The Allies did not negotiate upon these lines. They invited the Greeks to send practically the whole of their army to reinforce the Serbs; in return, they undertook to protect Greek communications with Salonika, by occupying the “non-contested” zone in Macedonia with Allied troops. In all my travels in the Balkan peninsula, I had never come across a region to which the description “non-contested” could be applied with any accuracy; in London and Paris it was visualized by a miracle of self-deception, and acted like a charm. Here was the solution of the Balkan question, an Allied force, immobilized in this mysterious zone, would hold the Bulgarians in check, encourage the Serbs and reassure the Greeks; Rumania would see what efforts we were making and hurry to our aid; the Turks, trembling for Adrianople, would make a separate peace.
For the moment the Greek Government was unable to entertain the proposed arrangement; King Constantine and the Greek General Staff rejected the suggested plan of operations and put forward another of their own, which envisaged a second campaign against Turkey and opened up alluring prospects further East. Temporarily, the negotiations failed to secure either the co-operation of the Greek Army or a more benevolent neutrality on the part of Greece. The political situation in Athens became more and more confused. Allied diplomacy paid assiduous court to M. Venizelos and, thereby, excited the jealousy and mistrust of the King. Telegrams from an Imperial War Lord addressed to “Tino” flattered the monarch’s vanity as a strategist, he laughed, with some reason, at our tactics, and grew convinced we could not win the war.
Sofia presented a very different aspect from Athens. In the Bulgarian capital there was little bustle in the streets, political excitement was not apparent, the inhabitants went about their business quietly and, in the case of most of them, that business was military in its nature. Bulgaria, though unwilling to commit herself permanently, still nursed her wrongs; to obtain redress for these was the object of the entire people, and no neutral State was better prepared for war.
The alliance of Bulgaria was on the market, obtainable by either set of belligerents at a price; that price was the territory in Thrace and Macedonia, of which Bulgaria considered she had been wrongfully deprived by the Treaty of Bucharest. If the Allies could have satisfied the Bulgarian Government on this point, the Bulgarian Army would have been employed with the same soulless ferocity against the Turks as, in the end, it displayed against the Serbs.
The situation was clearly defined, and the rôle of diplomacy limited to the manipulation of cross-currents of popular feeling and personal sympathies, which, in Bulgaria as in every other State, divided opinion among several political camps. Unfortunately for the Allies, neither the British nor the French representative in Sofia had the requisite qualifications for making verbiage about a “non-contested” zone pass for a definite policy in the Balkans. The British Minister was—rightly or wrongly—credited with Servian sympathies, the French Minister was not a “persona grata” with King Ferdinand, whose favour was all-important in a diplomatic sense. There does not appear to have been any reason for the retention of either of these officials in their posts, except the habitual unwillingness of government departments to disturb routine. The difficulty of finding substitutes did not arise in either case. Our Foreign Office had at its disposal a brilliant young diplomatist, with a unique experience of Balkan capitals, who could have rendered more useful services as Minister in Sofia than as Counsellor of Embassy in Washington; a well-selected French aristocrat would have received a cordial welcome from a Prince of the Orleans family, who himself controlled Bulgaria’s foreign policy, and whose “spiritual home” was France. The foregoing were some of the imponderable factors in Bulgaria; in 1914 they could have been turned to good account, in 1915 it was perhaps too late.
In time of war, a diplomatic duel is like a game of cards in which victories are trumps; no amount of diplomatic skill can convert defeat into success. During the spring and summer of 1915, our Diplomats in the Balkans fought an unequal fight. The conviction that a stalemate existed on the front in France and Flanders was daily gaining ground, public attention was concentrated on the Dardanelles, and here the operations were followed with an interest as critical as it was intelligent. During the war against Turkey, the topographical features in this theatre had been closely studied by the Bulgarian General Staff, when a portion of the Bulgarian Army had penetrated into Turkish Thrace as far as the lines of Bulair. To these men our tactics became daily more incomprehensible. At first, the assaults on the Western extremity of the Gallipoli Peninsula were taken to be feints, intended to cover a landing in the neighbourhood of Enos, but, when it was realized that these were the major operations, when thousands of lives were sacrificed for the capture of a few bare and waterless cliffs, their bewilderment became intensified, and into all their minds there crept a doubt. General Fitcheff, the Chief of Staff and a man whose English sympathies were widely known, ran considerable risks by giving his expert advice in regard to a landing on the coast near Enos; he was no arm-chair critic but a practical soldier with recent and personal experience of battlefields in Thrace. His views were identical with those of the King of Greece and, indeed, of the vast majority of soldiers in the Balkans. They were rejected or ignored; a pseudo-omniscient optimism pervaded Allied counsels and acted like a blight.
Our friends in Bulgaria contemplated the useless slaughter at Gallipoli with horror and dismay, waverers turned to German agents, who took full advantage of every change of mood. An influx of German officers and officials began about this time; they had access to all Government departments, and assumed control of part of the Bulgarian railway system; as one result of their activities Constantinople received supplies of ammunition, whose Bulgarian origin was suspected if not known.
The journey from Sofia to Bucharest lasts less than twenty-four hours, its one noteworthy feature is the abrupt transition from a Slavonic to a Latin race. The Bulgars are reserved and taciturn, strangers are treated coldly, they are not wanted unless they come on business whose utility can be proved. I left Sofia impressed by the efficiency and self-confidence of the people, but chilled by their morose and almost sullen ways. On crossing the Danube a new world was entered, where hearts were warm and life was gay and easy, where every one talked cleverly and much, and where, perhaps, words counted more than deeds.
In the spring of 1915 Bucharest was a diplomatic arena, in which all the Great Powers were making prodigious efforts. Russia had ceased to treat her southern neighbour as a revolted colony; the Central Empires had developed a sudden sympathy for Rumania’s national aspirations, more especially in the direction of Bessarabia; Great Britain had made a loan of £5,000,000, on little or no security, and, as a further proof of disinterested friendship, was buying a large proportion of the output of the oilfields, regardless of the impossibility of either using or exporting this more than ever precious product. A golden age had dawned, business men were doing a roaring trade, cereals were being bought at fancy prices and, looming ahead, were brighter prospects still.
I looked for the warlike preparations of which the War Office in London had so confidently spoken. Of officers there appeared to be no dearth, the streets and cafés were crowded with brilliant uniforms, whose wearers sauntered slowly to and fro, bestowing glances on the softer sex which were returned in kind. To seek the favour of the fair has at all times been a martial occupation. A wise man once remarked: “I know not how, but martial men are given to love,” and added some comments on perils, wine and pleasures which seemed to fit this case. But war is not made with officers alone, men are required, men of the people, who have no decorative functions in the piping times of peace. These were lacking, they were neither on the streets nor in the barracks, they were in their homes, producing wealth and not yet bearing arms.