themselves to be taken in detail and crushed under the heels of an invader who was alien in blood and in religion. In 1366 the Bulgarians became the vassals of the Turks, and the Serbians were defeated at Kossovo. The fall of the Greek Empire and the subjugation of Roumania followed in due course, and by the seventeenth century the Turks had penetrated to the very walls of Vienna. At one time it seemed as if all Europe would fall under the sway of Islam, for, as elsewhere than in the Balkans, there were Christian States which were treacherous to their faith. But that happily was averted. For the Balkan Peninsula, however, there were now to be centuries of oppression and religious persecution. It will be convenient once again to set forth under three national headings the chief facts regarding the Turkish conquest of the Balkans.

Bulgaria.—By 1366 weakness in the field and civil dissensions had brought Bulgaria to the humiliation of becoming the vassal of the Turk. In 1393 the Turks, not content with mere suzerainty, occupied Bulgaria and converted it into a Turkish province. In 1398 the Hungarians and the Wallachians (Roumanians) made a gallant attempt to free Bulgaria from the Turkish yoke, but failed. Some of the Bulgarians joined in with their Turkish conquerors, abandoned the Christian religion for that of Islam, and were the ancestors of what are known to-day as the Pomaks. The rest of the people gave a reluctant obedience to the Turkish conqueror, preserving their Christian faith, their Slav tongue, and their sense of separate nationality. The Greeks, who had come to some kind of terms with the Turkish invaders, assisted to bring the Bulgarian people under subjection. The Greek church and the Greek tongue rather than the Turkish were sought to be imposed upon the Bulgarians. The subject people accepted the situation with occasional revolts, but more tamely than some other Balkan nations. It was not a general meek acquiescence, though it was—possibly by chance, possibly because of the fact that a racial relationship existed between conqueror and conquered—not so fierce in protest as that of the Serbians. In writing that, I do not follow exactly the Bulgarian modern view, which represents as much more vivid the sufferings and the protests of the Bulgarian people, and ignores altogether the racial relationship which existed between Bulgarian and Turk, and enabled a section of the Bulgarian nation to fall into line with the conqueror and embrace his religion and his habits of life, a relationship which to this day shows its traces in the Bulgarian national life. But in Balkan history as written locally, there is usually a certain amount of political deflection from the facts. A modern Balkan historian, giving what may be called the official national account of the times of the Turkish domination, says (Bulgaria of To-day):

Had the rulers been of the same race and religion as the vanquished, the subjection might have been more tolerable. Ottoman domination was not, however, a simple political domination. Ottoman tyranny was social as well as political. It was keenly and painfully felt in private as well as in public life; in social liberty, manners and morals; in the free development of national feeling; in short, in the whole scope of human life. According to our present notions, political domination does not infringe upon personal liberty, which is sacred for the conqueror. This is not the case with Turkish rule. The Bulgarians, like the other Christians of the Balkan Peninsula, were, both collectively and individually, slaves. The life, possessions, and honour of private individuals were in constant peril. The bulk of the people, after several generations, calmed down to passivity and inertia. From time to time the more vigorous element, the strongest individualities, protested. Some Bulgarian whose sister had been carried off to the harem of some pasha would take to the mountains and make war on the oppressors. The haidukes and voivodes, celebrated in the national songs, kept up in mountain fastnesses that spirit of liberty which later was to serve as a cement to unite the new Bulgarian nation.

But it is a noteworthy fact that the Osmanlis, being themselves but little civilised, did not attempt to assimilate the Bulgarians in the sense in which civilised nations try to effect the intellectual and ethnic assimilation of a subject race. Except in isolated cases, where Bulgarian girls or young men were carried off and forced to adopt Mohammedanism, the government never took any general measures to impose Mohammedanism or assimilate the Bulgarians to the Moslems. The Turks prided themselves on keeping apart from the Bulgarians, and this was fortunate for our nationality. Contented with their political supremacy and pleased to feel themselves masters, the Turks did not trouble about the spiritual life of the rayas, except to try to trample out all desires for independence. All these circumstances contributed to allow the Bulgarian people, crushed and ground down by the Turkish yoke, to concentrate and preserve its own inner spiritual life. They formed religious communities attached to the churches. These had a certain amount of autonomy, and, beside seeing after the churches, could keep schools. The national literature, full of the most poetic melancholy, handed down from generation to generation and developed by tradition, still tells us of the life of the Bulgarians under the Ottoman yoke. In these popular songs, the memory of the ancient Bulgarian kingdom is mingled with the sufferings of the present hour. The songs of this period are remarkable for the oriental character of their times, and this is almost the sole trace of Moslem influence.

In spite of the vigilance of the Turks, the religious associations served as centres to keep alive the national feeling.

A conquered people which was allowed to keep up its religious institutions (with "a certain amount of autonomy"), and later to found national schools ("to keep alive the national feeling"), was not exactly ground to the dust. And truth compels the admission that Bulgaria under Turkish rule enjoyed a certain amount of material prosperity. When the Russian liberators of the nineteenth century came to Bulgaria they found the peasants far more comfortable than were the Russian peasants of the day. The atrocities in Bulgaria which shocked Europe in 1875 were not the continuance of a settled policy of cruelty and rapine. They were the ferocious reprisals chiefly of Turkish Bashi-Bazouks (irregulars) following upon a Bulgarian rising. The Turks felt that they had been making an honest effort to promote the interests of the Bulgarian province. They had just satisfied a Bulgarian aspiration by allowing of the formation of an independent Bulgarian church, though this meant giving grave offence to the Greeks. Probably they felt that they had a real grievance against the Bulgars. After the Bulgarian atrocities of 1875 there ended the Turkish domination of the country.

Serbia.—In December 1356 the great Serbian king, Stephen Dushan, soldier, administrator, and economist, died before the walls of Constantinople, and the one hope of the Balkan Peninsula making a stand against the Turks was ended. Shortly after, the Turks had occupied Adrianople, their first capital in Europe, defeating heavily a combined Serbian and Greek army. Later the Serbian forces were again defeated by the great Turkish sultan Amurath I., and the Serbian king was killed on the battle-field. King Lazar, who succeeded to the Serbian throne, made some headway against the invaders, but in 1389, at the Battle of Kossovo, the Serbian Empire came tumbling to ruins. The Turkish leader, Amurath, was killed in the fight, but his son Bajayet proved another Amurath and pressed home the victory. Serbia became a vassal state of Turkey.

But there was to be still a period of fierce resistance to the Turk. In 1413 the Turks, dissatisfied with the attitude of the Serbs, entered upon a new invasion of the territory of Serbia. In 1440 Sultan Amurath II. again overran the country and conquered it definitely, imposing not merely vassalage but armed occupation on its people. John Hunyad, "the White Knight of Wallachia," came to the rescue of the Serbs, and Amurath II. was driven back. An alliance between Serbs and Hungarians kept the Turk at bay for a time, and in 1444 Serbia could claim to be free once again. But the respite was a brief one. In 1453 Constantinople fell to the Turks, and the full tide of their strengthened and now undivided power was turned upon Serbia. A siege of Belgrade in 1457 was repulsed, but in 1459 Serbia was conquered and annexed to European Turkey. Lack of unity among the Serbs themselves had contributed greatly to the national doom, but on the whole the Serbs had put up a gallant fight against the Turks. And even now a section of them, the Montenegrins, in their mountain fastnesses kept their liberty, and through all the centuries that were to follow never yielded to the Crescent.

The condition of the Serbs in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was very unhappy. They could come to no manner of contentment with Turkish rule, and sporadic revolts were frequent. At times the Hungarians from the other side of the Danube came to the aid of the revolters, but never in such strength as to shake seriously the Turkish power. Very many of the Serbs left their country in despair and sought refuge under the Austrian flag. To-day a big Serb element, under the flag of Austro-Hungaria, is one of the racial difficulties of the Dual Monarchy.

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KING PETER OF SERBIA

The Serb exiles carried to their new homes their old sympathies, and largely because of their efforts Austria in 1788 went to the rescue of Serbia, and for a brief while the land again was free. But the Turkish power returned and Serbia stumbled blindly, painfully through years of reprisals, which culminated in the great massacre of Serbs by Turks in 1804, which, like the Turkish massacre of Bulgarians in 1875, really declared the doom of the Turkish power in the country. Following this massacre George Petrovic, "Black George," or "Kara George," as the Serbians knew him, raised the standard of revolt among his countrymen. He was a fierce blood-stained man, this first liberator of the Serbs, a man on whose head was the blood of his father and his brother. His grim character was fitted for his grim task. The story of that task will come better within the scope of a following chapter, which will tell of the liberation of the Balkans from the Turks.

Roumania.—It was not until 1391 that the Turks crossed the Danube and attacked the kingdoms of Wallachia and Moldavia, and reduced Wallachia to the position of a tributary state. King Mirtsched made a gallant fight against the invaders, but the Turks proved too strong. That was the beginning of a Turkish dominance of Roumania, which was never so complete as that exercised over Bulgaria and Serbia, but left the two Roumanian kingdoms of Wallachia and Moldavia as vassal states. Mutual jealousy between them prevented effective operations against the Turk, and helped to make their vassalage possible. In the fifteenth century both kingdoms had great rulers. Wallachia was ruled by Vlad the Impaler, an able but cruel man, who seems to have earned the infamy of inventing a form of torture still practised in the Balkans as a matter of religious proselytising, that of sitting the victim on a sharp stake, and leaving him to die slowly as the stake penetrated his body. Moldavia had as king Stephen the Great, who has no such ghastly reputation of cruelty. But able princes could effect little with communities weakened by the luxury of the nobles and the helpless poverty of the serfs. Still, the Roumanians had intervals of victory. In the sixteenth century Michael the Brave (whose memory is commemorated by a statue in Bucharest) drove the Turks back as far as Adrianople, liberating Roumania and Bulgaria. He annexed Moldavia and Transylvania to Wallachia, and was in a sense the founder of modern Roumania. But the union thus effected was not enduring and the Turkish ascendancy grew stronger. The Turkish suzerain forced upon the Roumanian peoples governors of the Greek race, who carried on the work of oppression and spoliation with an industrious effectiveness quite beyond the capacity of the Turk, who at his worst is a fitful and indolent tyrant.

In the last quarter of the seventeenth century the Russian Power began to take a close interest in Roumania. In 1711 there was a definite Russian-Roumanian alliance. By this time the Roumanians were resolutely hostile to the Turkish domination. True, they had been spared most of the cruelties which were in Servia a customary and in Bulgaria an occasional concomitant of Turkish rule. But they were deeply injured by the corrupt, the luxurious, the exacting administration of the Greek rulers forced upon them by the Turkish government. Though they suffered little from massacre they suffered much from "squeeze." There was not only the greed of the Turk but the greed of the intermediate Greek to be satisfied. From 1711 until the final liberation of Roumania, Roumanian sympathies were generally with the Russians in the frequent wars waged by them against Turkey. In 1770 the Russians occupied Roumania and freed it for a time from the Turk, but in 1774 the Roumanians went back to the Turkish suzerainty. During the Napoleonic wars Russia gave Roumania some reason to doubt the disinterestedness of her friendship by annexing the rich province of Bessarabia, a part of the natural territory of the Roumanian people. The year 1821 saw the outbreak of the Greek war of independence, in which Roumania took no part, having as little love for the Greek as for the Turk. She won one advantage for herself from the war, the right to have her native rulers under Turkish suzerainty. In 1828, as a result of a Russo-Turkish war, Roumania won almost complete freedom, conditional only on tribute being continued to be paid to the Sultan. She found a new master, however, in Russia, and was forced to keep up a Russian garrison within her borders, nominally as a protection against Turkey, really as a safeguard against the growth in her own people of a spirit of national independence. The Crimean War (1853) freed Roumania from this Russian garrison, and in 1856 the Treaty of Paris declared Roumania to be an independent principality under Turkish suzerainty.

