At the end of June, the storm broke. The signature of peace had enabled the Bulgarian Government to concentrate troops in Eastern Macedonia, in close proximity to the Servian army of occupation. The soldiers of the two armies fraternized with one another and, to all appearances, the Bulgars had the friendliest intentions. The first act of war took place before dawn on June 30 when, without warning, the Servian outpost line was attacked and driven in by a numerically superior force of Bulgars. The Serbs recovered themselves speedily, reinforcements were hurried to the front attacked, and a counter-attack was made which drove the Bulgars in confusion from the field. Servian successes had an immediate effect on the Government at Sofia. The treacherous offensive of June 30 was repudiated and ascribed to the personal initiative of General Savoff, one of Bulgaria’s most notorious “men of action” and a favourite of the King. The repudiation came too late. All the other Balkan States combined against Bulgaria, and within three months of the signing of peace in London, Greeks and Serbs were fighting their late ally in Macedonia, while Turks and Rumanians invaded her territory from the east and north.
The Bulgars soon found themselves in a desperate plight; no amount of stubborn valour at Carevoselo[15] could protect Sofia against the Rumanians or save Adrianople from the Turks. By the end of July the Bulgarian Government was forced to sue for an armistice to save the country from utter ruin. The day of reckoning had come for an inexcusable and odious crime.
In the first week of August, the delegates of the Balkan States assembled at Bucharest to negotiate yet another peace. Their task was not an easy one. Public opinion in Servia and Greece was exultant and clamouring for vengeance; in Turkey, Enver Pasha, the saviour of Adrianople, was at the zenith of his fame. From elements such as these a judicial frame of mind was not to be expected; they were blinded by hatred, pent up through decades of jealousy and fear. Enver cherished ambitious dreams, counted on German help, and knew no scruples. The majority of the Greeks and Serbs aimed at reducing Bulgaria to a state of impotence. Had it been possible, they would have exterminated the entire race.
A few courageous voices were raised in protest against a too brutal application of the principle that every country has the government it deserves; they declared it a crime to visit the sins of the rulers on their hapless subjects; they claimed that the Bulgarian people, as distinct from their rulers, had been punished enough already; that Bulgaria had been bled white and had made many sacrifices in a common cause; that she had lost much of her power for evil, and might, if properly handled, lose the will; they pleaded that justice should be tempered with common sense, if not with mercy, and urged that the folly of exasperating millions of virile peasants, and thereby driving them into closer union with the Central Empires, against all their racial instincts, should be foreseen and checked.
The men who dared to speak with the voice of reason were called pro-Bulgars in Greece and Servia; they went to Bucharest, hoping to find a more objective spirit.
Many factors combined to make the Rumanian capital the most suitable meeting-place for the Balkan delegates on this momentous occasion. Rumania had struck the decisive blow without bloodshed; her army was intact and her treasury was not depleted; her territorial claims were inconsiderable and had been submitted to the Great Powers for arbitration; lastly, in her King, Rumania possessed a personage peculiarly fitted to mould and direct, dispassionately, the proceedings of the Conference.
King Charles was a man advanced in years who had served his adopted country both faithfully and well. The Rumanian people felt for him gratitude and respect. At this period they would have followed loyally in any course he chose to take. As head of the elder and Catholic branch of the Hohenzollern family, the King of Rumania was in close touch with the courts of the Central Empires and with King Constantine of Greece.
In short, fate had conferred on this Hohenzollern prince unrivalled authority in his own country, access to powerful channels of persuasion, and in relation to the other Balkan States, forces sufficient to impose his will. He could, had he willed, have been arbiter of the Balkans and might have changed the course of history. In the event, he preferred to stand aside.
History is full of such “might have beens.” Time is a kind of fourth dimension affecting every human action. King Charles’s opportunity occurred when he was old and tired. Made over-cautious by his knowledge of the play of external forces on the Balkan situation, he feared a general conflagration, which might consume his life’s work at a stroke. And so he left ill alone, and hoped to end his days in peace.
Probably the best known of King Charles’s ministers in 1912 was M. Take Jonescu, whose tireless energy in the cultivation of relationships and souvenirs in foreign capitals had earned for him the title of “the Great European.” This title was not undeserved, though applied ironically in nine cases out of ten. M. Take Jonescu had acquired the habit of generalizing from Rumanian affairs so as to make them embrace the whole of the old world and the new; this had enlarged his horizon and given him a vision which at times was startlingly prophetic. He recognized more clearly than any of his countrymen the rôle of Rumania at the Conference and what could and should be done. The restless, versatile man of the people was fascinated by the splendid possibilities of a bold and imaginative Rumanian policy. Not so his colleagues of the Conservative Party; they opposed inertia to ideas, and behind them stood the King. M. Take Jonescu had a lawyer’s training and was no champion of lost causes. This cause was lost indeed while King Charles was on the throne; only a cataclysm could have saved it—a “Cascade des Trônes.”[16] The Rumanian statesman foresaw, and in his vaguely anarchic fashion wished for this consummation, about which he was to write a few years later, but the lawyer threw up his brief and devoted his undoubted talents to bargaining and the conclusion of a Treaty which King Charles himself described as a “drum-head truce.” In the Near East, men have a passion for subtle and tortuous negotiations, which are comprehended in the phrase “un marchandage Balkanique,”[17] which end in compromises, effect no settlement, and serve to postpone the evil day.