M. Joseph Reinach, who was first introduced to Ferdinand by King Edward VII, and who maintained a correspondence with him, has declared that when the time comes for the final publication of the documents relative to the Bulgarian treachery, they will furnish an example of disloyalty and treachery unexampled in the records of the chancellery.
“I am very sure,” adds this authority, “that if the Russians, instead of being conquered in Poland and Galicia, had won, the Czar of the Bulgarians would have treated with the Triple Alliance instead of betraying his past and his honour in selling his armies to the Germans.”
“Russia was trusting, and I myself was deceived into believing with Shakespeare, that there is no such thing as an utterly bad man. The Serbians have a proverb which explains Russia’s blind faith in the Shoddy Czar. ‘A woman who has wet-nursed a calf loves it like her own child.’ So Russia loved Bulgaria, a circumstance which makes Bulgaria’s crime more detestable still.”
FERDINAND THE HUN
“There is nothing I detest as much as a German.”—The Princess Clementine.
CHAPTER XVIII
FERDINAND THE HUN
When Ferdinand first rode through the streets of Sofia in a carriage, wearing the uniform of a Bulgarian general, there was an ominous murmur in the Bulgarian crowd that rose and swelled to a hoarse cry of “Schwaba.” It was as if a French crowd had cried “Boche” or an English mob had roared “Hun.” Austrian rank and French pretence did not blind the Bulgarians at the very outset; they knew they had to do with one of the detested Schwaba, a Hun of the Huns.
Do what he might, Ferdinand could not lift the reproach among the race he chooses to call his adopted people. To them, now as ever, he is the Hun. In normal times they turn away their heads as the Schwaba drives by; when he has done anything special to annoy them they gather under his palace windows and yell, “Down with the modern Nero.” No wonder Ferdinand prefers to spend the major portion of his time in the country at Euxinograd, or on the Coburg-Cohen estates in Hungary, where, as the Count of Murany, he is fond of assuring his visitors that he is now in his “second Fatherland.”