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KING NICOLAS OF MONTENEGRO

Montenegro.—The existence of Montenegro as a separate Balkan state dates back to the Battle of Kossovo. The Montenegrin is a Serbian Highlander, and whilst the Serbian Empire flourished, claimed for himself no separate national entity. When, however, the rest of Serbia was subjugated by the Turks, "the Black Mountain" held out, and there gathered within its little area of rocky hill fastnesses the free remnants of the Serbian race. The story of that little nation is quite the most wonderful in all the world. It transcends Sparta, and makes the fighting record of the Swiss seem tame. At the height of its power Montenegro had a population of perhaps 8000 males, and little source of riches from mines, from trade, or even from fertile agricultural land. Yet Montenegro kept the Turks from her own territory, and was able at times to give valuable help to the rest of Europe in withstanding the invasion of Islam.

The system of government instituted was that of a theocratic despotism: the head of the nation was its chief bishop, and he had the right to nominate a nephew (not a son—as a bishop of the Greek Communion he would be celibate) to succeed him. The Montenegrin dynasty was founded in 1696 by King Danilo I., and has endured to this day, though recently the functions of the chief priest and king have been separated, and the present monarch is purely a civil ruler.

It is not possible here to give even the barest mention of the leading facts in the proud history of little Montenegro. In the seventeenth century she was the valued friend of Venice against the Turks; in the eighteenth century she was aided by Peter the Great of Russia; later she met without being subdued the warlike power of Napoleon. All the time, during every century, every year almost, there was constant warfare with the Turks. One campaign lasted without interruption from 1424 to 1436, and was marked by over sixty battles. The little population of the patch of rocks in the mountains was worn down by this incessant fighting, but was recruited by a steady flow of exiles from other parts of the Balkan Peninsula, anxious for freedom and for revenge on the Turk. Sometimes the tide of battle went sorely against the mountaineers, and almost all their country was put under the heel of the Moslem. But always one eyrie was kept for the free eagles, and from it they swooped down with renewed strength to send the invader once again across their borders. Repeatedly the Turk levied great armies for the conquest of Montenegro (once the Turkish force reached to the number of 80,000). Repeatedly great European Powers which had proffered help or had been begged for help failed little Montenegro at a crisis. But never were the stout hearts of the Black Mountain quelled. In 1484, when Zablak had to be evacuated and the whole nation was confined to the little mountain fortress of Cettinje, Ivan the Black offered to his people the choice of ending the war and making peace with the Turks. They rejected the idea, and swore to stand by the freedom of Montenegro until the last. The oath was never broken. Right down to 1832 a free Montenegro faced Turkey. In that year the Turks, despairing of an occupation of the country, suggested that Montenegro should agree at least to pay tribute. That offer was rejected and yet another war entered upon. A war against Austria followed, in which the desperate Montenegrins used the type of their printing presses to make bullets for the soldiers.

MONTENEGRIN TROOPS

Weekly Drill and Inspection of Weapons

That there was lead type to be so used shows that the Montenegrins had not altogether neglected the arts of peace. In 1493 a printing press had been set up in Cettinje and the first Montenegrin book printed in the Cyrillic character. During the next century this printing press was kept busy with the issue of the Gospels and psalters under the rule of the brave Bishop Babylas. The state of Montenegro at this time aroused the admiration of the Venetians, and there is extant a book in praise of Montenegro written in 1614 by a Venetian noble, Mariano Bolizza.

When the time came for the other Balkan States to throw off the Turkish yoke Montenegro was not reluctant to join in the movement for liberation, and she was later first in the field in the campaign of 1912.

This very brief record of the leading facts of Balkan history has now brought each of the peoples up to the stage at which the final and successful effort was made with the help of Russia to drive the Turks out of Balkan territory. The story of that effort will be told in the succeeding chapter.

CHAPTER III

THE FALL OF THE TURKISH POWER

In the nineteenth century the Turkish dominion was pushed back in all directions from the Balkan Peninsula. At the dawn of that century Montenegro was the only Balkan state entirely free from occupation, vassalage, or the duty of tribute to the Sublime Porte. At the close of that century Montenegro, Serbia, Roumania, Greece, and Bulgaria were all practically free and self-governing.

In 1804, as has been recorded, Kara George in Serbia raised the standard of revolt against Turkey. In 1806 the Serbs defeated the Turks in a pitched battle, and for a moment Serbia was free. But in 1812 when the Turkish power resolved upon a great invasion of Serbia, the heart of Kara George failed him and he left his country to its fate, taking refuge in Austria. Thus deserted by their leader, the Serbs did not abandon the struggle altogether. Milosh Obrenovic stepped to the front as the national champion, and though he could make no stand against the Turkish troops in the open field he kept up an active revolt from a base in the mountains. The contest for national liberty went on with varying fortune. Troubles at this time were thickening around Turkey, and whenever she was engaged in war with Russia the oppressed nationalities within her borders took the opportunity to strike a blow for liberty. By 1839—it is not possible to make a record of all the dynastic changes and revolutions which filled the years 1812-1839—Serbia was practically free, with the payment of an annual tribute to Turkey as her only bond. During the Crimean War she kept her neutrality as between Russia and Turkey. The Treaty of Paris (1856) confirmed her territorial independence, subject to the payment of a tribute to Turkey. In 1867 the Turkish garrisons were withdrawn from Serbia; but the tribute was still left in existence until the date of the Treaty of Berlin.

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THE KING OF ROUMANIA

Roumania in 1828 (then Wallachia and Moldavia) had won her territorial independence of Turkey subject only to payment of a tribute. The Treaty of Paris (1856) left her under a nominal suzerainty to Turkey. In 1859 the two kingdoms united to form Roumania, and in 1866 the late King Charles, as the result of a revolution, was elected prince of the united kingdom.

Bulgaria had remained a fairly contented Turkish province until the rising of 1875, and its cruel suppression by the Bashi-Bazouks. As a direct consequence of that massacre European diplomacy turned its serious attention to the Balkan Peninsula, and at a Conference demands were made upon Turkey for a comprehensive reform applying to Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Bulgaria. The proposed reform was particularly drastic as applied to Bulgaria, which was still in effect Turkish territory, whilst all the other districts had achieved a practical freedom. It was proposed to create two Bulgarian provinces divided into Sandjaks and Kazas as administrative units, these to be subdivided into districts. Christian and Mohammedans were to be settled homogeneously in these districts. Each district was to have at its head a mayor and a district council, elected by universal suffrage, and was to enjoy entire autonomy in local affairs. Several districts would form a Sandjak with a prefect (mutessarif) at its head who was to be Christian or Mohammedan, according to the majority of the population of the Sandjak. He would be proposed by the Governor-General, and nominated by the Porte for four years. Finally, every two Sandjaks were to be administered by a Christian Governor-General nominated by the Porte for five years, with consent of the Powers. He would govern the province with the help of a provincial assembly, composed of representatives chosen by the district councils for a term of four years. This assembly would nominate an administrative council. The provincial assembly would be summoned every year to decide the budget and the redivision of taxes. The armed force was to be concentrated in the towns and there would be local militia besides. The language of the predominant nationality was to be employed, as well as Turkish. Finally, a Commission of International Control was to supervise the execution of these reforms.

The Sublime Porte was still haggling about these reforms when Russia lost patience and declared war upon Turkey on April 12, 1877. Moving through the friendly territory of Roumania, Russia attacked the Turkish forces in Bulgarian territory. In that war the Russians found that the Turks were a gallant foe, and the issue seemed to hang in the balance until Roumania and Bulgaria went actively to the help of the Russian forces. The Roumanian aid was exceedingly valuable. Prince Charles crossed the Danube at the head of 28,000 foot soldiers and 4000 cavalry. He was appointed Commander-in-Chief of the forces against Plevna, and his soldiers were chiefly responsible for the taking of the Grivica Redoubt which turned the tide of victory against the Turks. The Bulgarians did but little during the campaign: it was not possible that they should do much seeing that they could only put irregulars in the field. Nevertheless some high personal reputations for courage were made. During my stay with the Bulgarian army in 1912 I noted that there were of the military officers three classes, the men who had graduated in foreign military colleges—usually Petrograd,—very smart, very insistent on their military dignity, speaking usually three or four languages; officers who had been educated at the Military College, Sofia; and the older Bulgarian type, dating sometimes from before the War of Liberation. Of these last the outstanding figure was General Nicolaieff, who as captain of a Bulgarian company rushed a Turkish battery beneath Shipka after the Russians had been held up so long that they were in despair. A fine stalwart figure General Nicolaieff showed when I met him at Yamboli, a hospital base town of which he was military commandant. Another soldier of the War of Liberation, a captain in rank, I travelled with for a day once between Kirk Kilisse and Chorlu. We chummed up and shared a meal of meat balls cooked with onions, rough country wine (these from his stores), and dates and biscuits (from my stores). He spoke neither English nor French, but a Bulgarian doctor who spoke French acted as interpreter, and the old officer, who after long entreaty at last had got leave to go down to the front in spite of his age, yarned about the hardships and tragedies of the fighting around Stara Zagora and the Shipka Pass. Some of the Bulgarians, he said, took the field with no other arms than staves and knives, and got their first rifles from the dead of the battle-fields.

THE SHIPKA PASS

Serbia took a hand in this campaign, too, though she hesitated for some time, going to the aid of Russia through fear of Austria. Beginning late, at a time when the mountains were covered in the winter snows, the Serbians suffered severely from the weather, but won notable victories at Pirot, at Nish, and at Vranga. The Turks were in full retreat on Constantinople when the armistice and Treaty of San Stefano put an end to the war.

It seems to be one of the standing rules of Balkan wars and Balkan peace treaties that those who do the work shall not reap the reward, and that a policy of standing by and waiting is the wisest and most profitable. In this Russo-Turkish war the Roumanians had done invaluable work for the Russian cause. In return the Treaty of San Stefano robbed them shamefully. The Bulgarians had done little, except to stain the arms of the allies with a series of massacres of the Turks in reprisal for the previous atrocities inflicted upon them by the Bashi-Bazouks. The Bulgarians were awarded a tremendous prize of territory. If the grant had been confirmed it would have made Bulgaria the paramount power of the Balkan Peninsula. By the Treaty of San Stefano, Bulgaria was made an autonomous principality subject to Turkey, with a Christian government and national militia. The Prince of Bulgaria was to be freely chosen by the people and accepted by the Sublime Porte, with the consent of the Powers. As regards internal government, it was agreed that an assembly of notables, presided over by an Imperial Commissioner and attended by a Turkish Commissioner, should meet at Philippopolis or Tirnova before the election of the Prince to draw up a constitutional statute similar to those of the other Danubian principalities after the Treaty of Adrianople in 1830. The boundaries of Bulgaria were to include all that is now Bulgaria, and the greater part of Thrace and Macedonia.

The European Congress of Berlin which revised the Treaty of San Stefano recognised that the motive of Russia was to create in Bulgaria a vast but weak state, which would obediently serve her interests and in time fall into her hands: and that the injury proposed to be done to Roumania was inspired by a desire to limit the progress of a courageous but an unfortunately independent-minded friend. The Congress was suspicious of the Bulgarian arrangement, and clipped off much of the territory assigned to the new principality. The injury done to Roumania was allowed to stand. Then, as in 1912-1913, when Balkan boundaries were again under the discussion of an inter-European Conference, the vital interests of the great Powers surrounding the Balkan Peninsula were to keep its peoples divided and weak. Both Russia and Austria had more or less defined territorial ambitions in the Balkans: and it suited neither Power to see any one Balkan state rise to such a standard of greatness as would enable it to take the lead in a Balkan Union. Especially was it not the wish of Austria that any Balkan state should grow to be so strong as to kill definitely the hope she cherished of extending down the Adriatic and towards the Aegean.

