Such was the double treachery of which Ferdinand was guilty in 1914 and 1915. His treaties with the Teuton Powers appear to have been two. The first was made with Austria in 1913, when he pledged himself to common action against Serbia with that Power; and so, it may be, paved the way to the assassination of the heir-apparent to the Austrian throne. The other was made with Germany in July, 1915, when Ferdinand was guaranteed Thrace, and a strip of Greek territory along the Ægean, including the ports of Kavalla and Salonica.
In April of 1915 the Rumanian Minister at Sofia warned his government that the agreement had been made, and Rumania in its turn warned the Entente Powers. Later Greece warned the Entente of what was going on at least twice. In the face of these warnings, the Entente Powers continued to believe in Ferdinand. The Serbians, who knew his villany, and were certain that he was casting in his lot with their oppressors, wished to take the bull by the horns and attack Bulgaria while its powerful friends were fully occupied with Russia and on the western front. They were restrained by the Entente Powers; otherwise they would have altered the whole course of the war.
I repeat that the Entente must have had better assurance than mere protestations from Ferdinand to have trusted him so implicitly. His reputation and his past career were for any one to read; yet in face of all suspicious circumstances he was trusted. M. Joseph Reinach states that when the documents of the negotiations are published by the Entente Powers they will constitute a record in baseness and treachery. For my own part, I conceive that nothing less than a treaty signed by Ferdinand and his ministers will be brought forward in justification of the latitude that was allowed to him.
The mobilization of the Bulgarian army was finally ordered upon the flimsiest of pretexts, and its concentration upon the Serbian frontier, concurrently with the advance of the German and Austrians upon the doomed kingdom, follows inevitably. The rest is a matter of recent history, still an incomplete chapter in the story of the Great War.
One effect of Ferdinand’s intervention was to unite Constantinople with Berlin, and to make the British evacuation of the peninsula of Gallipoli a necessity. Thus the Czar of Bulgaria was instrumental in striking the hardest blow at the prestige of the British arms that has been inflicted in the memory of living man. He effected it, not by prowess in the field, but by an act of base and shameless treachery, which involved his turning his back upon all the nations which he had extolled as liberating influences, to which Bulgaria owed its very existence. It involved him in an alliance with Turkey, the Power against which he had been for a generation declaiming. But it was a shrewd blow nevertheless, and it will be the fault of Great Britain itself if the punishment for it is not conceived on a similar scale of magnitude.
It must not be supposed that Ferdinand stood alone in Bulgaria in this act of dissimulation and treachery. He acted in connivance with a ministry which represented a very powerful pro-Hun section of Bulgarian opinion. For by this time a large section of Bulgaria, embittered by the reverse of the second Balkan war, had renounced its Slavonic sympathies, and had openly pronounced for the Kultur of the Kaiser and his generals and professors.
KULTUR IN BULGARIA
“A heroic struggle is being played out before us; the healthy and mighty German Kultur is fighting the rotten French Culture which, being sentenced to death, endeavours to induce all the other nations of Europe to join her.”—Dr. Petroff, of the Bulgarian University.