document issued while the controversy was in progress showed that, even on the Servian and Greek proposal, Bulgaria would maintain her supremacy in the Alliance. She would still have had 157,000 square kilometres of territory to Servia's 85,000, as against 96,000 and 48,000 before the war. On Bulgaria's proposal, Servia would in proportion have lost heavily, coming off with 75,000 to Bulgaria's 183,000. A wise statesmanship would have found a way out of these difficulties. All that was essential for Servia was that she should have commercial access to the Ægean, now that she was denied it to the Adriatic. From this access she would be hopelessly barred if she were shut in on her southern as well as her eastern border by Bulgaria, and had no chance of free competition and alternative routes. If Bulgaria had faced this one vital point, and the fact that it probably entailed the sacrifice of Monastir, she would have found that there was plenty of territory left to bargain for. Servia did not want war, and would with little doubt have given up her claim to a large slice of Macedonia east of Uskub and Monastir. Bulgaria might perhaps have reconciled herself to the loss of Monastir, if she had had the insight to realise that the proposals made by Greece involved the abandonment of claims to territories as much bound up with the Greek 'idea' as Monastir was with her own. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks were being offered to Bulgaria in Thrace, while she was also to take over the flourishing Greek communities of Kavalla, Drama, and Serres, and control of the rich tobacco industry. 6 It is important in this connexion to recur to the election arrangements made with a view to the Ottoman Parliament by the Greek and Bulgarian communities a year before the war began. These arrangements, as the 'Dnewnik,' the Sofia organ of the Daneff party, assured us at the time, were made on the basis of official statistics and after lengthy deliberations.' For Thrace they allotted one seat to the Bulgarians, and eight to the Greeks. In the vilayet of Uskub (Kossovo) the Bulgarians were to have two seats, the Greeks none-it was Servia, of course, and not Greece, that claimed this district after the war. For the vilayet of Monastir, part of which after the war was in the Servian claim, the Bulgarians were to have two seats, the Greek five. For the vilayet of Salonica, which on the Greek claim after the war was to be fairly evenly divided, the Bulgarians were to have three seats, the Greeks five. How can these figures, arrived at by mutual compromise and for mutual benefit, be explained away? Making all possible allowances for superior Greek skill in electioneering, or the superior influence and riches of the Greek communities, we are left with an ample margin. It remains that, according to the opinion of the Bulgarians of Thrace and Macedonia, they were in a hopeless minority in Thrace, while they were distinctly in a minority in that part of Southern and Eastern Macedonia which had ex hypothesi to be divided between them and the Greeks. It was a real sacrifice that Venizélos was thus willing to make for the sake of peace and the maintenance of the Balkan League; but it must not be imagined that he carried his point without opposition. It was the crowning proof of his power that he was able to control the indignation that his loyalty to the League aroused. Early in March, 1913, a memorial was sent to the Boulé by the Greeks of Thrace and Eastern Macedonia; on the 14th it was submitted to the Chamber; and on the 15th two deputies raised the question of the Government's policy. The whole force of the Opposition, backed by an unusual body of public opinion outside, clamoured against the Prime Minister. Are such,' said Theotókis with bitter irony, 'the declarations of the "Liberator of Hellas"?' Venizelos's reply, which was never reported in the English Press, was a remarkable one, and is worth quoting at some length: 'I am aware,' he said, 'that there are those who are trying to stir up trouble among the Greek populations which without question will remain outside the Greater Greece. I want these populations to know from the lips of the responsible head of the Greek Government that those who urge on them such an attitude are the true enemies of their country, the true enemies of Hellenism. In other days-three years ago or more-it would have been difficult perhaps for a Prime Minister to dare to make such unpalatable revelations. But I, gentlemen, who have only been a few years among you, have come to the conclusion that in three years a tremendous change has come over the soul of the Greek people. Every one does not see it; but it is so great that it permits, nay that it compels, the responsible head of the Greek Government to tell the truth to the people. It is natural that difficulties should have arisen as to the division of the conquered territory. One knows how strong national exclusiveness is. Each of the nations that have shared in this struggle for freedom, impelled by the national instinct, tries to obtain as large a share as possible. Each, in good faith, claims to have contributed most to the common cause. But the truth is different. All have contributed to their utmost. Each of the allied nations has concentrated all its resources, moral and material, to win a result which never would otherwise have been won. I have a conviction that the partition of the conquered territory will not be made by the military authorities, who have a limited horizon and look at matters from a merely military point of view, nor by the too fervid patriots of this State or that, but by these States' responsible Governments. . . I hope their patriotism will be so lofty that they will not shrink from such sacrifices as will be inevitable if the partition is to ensure the continuance of the