By the Treaty of Berlin, which followed the Congress of Berlin, the greater part of the Balkan Peninsula was freed altogether from Turkish rule. Roumania and Serbia were relieved from all suggestion of tribute or vassalage. Bulgaria was left subject to a tribute (which was very quickly afterwards repudiated). Where the Turkish power was left in existence in European Turkey it was a threatened existence, for the newly freed Christian peoples began at once to conspire to help to freedom their nationals left still under Turkish rule. The war of 1912 began to be prepared in 1878.

There was, however, a period of comparative peace. Roumania, though discontented, decided to bide her time. Her prince was crowned king with a crown made from the metal of Turkish cannon taken at Plevna. That was the only hint that she gave of keeping in mind the greatness of her services which had been so poorly rewarded.

Montenegro, whilst deprived of the great and the well-deserved expansion which the Treaty of San Stefano offered, had some benefit from the Treaty of Berlin. The area of the kingdom was doubled and it won access to the Adriatic. A little later the harbour of Dulcigno was ceded to Montenegro by Turkey under pressure from the Powers, and she was left with only one notable grievance, that of being shut off from Serbia by the Sanjak of Novi-Bazar, which Austria secured for Turkey, apparently with the idea of one day seizing it on her way down to Salonica.

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KING FERDINAND OF BULGARIA

Serbia increased her territory by one-fourth under the Treaty of Berlin, but was not allowed to extend towards the Adriatic, and, nurturing as she did a dream of reviving the old Serbian Empire, was but poorly satisfied.

Bulgaria, if it had not been for the promises of the Treaty of San Stefano, might have been fairly content with the provisions of the Treaty of Berlin. She had been the first nation in the Balkans to yield to the Turks. She had allowed her sons to act as mercenary soldiers to aid the Turks against other Christians: and during the period of oppression she had suffered less than any from the rigours of the invader, had protested less than any by force of arms. Yet now she was given freedom as a gift won largely by the sacrifices of others. But, though having the most reason to be content, Bulgaria was the least contented of all the Balkan States. The restless ambition of the people guiding her destinies was manifested in an internal revolution which displaced the first prince (Alexander of Battenberg) and put on the throne the present king (Ferdinand of Coburg). Bulgaria, too, repudiated the friendly tutelage which Russia wished to exercise over her destinies.

The territorial settlement made by the Berlin Treaty was first broken by Bulgaria. That treaty had cut the ethnological Bulgaria into two, leaving the southern half as a separate province under the name of Eastern Rumelia. In 1885 Eastern Rumelia was annexed to Bulgaria with the glad consent of its inhabitants, but in spite of the wishes of Russia. Serbia saw in this the threat of a Bulgarian hegemony in the Balkans, and demanded some territorial compensation for herself. This was refused. War followed. The Bulgarians were victorious at the Battle of Slivnitza, an achievement which was in great measure due to the organising ability of Prince Alexander. The victory secured Rumelia for Bulgaria. But no sense of gratitude to Prince Alexander survived, and the Russian intrigue which secured his abdication and flight was undoubtedly aided by a large section of the Bulgarian people. Stambouloff, a peasant leader of the Bulgarians and its greatest personality since the War of Liberation, was faithful to Alexander, but was not able to save him.

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KING FERDINAND'S BODYGUARD

The Bulgarian throne after Alexander's abdication was offered to the King of Roumania. The acceptance of the offer would possibly have led to a real Balkan Federation. The united power of Roumania and Bulgaria, exercised wisely, could have gently pressed the other Balkan peoples into a union. That, however, would have suited the aims neither of Russia nor of Austria, the two Empires which guided the destinies of the Balkans, chiefly in the light of their own selfish ends. The Roumanian king refused the throne of Bulgaria, and in 1887 Prince Ferdinand of Coburg became Prince of the State. It was not long before he fell out with Stambouloff, the able but personally unamenable patriot who chiefly had made modern Bulgaria. In the conflict between the two Prince Ferdinand proved the stronger. Stambouloff was dismissed from office, and in 1895 was assassinated in the streets of Sofia. No attempt was made to punish his murderers.

In 1908 Bulgaria shook off the last shred of dependence to Turkey. The bold action was the crown of a clever diplomatic intrigue by Prince Ferdinand. Since the murder of Stambouloff the Prince had been sedulously cultivating in public the friendship of Russia: but that had not prevented him carrying to a great pitch of mutual confidence a secret understanding with Austria. The Austrian Empire was anxious to annex formally the districts of Bosnia and Herzegovina, of which it had long been in occupation. Objection to this would surely have come from Russia; but Russia was impotent for the time being after the disastrous war with Japan. Just as surely it would come from Serbia which would see thus definitely pass over to the one Power, which she had reason to fear, a section of Slav-inhabited country clearly connected to the Serbs by racial ties. Serbia, it might be expected, would have the support of France and England as well as Russia. For Bulgaria the offer to neutralise Serbia made to Austria all the difference between an action which was a little risky and an action which had no risk at all. Bulgaria supported Austria in the annexation, and, as was to have been expected, Serbia found protest impossible, since Russia, France, and England swallowed the affront to treaty obligations to which they were parties. It was Bulgaria's reward to have the support of the Triple Alliance in throwing off all fealty and tribute to the Sublime Porte. Prince Ferdinand became the Czar Ferdinand of Bulgaria.

Nor was that the end of Bulgarian ambition. The "big" Bulgaria of the San Stefano treaty floated before the eyes of her rulers constantly, and she began to prepare for a war against Turkey, of which the prize should be Thrace and Macedonia. An obstacle in Macedonia was not only that the Turks were in occupation, but that the Greeks considered themselves entitled to the reversion of the estate. Rivalry between the three nations was responsible for the Macedonian horrors, which went on from year to year, and made one district of the Balkans a veritable hell on earth. These horrors have been set at the door of the "Unspeakable Turk." The Turk has quite enough to answer for in the many hideous crimes which he has undoubtedly committed. It is not quite just to hold him wholly responsible for the terrible state of Macedonia during the last few years. Greek and Bulgarian were alike interested in making it appear to the world that Turkish rule in Macedonia was impossible. To effect this they insisted that rapine and massacre should become normal. If the Turk did not wish for massacres he was stirred up to massacres. Christian pastors were not prevented by their Christian faith from murders of their own people, if it could be certain that the Turks would have the discredit of them. Side by side with the atrocities which were committed by Turks against Christians and Christians against Turks, the two sets of warring Christians, the Bulgarian Exarchates and the Greek Patriarchates, attacked one another with a fiendish relentlessness, which equalled the most able efforts of the Turks in the way of rape, murder, and robbery.

In excuse for part of this, i.e. that part which stirred up the Turks to atrocities even when they wished to be peaceful, there could be pleaded the good object of striving for the end of all Turkish rule in Christian districts of the Balkans. The excuse will serve this far: that without a doubt a Christian community cannot be governed justly by the Turk, and the very strongest of steps are warranted to put an end to Turkish domination of a district largely inhabited by Christians. But no consideration, even that of exterminating Turkish rule, could justify all the Christian atrocities perpetrated in Macedonia: and there is certainly no shadow of an excuse for the atrocities with which Bulgarian sought to score against Greek and Greek against Bulgarian. The era of those atrocities has not yet closed. The Turk has been driven from Macedonia, but Greek and Bulgarian continue their feud. For the time the Greek is in the ascendant, whilst the Bulgarian broods over a revenge.

BULGARIAN INFANTRY

CHAPTER IV

THE WARS OF 1912-13

By 1912, Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Montenegro had contrived, in spite of any past quarrels, in spite of the mutual jealousies even then being displayed in the recurring Macedonian massacres, of Christians by Christians as well as by Turks, to arrive at a sufficient degree of unity to allow them to make war jointly on Turkey. Bulgaria and Serbia concluded an offensive and defensive alliance, arranging for all contingencies and providing for the division of the spoils which it was hoped to win from the Turks. Between Bulgaria and Greece there was no such definite alliance, but a military convention only. The division of the spoil after the war was left to future determination, both Greek and Bulgarian probably having it clearly in his head that he would have all his own way after the war or fight the issue out subsequently. A later Punch cartoon put this peculiarity of a Balkan alliance with pretty satire. Greece and Serbia were discussing what they should do with the spoils they were then winning from Bulgaria. "Of course we shall fight for them. Are we not allies?" said one of the partners.

I was through the war of 1912 as war correspondent for the London Morning Post, and followed the fortunes of the main Bulgarian army in the Thracian campaign. In this book I do not intend to attempt a history of the war but will give some impressions of it which, whilst not neglecting any of the chief facts in any part of the theatre of operations, will naturally be mainly based on observations with the Bulgarians.

First, with regard to the political side of the war, one could not but be struck by the exceedingly careful preparation that the Bulgarians had made for the struggle. It was no unexpected or sudden war. They had known for some time that war was inevitable, having made up their minds for a considerable time that the wrongs of their fellow-nationals in Macedonia and Thrace would have to be righted by force of arms. Attempts on the part of the Powers to enforce reforms in the Christian Provinces of Turkey had, in the opinion of the Bulgars, been absolute failures, and they had done their best to make them failures, wishing for a destroyed Turkey not a reformed Turkey. In their opinion there was nothing to hope for except armed intervention on their part against Turkey. And, believing that, they had made most careful preparation extending over several years for the struggle. That preparation was in every sense admirable. For instance, it had extended, so far as I could gather, from informants in Bulgaria, to this degree: that they formed military camps in winter for the training of their troops. Thus they did not train solely in the most favourable time of the year for manœuvres, but in the unfavourable weather too, in case that time should prove the best for their war. The excellence of their artillery arm, and the proof of the scientific training of their officers, prove to what extent their training beforehand had gone.

When war became inevitable, the Balkan League having been formed, and the time being ripe for the war, Bulgaria in particular, and the Balkan States in general, were quite determined that war should be. The Turks at this time were inclined to make reforms and concessions; they had an inclination to ease the pressure on their Christian subjects in the Christian provinces. Perhaps knowing—perhaps not knowing—that they were unready for war themselves, but feeling that the Balkan States were preparing for war, the Turks were undoubtedly willing to make great concessions. But whatever concessions the Turks might have offered, war would still have taken place. I do not think one need offer any harsh criticism about the Balkan nations for coming to that decision. If you have made your preparation for war—perhaps a very expensive preparation, perhaps a preparation which has involved very great commitments apart from expense—it is not reasonable to suppose that at the last moment you will consent to desist from making that war. The line which you may have been prepared to take before you made your preparations you may not be prepared to take after the preparations have been made. And, as the Turks found out afterwards, the terms which were offered to them before the outbreak of the war were not the same terms as would be listened to after that event.

To a pro-Turk it all will seem a little unscrupulous. But it is after the true fashion of diplomacy or warlike enterprise. The simple position was that Turkey was obviously a decadent Power; that her territories were envied and that if there had not been a real grievance (there was a real grievance) one would have been manufactured to justify a war of spoliation. It not being necessary to manufacture a grievance, the existing one was carefully nursed and stimulated: and when the ripe time came for war the unreal pretext that war was the alternative to reform and could be avoided by reform was put forward. No reform would have stopped the war just as no "reform" would stop, say, San Marino attacking the British Empire if she wanted something which the British Empire has got and felt that she could get it by an attack.

I do not think that the Balkan League would have withdrawn from the war supposing the Turks before the outbreak of the war had offered autonomy of the Christian provinces. I was informed in very high quarters, and I believe profoundly, that if the Turks had offered so much at that time the war would still have taken place.

There is another interesting lesson to be gleaned from the political side of this war. At the outset, the Powers, when endeavouring to prevent hostilities, made an announcement that, whatever the result of the war, no territorial benefit would be allowed to any of the participants; that is to say, the Balkan States were informed, on the authority of all Europe, that if they did go to war, and if they won victories they would be allowed no fruits from those victories. The Balkan States recognised, as I think all sensible people must recognise, that a victorious army makes its own laws. They treated this caveat which was issued by the Powers of Europe as a matter to be politely set aside; and ignored it.

Political experience seems to show that if a nation, under any circumstances, wishes its international rights to be respected, it must be ready to fight for them. There is proof from contemporary history in the respective fates of Switzerland and Korea. Both nations once stood in very much the same position internationally; that their independence was, in a sense, guaranteed. Korea's independence was guaranteed by both the United States and Great Britain. But the independence of Korea has now vanished. Korea could not fight for herself, and nobody was going to fight for a nation which could not fight for herself. The independence of Switzerland is maintained because Switzerland would be a very thorny problem for any Power in search of territory to tackle. In case of an attack on Switzerland, that country would be able to help herself and her friends.

On the opposite side of the argument, we see the Balkan League entering upon a desperate war, warned that they would be allowed no territorial advantage from that war, but engaging upon it because they recognised that a victorious army makes its own laws.

It was of wonderful value to the Bulgarian generals entering upon this war that the whole Bulgarian nation was filled with the martial spirit—was, in a sense, wrapped up in the colours. Every male Bulgarian citizen was trained to the use of arms. Every Bulgarian citizen of fighting age was engaged either at the front or on the lines of communication. Before the war, every Bulgarian man, being a soldier, was under a soldier's honour; and the preliminaries of the war, the preparations for mobilisation in particular, were carried out with a degree of secrecy that, I think, astonished every Court and every Military Department in Europe. The secret was so well kept that one of the diplomatists in Roumania left for a holiday three days before the declaration of war, feeling certain that there was to be no war. Bulgaria is not governed altogether autocratically, but is a very free democracy in some respects. It has a newspaper Press that, on ordinary matters, for delightful irresponsibility, might be matched in London. Yet not a single whisper of what the nation was designing and planning leaked abroad. Because the whole nation was a soldier, and the whole nation was under a soldier's honour, secrecy could be kept. No one abroad knew anything, either from the babbling of "Pro-Turks," or from the newspapers, that a great campaign was being designed.

Topical Press

BULGARIAN TROOPS LEAVING SOFIA

The Secret Service of Bulgaria before the war evidently had been excellent. They seemed to know all that was necessary to know about the country in which they were going to fight. This very complete knowledge of theirs was in part responsible for the arrangements which were made between the Balkan Allies for carrying on the war. The Bulgarian people had made up their minds to do the lion's share of the work, and to have the lion's share of the spoils. They knew quite definitely the state of corruption to which the Turkish nation had come. When I reached Sofia, the Bulgarians told me they were going to be in Constantinople three weeks after the declaration of war. That was the view that they took of the possibilities of the campaign. And they kept their programme as far as Chatalja fairly closely.

The view of the Bulgarians as to the ultimate result of the war, and what they had designed should be the division of spoil after the war, I gathered from various classes in Bulgaria, 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 practically all Turkey-in-Europe—the province of Thrace, and a large part of Macedonia as far as the city of Salonica. Constantinople was to be left, with a small territory, as an international city, and the Bulgarian boundary was to stretch as far as Salonica. Salonica, they admitted, was desired very much by the Bulgarians, and also very much by the Greeks; and the Bulgarian idea 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, and a free port for all the Balkan States. Then the frontier of Greece was to extend very much to the north, and Greece was to be allowed all the Aegean Islands. The Serbian frontier was to extend to the eastward and the southward, and what is now the autonomous province of Albania (the creation of which has been 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). It needed great confidence and exact knowledge as to the state of the Turkish Army to allow plans of that sort to have been not only formed, but to be generally talked about.

It must be tragical now for a patriotic Bulgarian to compare these high anticipations with the actual results of the war, and to reflect that at one time he had three-fourths of his hopes secure and then sacrificed all by straining after the remainder.

The Bulgarian mobilisation—effected after lengthy preparation with perfect success and complete secrecy—was a triumph of military achievement. It emphasises a point often urged, that when a whole nation is wrapt up in the colours, when every citizen is a soldier and taught the code of patriotic honour of the soldier—then at a time of crisis, spies, grumblers, critics are impossible. Bulgaria, as I have said, is very democratic. Unlike Roumania, where a landed aristocracy survived Turkish rule, the whole nation is of peasants or the sons and grandsons of peasants. The nobles, the wealthy, the intellectuals were exterminated by the Turk. Yet the strategy of the war suffered nothing from the democracy of the people. They acted with a unity, a secrecy, and a loyalty to the flag that no despotism could rival.

The mobilisation was effected on very slender resources. Official statistics—perhaps for a reason—are silent regarding the growth of railway material since 1909. But in that year there were only 155 locomotives in the country. As soon as war was anticipated these provident and determined people set to amassing railway material, and one railway official, without giving exact figures, talked of locomotives being added by "fifties" at a time. I doubt that. But perhaps there were between 200 and 225 locomotives in Bulgaria in October 1912, though one military attaché gave me the figure at 193. It was a slender stock, in any case, on which to move 350,000 men and to keep them in supplies. But the people contributed all their horses, mules, and oxen to the war fund. Soldiers were willing and able to walk great distances, and within a few days all the armies were over the frontier.

The Bulgarians, by the way, began the war with a moratorium. (The week of the declaration of hostilities, meeting some personages notable in European finance, they ridiculed for this reason the idea of the war being anything but a dismal failure from the point of view of the Balkan States.) It was necessary to win in a hurry if they were to win at all. They could take the field only because of the magnificent spirit of their population. They could not keep the field indefinitely under any circumstances.

The main line of communication was through Yamboli, and here the chief force was massed whilst exploratory work was carried on towards Adrianople and Kirk Kilisse. I believe that originally the capture of Adrianople was the first grand object of the campaign, and that a modification was made later either for political or military reasons, or for a mixture of both. Up to the point at which Adrianople was invested from the north, Kirk Kilisse captured, and the cavalry sent raiding south-west to attack the Turk's lines of communication and to feel for his field army, an excellent plan of campaign was followed. If the main Bulgarian army had then swung over from Kirk Kilisse and had made a resolute—and, under the circumstances, almost certainly victorious—effort to rush Adrianople the natural course, from a military point of view, would have been followed. The one risk involved was that the Turkish field army would come up from the south and force a battle under the walls of Adrianople, aided by a sortie from the garrison. But the experience of Kirk Kilisse and the following battles argued against this. There would have been, one may judge, ample time allowed to subdue Adrianople with an army flushed by its success at Kirk Kilisse, operating against a garrison thoroughly despondent at the moment.

Kirk Kilisse, it must be noted in passing, was a vastly overrated fortress. The Turks, I believe, valued it highly. The Bulgarians triumphantly quoted a German opinion that it could withstand a German army for three months. As a matter of fact, whilst it was a valuable base for an enterprising field army, surrounded as it was by natural features of great strength, it was not a real fortress at all. Still, the moral effect of its capture was great, and on the flood of that success the Bulgarian army could have entered Adrianople if it had been willing to make the necessary great sacrifice of infantry.

A second sound—and more enterprising, and therefore probably better course—was that which I thought at the time was being followed, to pursue the Turks fleeing from Kirk Kilisse, to search out their field army, give it a thrashing, and then swing back to subdue Adrianople. But neither of these courses was followed. Kirk Kilisse was not followed up vigorously in the first instance. After its capture the Bulgarian army rested three days. During that time the fleeing Turks had won back some of their courage, had come back in their tracks, recovered many of the guns they had abandoned, and the battles of Ivankeui and Yanina—battles in which the Bulgarian losses were very heavy—were necessary to do over again work which had been already once accomplished. This criticism must be read in the light of the fact that I am totally ignorant of the transport position in the Bulgarian Third Army at the time. General Demetrieff had made a wonderful dash over the wild country between Yamboli and Kirk Kilisse, carrying an army over a track which took a military attaché six days to traverse on horseback, and a hospital train seven days to traverse by ox wagon. He might at the time have been seriously short of ammunition, though Kirk Kilisse renewed his food and forage supplies.

After three days the Bulgarians moved on. Ivankeui and Yanina were won, and the pursuit continued until Lule Burgas, where the Turkish army in the field was decisively defeated and driven with great slaughter towards Chorlu, where its second stand was expected. That expectation was not realised. The flight continued to Chatalja. This was the turning-point of the campaign. Up to now the Bulgarian success had been complete. If now Adrianople had been made the main objective, with a small "holding" force left at Chorlu, the entry into Constantinople would possibly have been realised. But the decision was made to "mask" Adrianople and to push on with all available force towards Constantinople.

In considering this decision it is easy to be misled by giving Adrianople merely the value of a fortress in the rear, holding a garrison capable of some offensive, necessitating the detachment of a large holding force. But that was not the position. Actually Adrianople straddled the only practical line of communication for effective operations against the enemy's capital. The railway from Bulgaria to Constantinople passed through Adrianople. Excepting that line of railway, there was no other railroad, and there was no other carriage road, one might say, for the Turk did not build roads. Once across the Turkish frontier there were tracks, not roads.

GENERAL DEMETRIEFF, THE CONQUEROR AT LULE BURGAS

The effect of leaving Adrianople in the hands of the enemy was that supplies for the army in the field coming from Bulgaria could travel by one of two routes. They could come through Yamboli to Kirk Kilisse, or they could come through Novi Zagora to Mustapha Pasha by railway, and then to Kirk Kilisse around Adrianople. From Kirk Kilisse to the rail-head at Seleniki, close to Chatalja, they could come not by railway, but by a tramway, a very limited railway. If Adrianople had fallen, the railway would have been open. The Bulgarian railway services had, I think, something over 100 powerful locomotives at the outset of the war, and whilst it was a single line in places, it was an effective line right down to as near Constantinople as they could get.

But, Adrianople being in the hands of the enemy, supplies coming from Yamboli had to travel to Kirk Kilisse by track, mostly by bullock wagon, and that journey took five, six, or seven days. The British Army Medical Detachment, travelling over that road, took seven days. If one took the other road you got to Mustapha Pasha comfortably by railway. And then it was necessary to use bullock or horse transport from Mustapha Pasha to Kirk Kilisse. That journey I took twice; once with an ox wagon, and afterwards with a set of fast horses, and the least period for that journey was five days. From Kirk Kilisse there was a line of light railway joining the main line. But on that line the Bulgarians had only six engines, and, I think, thirty-two carriages; so that, for practical purposes, the railway was of very little use indeed past Mustapha Pasha. Whilst Adrianople was in the hands of the enemy, the Bulgarians had practically no line of communication.

My reason for believing that it was not the original plan of the generals to leave Adrianople "masked" is, that in the first instance I have a high opinion of the generals, and I do not think they could have designed that; but think rather it was forced upon them by the politicians saying, "We must hurry through, we must attempt something, no matter how desperate it is, something decisive." In the second instance, after Adrianople had been attacked in a very half-hearted way, and after the main Bulgarian army had pushed on to the lines of Chatalja, the Bulgarians called in the aid of a Serbian division to help them against Adrianople. I am sure they would not have done that if it had not been their wish to subdue Adrianople. To be forced to invoke Serbian aid was a serious wound to their vanity.