Alliance-even if they are bound to be called traitors by the fervid patriots of their own race.' There may have been statesmen in Bulgaria who were capable of responding to this lofty conception of patriotism, but, if so, they did not carry their people with them, while Venizelos did. The direction of Bulgarian policy passed out of the hands of Gueschoff, the moderate and reasonable promoter of the original alliance, and was left more and more to men like Daneff, who even in the early negotiations that preceded the signing of the Treaty of London had astonished the diplomatic world by his truculent Chauvinism. That Venizelos, on the other hand, maintained his conciliatory attitude to the end, is clear not only from the response he made to those friends of the League in England who strove during May and June to avert hostilities, but from some curious revelations which were made in the Boulé at the end of last November. A subordinate member of the Government, M. Stratós, provoked by what he considered the Premier's high-handed action in asking him to send in his resignation, committed the grave indiscretion of charging him in the Press with having sacrificed Greek interests to maintain the Bulgarian alliance, with having for this object postponed till almost too late the conclusion of a separate agreement with Servia, and with having been thrown into complete despair by the repeated aggressions of the Bulgarians during the month of May in the district of the Panghaeon. Venizelos, in another great speech before the Boulé of Nov. 25, easily disposed of the accusations that he was unprepared or taken at a loss. But he did not deny that, up to the moment when hostilities were definitely begun by Bulgaria, he had done all in his power to keep the League together. To this end he offered Bulgaria Serres, Drama, and Kavalla. The fact that the war had had a favourable issue did not make him ashamed to admit that he had dreaded it. War was after all, prepare as you might, largely a matter of chance. My critics,' he said-and the remark shows the greatness of the man--' forget the misfortunes of the State which for thirty years has held the hegemony in the Balkan Peninsula.' There is now, of course, no doubt that Bulgaria did in fact deliberately begin the second war. At the time, the copies of the orders to advance, captured on the field by the Servian army, and published in facsimile, were repudiated. Even so late as Aug. 30, three Bulgarian Professors, sure of hospitality in the columns. of the 'Nation,' pleaded that the scattered distribution of the Bulgarian forces over a frontier of 600 miles is incompatible with the view that Bulgaria intended or began the war. Facsimiles of orders to advance can be shown on both sides.' The exigencies of domestic politics have long ago swept aside all such pleas. Gennadieff and the Austrian party, the 'Dnewnik,' the organ of the Russophils, the Epoca,' which represents General Savoff, above all Gueschoff's Mir,' in a number so indiscreet that it was suppressed by the authorities, agree in only one item of the counter-accusations which bandy about responsibility for blunders between Ministers and Generals and King; and that is the charge that those orders to advance were genuine, and that Somebody, with a very capital 'S' indeed, issued them.* That Bulgarian statesmanship was incredibly foolish does not * See a summary in the 'Manchester Guardian,' Dec. 1, 1913. The 'Cambana' of Sofia has further published documents implicating, among others, General Ivanoff. In the light of them, his disclaimers in the • Nineteenth Century' (Dec. 1913, p. 1347) lose all value. make it any the less true that it was also treacherous; and the murder of the Servian outposts is an act for which the country must long feel shame. It has been difficult for English opinion to accept these bitter facts. When the second war began, the 'Nation' (July 5) refused to believe in Bulgarian defeats. The reports were attributed to Greek and Servian 'garrulousness'; 'and neither of them has any reputation to lose for accuracy.' It is very hard to get rid of, this 'Mirage Bulgare,' the picture so fondly and pathetically believed in of the wise, silent, practical nation, slow but sure, methodical and massive! How was it possible to believe that it was they who had been immoderate and vainglorious? 6 That A few words about Atrocities.' The second war was bound to be a bitter one. The Bulgarians were maddened by the check they received in what they imagined would be the easiest of 'walk-overs.' The Greeks captured at Strumnitza a heavy silk standard fringed in gold and embroidered with the royal crown. The ladies of Sofia had worked on it the motto 'Forward to Athens.' sort of thing only happens when a nation is secure of victory. The Greeks, on the other hand, had already been inflamed by the accounts they received of the treatment of some of the Greek villages occupied by the Bulgarians on the slopes of Mt Panghaeon. Pillage, murder and rape were alleged to have taken place on a large scale in this district during the month of May; and the phrases the Bulgarian atrocities,' 'Attila and his Huns' appeared in the Greek Press in June, two weeks before the war broke out.* Names and dates are given for many of these accusations; and the Bulgarian military governor of Doiran is quoted as saying to a Greek priest who asked him to restore a school, 'Not a Greek shall remain on Bulgarian territory.' Some of these accusations could very possibly not be substantiated, if we had the complete evidence before us in a court of law. For others, at least that amount of justification could probably be urged, that neighbours who had hated each other for generations regarded each other as in a * See the 'Messager d'Athènes,' June 21, 1913, which also quotes an earlier number of the Akropolis.' |