The position of the Bulgarian army on the lines of Chatalja, with Adrianople in the hands of the enemy, was this: that it took practically their whole transport facilities to keep the army supplied with food, and there was no possibility of keeping the army properly supplied with ammunition. So if the Bulgarian generals had really designed to carry the lines of Chatalja without first attacking Adrianople, they miscalculated seriously. But I do not think they did; I think it was a plan forced upon them by political authority, feeling that the war must be pushed to a conclusion somehow. Why the Bulgarians did not take Adrianople quickly in the first place is to be explained simply by the fact that they could not. But if their train of sappers had been of the same kind of stuff as their field artillery, they could have taken Adrianople in the first week of the war. The Bulgarians, however, had no effective siege train. A Press photographer at Mustapha Pasha was very much annoyed because photographs he had taken of guns passing through the town were not allowed to be sent through to his paper. He sent a humorous message to his editor, that he could not send photographs of guns, "it being a military secret that the Bulgarians had any guns." But the reason the Bulgarians did not want photographs taken was that these guns were practically useless for the purpose for which they were intended.

In short, whilst Adrianople stood it was impossible to keep 250,000 men in the field at Chatalja with the guns and ammunition necessary for their work. Therefore the taking of Adrianople should have followed the Battle of Lule Burgas.

A reservation is perhaps necessary. If after Lule Burgas the victorious Bulgarians had been able to push on at once, the fleeing Turks might have been followed to the very walls of Constantinople. If even the flower of the force to the extent of 50,000 men had gone on with all the guns, ammunition, and food possible, the enterprise would probably have succeeded. But one may judge that that too was impossible, in view of the transport position. There was a long pause. Then an attempt was made to do deliberately against an entrenched army what it was thought impossible to do against a fleeing rabble. Reasons of humanity were given to me to explain the hesitation to assault Adrianople. The Bulgarians shrank from the great expenditure of men necessary, from the sacrifice of the Christian population involved. Such reasons would be admirable if truthful; but they are not war.

When the action against the lines of Chatalja was at last opened the Turks had had time to entrench strongly, to recover their wind, to recognise that they had come to the last ditch. On November 17, after the artillery reconnaissance of the position by the Bulgarians, I had slight hope that success would be possible; it looked as if they were short of ammunition, and not well supplied with food. Shells were used very sparingly. When a storm was necessary there was a shower. Even on that day infantrymen were asked to do the work of shrapnel, and valuable lives paid for very slight information. Still, the Turkish artillery work was so poor; their sticking to their trenches was so persistent, that I half anticipated that the night would see a big Bulgarian success on the left flank, making an effective attack on the centre possible with the morning. But by next morning little had been done. That day was spent in a heroic display of infantry courage. Men rushed out from trenches against forts the strength of which was unknown, with practically no artillery backing. Certainly the day was misty, and artillery work could not have been properly effective. If the position was—as I guess it was—that there was no adequate supply of ammunition, the choice of the day was good. If it were possible to succeed with infantry alone it would have been possible on that day and with those men. But it was impossible. That night operations were suspended, and negotiations for peace followed.

Meanwhile in other quarters of the theatre of war the Balkan Allies had been doing as well or even better. True, the Montenegrins were not very successful against Scutari (it did not fall until the second phase of the war), and the Greeks had been held up at Janina. But the Serbians had swept the Turks from Old Serbia and from Northern Macedonia in fine style, and had carried through an expedition of great gallantry over the mountains to the Adriatic. As the Bulgarians and Turks stood at bay on opposite ranges of hills within 25 miles of Constantinople, all that was left of Turkish territory in Europe was the little peninsula on which Constantinople stood, the peninsula of Gallipoli, and the towns of Adrianople, Scutari, and Janina. It was certainly high time for the Turk to talk of peace.

War was now interrupted for a time to allow the Balkan Allies who had shown themselves so gallant in war to show their mettle as statesmen and negotiators. It is one of the established facts of history that warlike prowess alone has never made a nation securely great. Within the Balkan Peninsula that was made plain during the invasions of the Goths and the Huns. There was now to be a melancholy modern proof. At the end of 1912 the Balkan States, united and victorious, were in the position to take the Balkan Peninsula for themselves and keep out European interference for the future. They had soon dissipated all this advantage with mutual jealousies and blundering negotiations. Already, before the Peace Conference had actually begun its work, charges and counter-charges of atrocities were bandied about between Bulgar and Greek. A Greek official account set forth the following accusations:

The detailed inquiry with regard to excesses and crimes committed by the Bulgarian army shows that they constitute a cause for the disturbances reported during the first days after the surrender of Salonica. According to this inquiry, the excesses of the Bulgarians can be divided into three categories: (1) damage to property; (2) crimes against the life and honour of private persons, especially Turks; and (3) offences—and these were the less frequent—due to misconceived political interest. In the majority of cases Bulgarian soldiers and peasants gave themselves up to pillaging. At Vassilika, Agiaparaskevi, Apostola, Alihatzilar, Serres, Langada, Asvestohori, Baroritza, Tohanli, Karaburnu, Vardar, Doiran, and Salonica pillaging and thefts of all kinds were committed, the stolen articles including horses, goats, sheep, barley, hay, jewels, and other articles of value, large sums of money, carpets, furniture, clothes, and arms. Attacks were made on Austrian subjects, and the Austrian Consulate in consequence, lodged an energetic protest. Unspeakable outrages were committed at Serres and at the other towns and villages mentioned above. At Doiran, despite the protests of the municipality, the Bulgarians seized and imprisoned the rich Turkish residents, who after having secured their liberty by the payment of enormous ransoms, were ambushed by the Bulgarians and massacred, sixty of them being killed.

The political crimes were of little importance, as the greater number of the Bulgarians ardently desire the maintenance of the Balkan Alliance, especially a Greco-Bulgarian entente, safeguarding their political interests.

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ADRIANOPLE

A general view, showing the Mosque of Sultan Selim on the left and the Old Mosque on the right

On the Bulgarian side just as positive charges against the Greeks were made. It is not my province to attempt to judge as to the truth of the Salonica events, but I quote this official charge as illustrative of the spirit which had come over the Balkan League before the close of 1912.

CHAPTER V

A CHAPTER IN BALKAN DIPLOMACY

Watching through many exciting weeks the course of a Balkan Peace Conference, I had the opportunity of seeing another phase of the Near Eastern character in its various sub-divisions—the Turkish, the Grecian, the Roumanian, the Bulgarian, and the Serbian. It was in certain general characteristics the same character with certain points of difference, ranging from almost purely Oriental through various grades until it reached to a phase which was rather more than half European. In various aspects it was naïve, wily, deceitful, vainglorious, truculent, servile, stubborn, supple. At times it was very trying. Usually it was distinctly amusing. There were some exceptions among the Balkan statesmen, but as a rule they were men of very ordinary ability and very extraordinary conceit. Close association with them dissipated for a time the extremely good impression that Bulgarian, Serbian, Grecian, and Roumanian peasants and officials and traders had made on me, meeting them as soldiers or as wayside hosts.

When the Bulgarian progress towards Constantinople was stopped at Chatalja, the Bulgarian authorities favoured negotiations for peace. To this Greece very strenuously, and Serbia more gently, objected. They offered as an alternative suggestion to send aid to the Chatalja lines to help Bulgaria to force things to a conclusion there. But by this time the Balkan Allies were at least as much suspicious of one another as they were hostile to the Turk. The troubles after the fall of Salonica had given a picturesque illustration of the hollowness of the Balkan League. Greece and Bulgaria had raced armies down for the capture of that city, and the Greeks had won in the race by bribing the Turkish commander to surrender to them—the Bulgarians said sourly (an absurd accusation!). Now Bulgarian and Greek were at the point of open war in Salonica, and were doing a little odd killing of one another to keep their hands in practice. Around Adrianople Bulgarian and Serbian were growling at one another, the Bulgarians treating their friends rather badly, so far as I could judge. Both racial sections of the army of siege were inclined to do very little, because each was waiting for the other to begin. Bulgaria, too, was extremely anxious to have no more friendly allied troops in the areas which she had marked out for herself. She was aware that the Greek population of Thrace was agitating for an autonomous Thrace instead of a Bulgarian annexation, and feared that the presence of a Greek army in the province would strengthen this movement.

In the upshot Serbia and Montenegro supported Bulgaria in the signing of an armistice. Greece refused to sign an armistice, but joined in the negotiations for a final peace which opened at the Conference of St. James's, London, in December 1912. This Conference quickly resolved itself into a wonderful acrobatic display of ground and lofty fiction, of strange childish "bluffs," of complicated efforts at mystery which would not deceive a Punch-and-Judy show audience.

In the East and the Near East, the man who wants to buy a horse goes to the market-place in the first instance, and curses publicly all horses and thoughts of horses. He proclaims that he will see his father's tomb defiled before he will ever touch a horse again. Hearing of this, a man who wishes to sell a horse appears in public, and proclaims that the horse he has in his stall is the sun and the moon and the stars of his life: that sooner than part with it he would eat filth and become as a dog. At this stage the negotiations for a bargain are in fair progress. After some days—the East and the Near East is not very thrifty with time—a satisfactory bargain is struck.

The Balkan Peace Conference was carried on very much on those lines. In a London winter atmosphere, among the unimaginative and matter-of-fact London population, the effect was strangely fantastic. In an early stage of the negotiations the Turkish delegates (who were out to gain time in the desperate hope that something would turn up) said one day that they must ask for instructions on some point, about which they were as fully instructed as it was possible to be: said the next sitting day that unfortunately their instructions had not arrived: and the next sitting day that their instructions had arrived but unfortunately they could not decipher some of the words, and must refer to Constantinople again! With all this it was difficult to believe that we lived in a civilised age of telegraphs and newspapers and railway trains. The mind was transported back insensibly to the times of the great Caliph of Bagdad.

Whilst the Turks dallied in the hope that something would turn up, and devoted a painstaking but painfully obvious industry to the task of trying to sow dissensions among the Balkan Allies, these Balkan Allies engaged among themselves in a vigorous Press campaign of mutual abuse and insinuation. The seeds of dissension which the Turk was scattering refused to germinate, because already the field which was sown had a full-grown crop. But the Balkan Allies had one point of elementary common sense. They were resolved to take from the Turk all that was possible before they fell out among themselves as to the division of the spoil. (As it happened, they forgot to take into account the contingency that after the division it would still be within the power of the Turk to seek some revenge if they abandoned their League of Alliance, which alone had made the humiliation of the Turkish Empire possible.)

The first squabble between the Allies was over the appointment of a leader or chief spokesman of the Balkan delegates. If there had been a touch of imagination and real friendliness between them they would have selected the senior Montenegrin delegate in acknowledgment of the gallantry which had kept Montenegro during all the centuries unsubdued by the Turkish invader. Or there were reasons why the chief Greek delegate should have been chosen, as he was Prime Minister in his own country, and therefore the senior delegate in official position. But there was not enough good feeling among the Allies to allow of any such settlement. The delegation was left without an official spokesman and there had to be a roster of Presidents in alphabetical order as the only way to soothe the embittered jealousies of rival allies. That was the first of a series of childish incidents.

Some of the delegates talked with the utmost freedom to the Press: and if what they told was not always accurate it was nearly always interesting. The loathsome wiles of the other Balkan fellow and his black treachery were explained at length. It seemed seriously to be thought that British and European opinion would be influenced by this sort of fulmination in the more irresponsible Press.

Diplomacy under these conditions was bound to fail. The Turkish position was at the time plainly desperate if only military considerations were taken into account. A united front on the part of the Balkan delegates, combining firmness with some suavity, would have convinced even the procrastinating Turkish mind that the game was up and the only thing to do was to make a peace on lines of "cutting the loss." But the constant quarrels of the Balkan States' representatives between themselves encouraged the Turks day by day to think that a definite split must come between the Allies, and with a split the chance for Turkey to find a way out of her desperate position. As it happened, Turkey played that game too long: and the war was resumed and further heavy bloodshed caused. Then the Peace Conference resumed with Turkey and Bulgaria, apparently very anxious for peace on terms dictated by the Powers: and Greece and Serbia anxious now for delays because they had made up their minds that it was necessary to defend themselves against Bulgaria, and they wished time for their preparations.

Underwood & Underwood

ROUMANIAN SOLDIERS IN BUCHAREST

Throughout both Conferences Roumania hovered about in the offing waiting confidently for an opportunity for pickings. Roumania had learned well the lesson taught her by European diplomacy after the War of Liberation. Then she had done great work, made enormous sacrifices, and won not rewards but robberies. In the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 she stood apart, risking nothing, and waiting for the exhaustion of the combatants to put in her claims.

The second session of the Balkan Peace Conference came to an abrupt end through practically an ultimatum from the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, that peace with Turkey on the lines determined by the Powers must be signed at once. The Grecian and Serbian delegates saw then that the game of delay could no longer be played, signed the Peace of London, and hurried away to their homes expecting an attack from Bulgaria.

Some strange infatuation drove the Bulgarian leaders at that time to a fit of madness. They had just wrung the last atom of concession from Turkey, and had an enormous undisputed access of territory in Thrace and in eastern Macedonia, with a good coastal frontage on the Aegean. True, they were faced with a demand for a small territorial concession by Roumania, and Greece disputed the right of Bulgaria to an area of northern Macedonia, and Serbia disputed with her over her Macedonian area. It would have been quite within the rules of Balkan diplomacy for Bulgaria to have sought the help of one of her neighbours, so that she might withstand the others. With proper adroitness she might have robbed each in turn with the help of the others. But Bulgaria elected to fight all of them at once. To Roumania she was rude, to Serbia stiff, to Greece provocative. By joining hands with Serbia, which had helped her very gallantly at Adrianople, and was now much injured by the decision of the Powers that she was not to keep the Adriatic territory which she had won in the war, Bulgaria might have coerced Greece and Turkey at least, and perhaps have struck a better bargain with Roumania. But she had conciliation for none.

The events that followed are as tragical as any that I can recall in history. Bulgaria had within a few weeks raised herself to a position which promised her headship of a Balkan Confederation. She might have been the Prussia of a new Empire. Within a few days her blunders, her intolerance, and her bad faith had humbled her to the dust. As soon as she attacked Greece and Serbia—to attack such a combination was absurd—Roumania moved down upon her northern frontier, and the Turk moved up from the south. Neither Roumanian nor Turk were opposed. The whole Bulgarian strength was kept for her late Allies: and yet the Bulgarian forces were decisively routed by both Serbians and Greeks.

Of the dark incidents of that fratricidal war no history will ever tell the truth. No war correspondents nor military attachés accompanied the forces. From the accusations and counter-accusations of the combatants, from the eloquent absence of prisoners, from the ghastly gaps in the ranks of the armies when they returned from the field, it is clear that the war was carried on as a rule without mercy and without chivalry. There was no very plentiful supply of ammunition on either side. That fact enabled the combatants to approach one another more closely and to inflict more savage slaughter. During the course of the war with Turkey the Balkan Allies lost 75,000 slain. During the war between themselves, though it lasted only a few days, it is said that this number was exceeded.

Roumania, whose army though invading Bulgaria engaged in no battle, finally dictated terms of peace. The Peace of Bucharest supplanted the Peace of London. Bulgaria, beaten to the ground, had to give up all that Roumania demanded, and practically all that Greece and Serbia demanded. It was a characteristic incident of Balkan diplomacy that the unhappy Bulgarians, having the idea of conciliating Roumania, conveyed the territory to that state with expressions of joy and gratitude, to which expressions the wily Roumanians gave exactly their true value.

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ADRIANOPLE

View looking across the Great Bridge

Turkey, meanwhile, had taken full advantage of the opportunity given to her by Bulgaria. Beaten decisively she had had to agree to give up all her European possessions with the exception of those beyond a line drawn from Enos on the Black Sea to Midia on the Aegean. She saw now Bulgaria powerless and calmly marched back, and seized again practically all Thrace, including Adrianople, over which had been fought such great battles, and Kirk Kilisse. The Bulgarians protested, appealed to Europe, to Roumania in vain, then accepted the situation and professed a warm friendship for Turkey. There seemed to be a movement for a joint Turkish-Bulgarian attack upon Greece, which would have put the last touch upon this tragic comedy of the Balkans. But the Powers vetoed this enterprise if ever it were contemplated, and the Balkans for a while, except for a little massacring in Macedonia and Albania, enjoyed an unquiet peace. But the forces of hate and revenge waited latent.

The city which figured most prominently in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the intervening diplomacy was Adrianople, the city founded by the Emperor Adrian. It has seen more bloodshed probably than any other city of the world. It was before Adrianople that the Roman Emperor Valerius and his army were destroyed by the Goths, and the fate of the Roman Empire sealed (a.d. 378). It was Adrianople that was first captured by the Turkish invaders of the Balkans to serve as their capital until they could at a later date capture Constantinople. Many sieges and battles it saw until 1912, when the Bulgarians and Serbians gathered around its marshy plains, and after several months of siege finally carried it by assault. Finally it was re-captured by a mere cavalry patrol of the Turks.

Adrianople has its beauties seen from afar. The great mosque with four slender minarets shines out from the midst of gardens and picturesque villas over the wide plain which marks the confluence of the Maritza and the Tchundra Rivers. But on nearer examination Adrianople, like all other Turkish towns, is dirty, unkempt, squalid. Most Turkish towns in the Balkans—Mustapha Pasha on the Maritza was an exception, looking dirty and unattractive from any point of view—have a certain enchantment when they first catch the eye of the traveller. It is the custom of the richer Turks to build their villas on the high ground around a town if there is any, and to surround them with gardens. These embowered houses and the slender fingers pointing skyward of the minarets, give a first impression of ample space, of delicacy in architecture. Closer knowledge discloses the town as a herd of hovels, irregularly set in a sea of mud (in dry weather a dirty heap of dust), with the hilly outskirts alone tolerable.

I regret the wild Balkan diplomacy which doomed that Adrianople should go back to the Turks. The Bulgarians would have made a fine clean city of it: and had a project to canalise the Maritza and bring to the old city of Adrian all the advantages of a seaport. Possibly, that will come in the near future if, in renewing their strength, the Bulgarian nation learn also some sense of diplomacy and moderation in using it.

Now the position is that for the first time for very many years the old principle has been broken that the Turkish tide may retreat but must never advance in Europe. During the negotiations of the first session of the Balkan Peace Conference, the Balkan Committee—a London organisation which exists to befriend the Balkan States—urged:

Any district which should be restored to Turkish rule would be not only beyond the possibility of rehabilitation, but would suffer the second scourge of vengeance.... It would be intolerable that any such districts should meet the fate meted out to Macedonia in 1878. There is no ground for such restoration except the claim arising from the continued Turkish possessions of Adrianople. But compensation for the brief period during which Adrianople may still be defended would be represented by a district adjoining Chatalja, not exceeding, at all events, the vilayet of Constantinople....

It is clearly our duty to call attention to the governing principle laid down by Lord Salisbury that any district liberated from Turkish rule should not be restored to misgovernment.... The ostensible ground for the action of Europe, and particularly of England in 1878, was that the Powers themselves undertook the reform of Turkish government in the restored provinces. They have since that day persistently restrained the small States from undertaking reform or liberation, while notoriously neglecting the task themselves. The promise to undertake reform was regarded in 1878 in many quarters as sincere. But renewed restoration of Christian districts to Turkey to-day would, after the experiences of the past, be devoid of any shred of sincerity....

The restoration of European and civilised populations to Turkish rule would be resented now, not merely by those who have sympathised with the Balkan Committee, but by the entire public, which recognises that the Allies have achieved a feat of arms of which even the greatest Power would be proud.

In 1914 no more was heard of "Lord Salisbury's principle," and in public repute the Balkan States were in a position worse than any they had occupied for half a century. Coming after a successful war such a result condemns most strongly Balkan statesmen and diplomats.

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GENERAL VIEW OF STARA ZAGORA, BULGARIA

Roumanian diplomacy during 1912-13 was subtle, wily, and unscrupulous, enough to delight a Machiavelli. With all its ethical wickedness it was the most stable element in the wild disorders of 1913; was efficacious in insisting upon peace: and imposed a sort of rough justice on all parties. Grecian diplomacy was of the same character as the Roumanian, but not so supremely able. The difference, it appeared to me, was that the Roumanian sought a grand advantage with a humble air: the Greek would seek an advantage, even a humble one, with a grand air. A lofty dignity sits well on the diplomacy which is backed by great force: there should be something more humble in the bearing of the diplomat relying upon subtle wiles. The Greek is a little too conscious of his heroic past not to spoil a little the working of his otherwise very pliant diplomacy. The Serbian in diplomacy was not so childish as the Bulgarian and a great deal more amiable and modest. Europe has long given the Serbian a bad reputation for bounce and bluster. In the events of 1912-13 he did nothing to earn such ill-repute. His work in the field was done excellently and with little réclame. In Conference he was not aggressive, but moderate, and, in my experience, more truthful than other Balkan types.

CHAPTER VI

THE TROUBLES OF A WAR CORRESPONDENT IN THE BALKANS

Being a war correspondent with the Bulgarian army gave one far better opportunities of studying Balkan scenery and natural characteristics than war operations. After getting through to Staff headquarters at Stara Zagora and to Mustapha Pasha, which was about twelve miles from the operations against Adrianople, I found myself a kind of prisoner of the censor, and recall putting my complaint into writing on November 7:

It is the dullest of posts, this, at the tail of an army which is moving forward and doing brave deeds whilst we are cooped up by the censor, thirsting for news, and given an occasional bulletin which tells us just what it is thought that we should be told. True, we are not prisoners exactly. We may go out within a mile radius. That is the rule which must be faithfully kept under pain of being sent back to headquarters. Perhaps, now and again, a desperate correspondent, thinking that it would not be such a sad thing after all to be sent back to headquarters, takes a generous view of what a mile is. (Perhaps he has been used to Irish miles, which are of the elastic kind; short when you pay a car fare, long, very long, at other times.) But, supposing, with great energy and at dread risk of being sent back to headquarters a correspondent has walked one mile and one yard; or his horse, which cannot read notices, has unwittingly carried him on; and supposing that he has made all kinds of brilliant observations, analysing a speck of shining metal showing there, a puff of smoke elsewhere, a flash, or a scar on the earth, still there remains the censor. A courteous gentleman is the censor, with a manner even deferential. He cuts off the head of your news with the most malignant courtesy. "I am sorry, my dear sir, but that refers to movements of troops; it is forbidden. And that might be useful to the enemy. Ah, that observation is excellent; but it cannot go."

Afterwards, there remains in your mind an impression of your wickedness in having troubled so amiable a gentleman, and on your telegraph form nothing, just nothing. Of course, if you like, you can pass along the camp chatter, the stories brought in by Greeks anxious to curry favour, the descriptions of the capture of Constantinople by peasants whose first cousins were staying at the Pera Hotel the day it happened. The censor is too wise a gentleman to interfere with the harmless amusement of sending that on. It does not harm; it may entertain somebody.

So at the rear of the army, which is making the Christian arm more respected than it has been for some time in this Balkan Peninsula, we sit and growl. Those of us who are convinced that we possess that supreme capacity of a general "to see what is going on behind the next hill" are particularly sad. There are so many precious observations being wasted, theories which cannot be expressed, sagacious "I told you so's" which are smothered. We are at the rear of an army, and endless trains of transport move on; and if we can by chance catch the sound of a distant gun we are happy for a day, since it suggests the real thing. Some of us are optimists, and feel sure that we shall go forward in a day or two; that we shall be allowed to see the bombardment of Adrianople; if not that, then its capture; if not that, then something. Others are pessimists, and have gone home.

It is easy to understand the anxiety of the Bulgarians. They are engaged in a big war. They know that some of the Great Powers are watching its progress with something more than interest and something less than sympathy. It is their impression that they can beat the Turks; but that afterwards they may have to meet an attempt to neutralise their victory. So they are anxious to mask every detail of their organisation. Secrecy applies to the past as well as to the present and the future. But it is very irritating; and one goes home, or holds on in the hope that something better will come after a time.

Meanwhile one may learn a little of the country and its people—this country which has been riven by many wars. The map—with its names in several languages—gives indications of the wounds they inflicted. In Bulgaria, too, it shows how determined is the nationality of the people who have within a generation reasserted their right to be a nation. They permit no Turkish names to remain on their maps. Not only do the Arabic characters go, but also the Turkish names. Eski Sagrah, for example, gives place to the title it has on the best English maps. "Sagrah" means in Turkish a "dell," a place sheltered by a wood. "Eski" means "old." The Bulgarian has changed that to Stara Zagora, Bulgarian words with exactly the same significance. He wishes to wipe away all traces of the defiling hand of the Turk from his country, though tolerant of his Turkish fellow-subjects.

Almost completely he succeeds, but not quite completely. The Turkish sweetmeats, the Turkish coffee keep their hold on the taste of the people, and away from the towns, among the peasants who till rich fields with wooden ploughs, there remain traces of the Eastern disregard for time. But even in the country the people are waking up to modern ideas, aroused in part by the American "drummer" selling agricultural machinery. But in his city of Sofia, "the little Paris," as he likes to hear it called, and in his towns the Bulgarian has become keen and bustling. He rather aspires to be thought Parisian in manner. A "middle class" begins to grow up. The Bulgarian prospers mightily as a trader, and when he makes money he devotes his son to a profession, to the staff of the army, the law, to public life. Also the Bulgarian is keen to add manufacturing industries to his agricultural resources, and there are cotton mills and other factories springing up in different places. The Bulgarian has a great faith in himself. Thinking over what he has done within forty years, it is easy to share that belief and to think of him one day with a great seaport on the Mediterranean aspiring to a place in the family council of Europe.

Afterwards, when by dint of hard begging, hard travelling, hard living, and some hard swearing, I had forced my way through to the front, I concluded that with the exception of Mustapha Pasha—where the Second Army had failed at its task and was set to work on a dull siege, and was consequently very bad-tempered—the famous censorship of the Bulgarian Army was not so vexatious to the correspondents as to their editors. The censors were usually polite, and tried to make a difficult position agreeable.

When the correspondents were despatched it was thought that the Balkan States, needing a "good Press," would be fairly kind. The expectation was realised in the case of the Montenegrins and the Greeks. The Serbians allowed the correspondents to see nothing. The Bulgarian idea was to allow nothing to be seen and nothing to be despatched except the "Te Deums." It was an aggravation of the Japanese censorship, and if it is accepted as a model for future combatant States the "war correspondent" will become extinct. I am not disposed to claim that an army in the field should carry on its operations under the eyes of newspaper correspondents; and there were special circumstances in regard to the campaign of the Bulgarian army (which was a desperate rush against a big people of a little people operating with the slenderest of resources) that made a severe censorship absolutely necessary. But, that allowed, there are still some points of criticism justified.

One correspondent, and one only, was exempted from censorship, and he was not at the front but at Sofia. His special position as an informal member of the Cabinet led to a concession which, to a man of honour, was more of a responsibility than a privilege. At the outset the Russian and French correspondents were highly favoured, and two English correspondents—who were working jointly—were granted passes of credit to all the armies. That privilege was afterwards granted to me towards the end of the war. It should have been granted to all or none. A censorship which is harsh but has no favouritism may be criticised, but it cannot be held suspect. Throughout the campaign there was some favouritism, the Russians having first place, the French next, the English and Americans next, the Italians, Germans, Austrians, and others coming last. The differentiation between nations was comprehensible enough, in view of the political situation in Europe, but differentiations between different papers of equal standing of the same country cannot be defended. As I ended the campaign one of the three favoured English correspondents, I speak on this point without bitterness. Indeed, I found no valid grounds for abusing the censorship until just as I was leaving Sofia, when I found that some of my messages from Kirk Kilisse to the Morning Post had been seriously (and, it would seem, deliberately) mutilated after they had passed the censor. They were of some importance as sent—one the first account from the Bulgarian side of the battle of Chatalja, the other a frank statement of the position following that battle, which I did not submit to the censor until after close consultation with high authority, and which was passed then with some modifications, and, after being passed, was mutilated until it had little or no meaning.

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SOFIA

Commercial Road from Commercial Square

In lighter vein I may record some of the humours of the censorship, mostly from Mustapha Pasha, where the Second Army was held up and everybody was in the worst of tempers. Mustapha Pasha would not allow ox wagons to be mentioned, would not allow photographs of reservists to be sent forward because they were not in full uniform, would not allow the fact that Serbian troops were before Adrianople to be recorded. Indeed, the censorship there was full of strange prohibitions. Going down to Mustapha Pasha I noticed aeroplane equipment. The censor objected to that being recorded then, though two days after the official bulletin trumpeted the fact.

At Mustapha Pasha the custom was after the war correspondent had written a despatch to bring it to the censor, who held his court in a room surrounded by a crowd of correspondents. The censor insisted that the correspondent should read the despatch aloud to him. Then the censor read it over again aloud to him to make sure that all heard. Thus we all learned how the other man's imagination was working, and telegraphing was reduced to a complete farce. Private letters had to pass through the same ordeal, and one correspondent, with a turn of humour, wrote an imaginary private letter full of the most fervent love messages, which was read out to a furiously blushing censor and to a batch of journalists, who at first did not see the joke and tried to look as if they were not listening. I have described the early days of Mustapha Pasha. Later, when most of the men had gone away, conditions improved.

The "second censorship"—the most disingenuous and condemnable part of the Bulgarian system—was applied with full force to Mustapha Pasha. After correspondents, who were forbidden to go a mile out of the town and forbidden to talk with soldiers, had passed their pitiful little messages through the censor, those messages were not telegraphed, but posted on to the Staff headquarters and then censored again, sometimes stopped. Certes, the treasures of strategical observation and vivid description thus lost were not very great, but the whole proceeding was unfair and underhand. The censor's seal once affixed a message should go unchanged. Otherwise it might be twisted into actual false information.

In almost all cases the individual censors were gentlemen, and personally I never had trouble with any of them; but the system was faulty at the outset, inasmuch as it was not frank, and was made worse when it became necessary to change the plan of campaign and abandon the idea of capturing Adrianople. Then the Press correspondents who had been allowed down to Mustapha Pasha in the expectation that after two days they would be permitted to follow the victorious army into Adrianople, had to be kept in that town, and had to be prevented from knowing anything of what was going on. The courageous course would have been to have put them under a definite embargo for a period. That was not followed, and the same end was sought by a series of irritating tricks and evasions. The facts argue against the continuance of the war correspondent. An army really can never be sure of its victory until the battle is over. If it allows the journalists to come forward to see an expected victory and the victory does not come, then awkward facts are necessarily disclosed, and the moving back of those correspondents is tantamount to a confession of a movement of retreat. If I were a general in the field I should allow no war correspondents with the troops except reliable men, who would agree to see the war out, to send no despatches until the conclusion of an operation, and to observe any interdiction which might be necessary then. Under these circumstances there would be very few correspondents, but there would be no deceit and no ill-feeling.

The holding up of practically all private telegraphic messages by the authorities at the front was a real grievance. It was impossible to communicate with one's office to get instructions. One correspondent, arriving at Sofia at the end of the campaign, found that he had been recalled a full month before. The unnecessary mystery about the locality of Staff headquarters added to the difficulty of keeping in touch with one's office.

The Bulgarian people made some "bad friends" on the Press because of the censorship; but the sore feeling was not always justifiable. The worst that can be said is that the military authorities did in rather a weak and disingenuous way what they should have had the moral courage to do in a firm way at the outset. The Bulgarian enterprise against the Turks was so audacious, the need of secrecy in regard to equipment was so pressing, that there was no place for the journalist. Under the circumstances a nation with more experience of affairs and more confidence in herself would have accredited no correspondents. Bulgaria sought the same end as that which would have served secrecy by an evasive way. Englishmen, with centuries of greatness to give moral courage, may not complain too harshly when the circumstances of this new-come nation are considered.

When the army of Press correspondents were gathered, it was seen that there were several Austrians and Roumanians, and these countries were at the time threatening mobilisation against the Balkan States. It was impossible to expect that the Bulgarian forces should allow Roumanian journalists and Austrian journalists to see anything of their operations which might be useful to Austria or Roumania in a future campaign. Yet it would not have been proper to have allowed correspondents other than the Austrians and Roumanians to go to the front, because that would perhaps have created a diplomatic question, which would have increased the tension. It certainly would have given offence to Austria and to Roumania. It would have been said that there was an idea that war was intended against those nations; and diplomacy was anxious to avoid giving expression to any such idea. The military attachés were in exactly the same position.

There were the Austrian attaché and the Roumanian attaché, and their duty was to report to their Governments all they could find out that would be to the advantage of the military forces of their Governments. The Bulgarians naturally would not allow the Roumanian nor the Austrian attaché to see anything of what went on. The attachés were even worse treated than the correspondents, because, as the campaign developed, the Bulgarians got to understand that some of us were trustworthy, and we were given certain facilities for seeing. But we were still without facilities for the despatch of what we had seen. But the military attachés were kept right in the rear all the time. They were taken over the battle-fields after the battles had been fought, so that they might see what victories had been gained by the Bulgarians.

The Bulgarians were much strengthened in their attitude towards the war correspondents by the fact that they admitted receiving much help in their operations from the news published in London and in French newspapers from the Turkish side. The Turkish army, when the period of rout began, was in the position that it was able to exercise little check on its war correspondents; and the Bulgarians had everything which was recorded as being done in the Turkish army sent on to them. They said it was a great help to them. I think the outlook for war correspondents in the future is a gloomy one, and the outlook for the military attaché also. In the future, no army carrying on anything except minor operations with savage nations, no army whose interests might be vitally affected by information leaking out, is likely to allow military attachés or war correspondents to see anything at all.

The Balkan War probably will close the book of the war correspondent. It was in the wars of the "Near East" that that book was first opened in the modern sense. Some of the greatest achievements of the craft were in the Crimean War, the various Turco-Russian wars, and the Greco-Turkish struggle. It is an incidental proof of the popularity of the Balkan Peninsula as a war theatre that the history of the profession of the war correspondent would be a record almost wholly of wars in the Near East.

Certainly if the "war correspondent" is to survive he will need to be of a new type. I came to that conclusion when I returned to Kirk Kilisse from the Bulgarian lines at Chatalja, and had amused myself in an odd hour with burrowing among a great pile of newspapers in the censor's office, and reading here and there the war news from English, French, and Belgian papers.

Dazed, dismayed, I recognised that I had altogether mistaken the duties of a war correspondent. For some six weeks I had been following an army in breathless anxious chase of facts: wheedling censors to get some few of those facts into a telegraph office; learning then, perhaps, that the custom at that particular telegraph office was to forward telegrams to Sofia, a ten days' journey, by bullock wagon and railway, to give them time to mature. Now here, piping hot, were the stories of the war. There was the touching prose poem about King Ferdinand following his troops to the front in a military train, which was his temporary palace. One part of the carriage, serving as his bed-chamber, was taken up with a portrait of his mother, and to that picture he looked ever for encouragement, for advice, for praise. Had there been that day a "Te Deum" for a great victory? He looked at the picture and added, "Te Matrem."

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BUCHAREST

The Roumanian House of Representatives

It was a beautiful story, and why should any one let loose a brutal bulldog of a fact and point out that King Ferdinand during the campaign lived in temporary palaces at Stara Zagora and Kirk Kilisse, and when he travelled on a visit to some point near the front it was usually by motor-car?

In a paper of another nationality there was a vivid story of the battle of Chatalja. This story started the battle seven days too soon; had the positions and the armies all wrong; the result all wrong; and the picturesque details were in harmony. But for the purposes of the public it was a very good story of a battle. Those men who, after great hardships, were enabled to see the actual battle found that the poor messages which the censor permitted them to send took ten days or more in transmission to London. Why have taken all the trouble and expense of going to the front? Buda-Pest, on the way there, is a lovely city; Bucharest also; and charming Vienna was not at all too far away if you had a good staff map and a lively military imagination.

In yet another paper there was a vivid picture—scenery, date, Greenwich time, and all to give an air of artistic verisimilitude—of the signing of the Peace armistice. The armistice had not been signed at the time, was not signed for some days after. But it would have been absurd to have waited, since "our special correspondent" had seen it all in advance, right down to the embrace of the Turkish delegate and the Bulgarian delegate, and knew that some of the conditions were that the Turkish commissariat was to feed the Bulgarian troops at Chatalja and the Bulgarian commissariat the Turkish troops in Adrianople. If his paper had waited for the truth that most charming story would never have seen the light.

So, in a little book I shall one day bring out in the "Attractive Occupations" series on "How to be a War Correspondent," I shall give this general advice:

1. Before operations begin, visit the army to which you are accredited, and take notes of the general appearance of officers and men. Also learn a few military phrases of their language. Ascertain all possible particulars of a personal character concerning the generals and chief officers.

2. Return then to a base outside the country. It must have good telegraph communication with your newspaper. For the rest you may decide its locality by the quality of the wine, or the beer, or the cooking.

3. Secure a set of good maps of the scene of operations. It will be handy also to have any books which have been published describing campaigns over the same terrain.

4. Keep in touch with the official bulletins issued by the military authorities from the scene of operations. But be on guard not to become enslaved by them. If, for instance, you wait for official notices of battles, you will be much hampered in your picturesque work. Fight battles when they ought to be fought and how they ought to be fought. The story's the thing.

5. A little sprinkling of personal experience is wise: for example, a bivouac on the battle-field, toasting your bacon at a fire made of a broken-down gun carriage with a bayonet taken from a dead soldier. Mention the nationality of the bacon. You cannot be too precise in details.

Ko-Ko's account of the execution of Nankipoo is, in short, the model for the future war correspondent. The other sort of war correspondent, who patiently studied and recorded operations, seems to be doomed. In the nature of things it must be so. The more competent and the more accurate he is, the greater the danger he is to the army which he accompanies. His despatches, published in his newspaper and telegraphed promptly to the other side, give to them at a cheap cost that information of what is going on behind their enemy's screen of scouts which is so vital to tactical, and sometimes to strategical, dispositions. To try to obtain that information an army pours out much blood and treasure; to guard that information an army will consume a full third of its energies in an elaborate system of mystification. A modern army must either banish the war correspondent altogether or subject him to such restrictions of censorship as to veto honest, accurate, and prompt criticism or record of operations.

Some of the correspondents—one in particular—overcame a secretive military system and a harsh censorship by the use of a skilled imagination, and of a friendly telegraph line outside the area of censorship. At the Staff headquarters at Stara Zagora during the early days of the campaign, when we were all straining at the leash to get to the front, waiting and fussing, he was working, reconstructing the operations with maps and a fine imagination, and never allowing his paper to want for news. I think that he was quite prepared to have taken pupils for his new school of war correspondents. Often he would come to me for a yarn—in halting French on both sides—and would explain the campaign as it was being carried on. One eloquent gesture he habitually had—a sweeping motion which brought his arms together as though they were gathering up a bundle of spears, then the hands would meet in an expressive squeeze. "It is that," he said, "it is Napoleonic."

Probably the censor at this stage did not interfere much with his activities, content enough to allow fanciful descriptions of Napoleonic strategy to go to the outer world. But, in my experience, facts, if one ascertained something independently, were not treated kindly.

"Why not?" I asked the censor vexedly about one message he had stopped. "It is true."

"Yes, that is the trouble," he said,—the nearest approach to a joke I ever got out of a Bulgarian, for they are a sober, God-fearing, and humour-fearing race.

The idea of the Bulgarian censorship in regard to the privileges and duties of the war correspondent was further illustrated to me on another occasion when a harmless map of a past phase of the campaign was stopped.

"Then what am I to send?" I asked.

"There are the bulletins," he said.

"Yes, the bulletins which are just your bald official account of week-old happenings which are sent to every news agency in Europe before we see them!"

"But you are a war correspondent. You can add to them in your own language."

Remembering that conversation, I suspect that at first the Bulgarian censorship did not object to fairy tales passing over the wires, though the way was blocked for exact observation. An enterprising story-maker had not very serious difficulties at the outset. Afterwards there was a change, and even the writer of fairy stories had to work outside the range of the censor.

The Mustapha Pasha censorship would not allow ox wagons, reservists, or Serbians to be mentioned, nor officers' names. The censorship objected, too, for a long time to any mention of the all-pervading mud which was the chief item of interest in the town's life. Yet you might have lost an army division in some of the puddles. (But stop, I am lapsing into the picturesque ways of the new school of correspondents. Actually you could not have lost more than a regiment in the largest mud puddle.)

Let the position be frankly faced that if one is with an army in modern warfare, common sense prohibits the authorities from allowing you to see anything, and suggests the further precautions of a strict censorship and a general hold-up of wires until their military value (and therefore their "news" value) has passed. If your paper wants picturesque stories hot off the grill it is much better not to be with the army (which means in effect in the rear of the army), but to write about its deeds from outside the radius of the censorship.

Perhaps, though, your paper has old-fashioned prejudices in favour of veracity, and will be annoyed if your imagination leads you too palpably astray? In that case do not venture to be a war correspondent at all. If you do not invent, you will send nothing of value. If you invent you will be reprimanded.

Here is my personal record of "getting to the front" and the net result of the trouble and the expense. I went down to Mustapha Pasha with the great body of war correspondents and soon recognised that there was no hope of useful work there. The attacking army was at a stand-still, and a long, wearisome siege—its operations strictly guarded from inspection—was in prospect. I decided to get back to Staff headquarters (then at Stara Zagora) and just managed to catch the Staff before it moved on to Kirk Kilisse. By threatening to return to London at once I got a promise of leave to join the Third Army and to "see some fighting."

The promise anticipated the actual granting of leave by two days. It would be tedious to record all the little and big difficulties that were then encountered through the reluctance of the military authorities to allow one to get transport or help of any kind. But four days later I was marching out of Mustapha Pasha on the way to Kirk Kilisse by way of Adrianople, a bullock wagon carrying my baggage, an interpreter trundling my bicycle, I riding a small pony. The interpreter was gloomy and disinclined to face the hardships and dangers (mostly fancied) of the journey. Beside the driver (a Macedonian) marched a soldier with fixed bayonet. Persuasion was necessary to force the driver to undertake the journey and a friendly transport officer had, with more or less legality, put at my command this means of argument. A mile outside Mustapha Pasha the soldier turned back and I was left to coax my unwilling helpers on a four days' journey across a war-stricken countryside, swept of all supplies, infested with savage dogs (fortunately well-fed by the harvest of the battle-fields), liable to ravage by roving bands.

GENERAL SAVOFF

That night I gave the Macedonian driver some jam and some meat to eke out his bread and cheese.

"That is better than having a bayonet poked into your inside," I said, by pantomime. He understood, grinned, and gave no great trouble thereafter, though he was always in a state of pitiable funk when I left the wagon to take a trip within the lines of the besieging forces.

So to Kirk Kilisse. There I got to General Savoff himself and won not only leave, but a letter of aid to go down to the Third Army at the lines of Chatalja. But by then what must be the final battle of the war was imminent. Every hour of delay was dangerous. To go by cart meant a journey of several days. A military train was available part of the way if I were content to drop interpreter, horse, and baggage, and travel with a soldier's load.

That decision was easy enough at the moment—though I sometimes regretted it afterwards when the only pair of riding breeches I had with me gave out at the knees and I had to walk the earth ragged—and by train I got to Chorlu. There a friendly artillery officer helped me to get a cart (springless) and two fast horses. He insisted also on giving me a patrol, a single Bulgarian soldier, with 200 rounds of ammunition, as Bashi-Bazouks were ranging the country.

It was an unnecessary precaution, though the presence of the soldier was comforting as we entered Silviri at night, the outskirts of the town deserted, the chattering of the driver's teeth audible over the clamour of the cart, the gutted houses ideal refuges for prowling bands. From Silviri to Chatalja there was again no appearance of Bashi-Bazouks. But thought of another danger obtruded as we came near the lines and encountered men from the Bulgarian army suffering from the choleraic dysentery which had then begun its ravages. To one dying soldier by the roadside I gave brandy; and then had to leave him with his mates, who were trying to get him to a hospital. They were sorely puzzled by his cries, his pitiful grimaces. Wounds they knew and the pain of them they despised. They could not comprehend this disease which took away all the manhood of a stoic peasant and made him weak in spirit as an ailing child.

From Chatalja, the right flank of the Bulgarian position, I passed along the front to Ermenikioi ("the village of Armenians"), passing the night at Arjenli, near the centre and the headquarters of the ammunition park. That night at Arjenli seemed to make a rough and sometimes perilous journey, which had extended over seven days, worth while. The Commander, an artillery officer, welcomed me to a little mess which the Bulgarian officers and non-commissioned officers (six in all) had set up in a clean room of a village house. We had dinner, "Turkish fashion," squatting round a dish of stewed goat and rice, and then smoked excellent cigarettes through the evening hours as we looked out on the Chatalja lines.

Arjenli is perched on a high hill, to the west of Ermenikioi. It gave a view of all the Chatalja position—the range of hills stretching from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmora, along which the Bulgarians were entrenched, and, beyond the invisible valley, the second range which held the Turkish defence. Over the Turkish lines, like a standard, shone in the clear sky a crescent moon, within its tip a bright star. It seemed an omen, an omen of good to the Turks. My Australian eye instinctively sought for the Southern Cross ranged against it in the sky in sign that the Christian standard held the Heavens too. I sought in vain in those northern latitudes, shivered a little and, as though arguing against a superstitious thought, said to myself: "But there is the Great Bear."

Now there had been "good copy" in the journey. At Arjenli I happened to be the witness of a vivid dramatic scene (more stirring than any battle incident). It was a splendid incident, showing the high courage and moral of these peasant soldiers at an anxious time. To have witnessed it, participated in it, was personal reward sufficient for a week of toil and anxiety. To my paper, too, the reader might say, it was of some value, if properly told and given to the London reader the next morning, the day before the battle of Chatalja.

Yes. But it was the next afternoon before I could get to a telegraph office within the Bulgarian lines. Then the censor said any long message was hopeless. I was allowed to send a bare 100 words. They reached London eight days later, a week after the battle had been fought, when London was interested no longer in anything but the armistice negotiations. The reason was that the single telegraph line was monopolised for military business. My account of the battle of Chatalja reached London a full fortnight after the event, though I had the advantage of the highest influence to expedite the message.

Thus from a daily-newspaper point of view all the expense, toil, danger were wasted.

Summing up, an accurate and prompt Press service as war correspondent with the Bulgarian army was impossible, because—

1. The Bulgarian authorities were keen that correspondents should see nothing.

2. A rigid first censorship checked a full record of what little was seen.