[57] While these pages were going through the press, the peace treaty with Hungary was signed on June 4 at the palace of the Grand Trianon at Versailles.
[58] H. Wickham Steed, Edinburgh Review, vol. 222, p. 234.
VIII
THE BALKANS
It was in the Balkans that the World War started; control of the Balkans was one of the primary objects for which the Central Powers fought; through the intervention of our Balkan opponents, Turkey and Bulgaria, the War was prolonged far beyond what would probably otherwise have been the case; and it was in the Balkans that the victory of the Entente was earliest and, perhaps, most decisively won.
Nevertheless, the War has produced, or is likely to produce, fewer and much less sweeping changes of territory in the Balkans than in the case of Austria-Hungary or Germany. It will probably alter the map of the Peninsula less than did almost any other of the Balkan cataclysms of the last hundred years. That is partly because one of our late enemies, the Sick Man on the Bosporus, had already handed over so much of his estate to his impatient heirs that in Europe at least very little remains to be liquidated; while our other enemy at Sofia possessed very little land that was not Bulgarian in population, and it was not the policy of the Allies to take away territory simply by way of retribution. But the main reason why no very large alterations of frontiers are now in process, is that the most contentious territorial questions of the Peninsula were settled by the two Balkan wars of 1912-13 and the ensuing Peace of Bucharest. Whether they were rightly settled at that time is a topic to which I may revert a little later. At any rate, they were settled in a sense favorable to our allies, Greece, Serbia, and Roumania. And the most salient feature of the Balkan settlement made by the Conference at Paris is that it essentially confirms the settlement made by the Peace of Bucharest.
Bulgaria escapes with far slighter losses than any other member of the defeated alliance. Nevertheless, she is quite as indignant as any of the rest of them over the peace treaty imposed upon her (the treaty signed at Neuilly, November 27, 1919). But she is indignant, not so much over what she has lost, as over what she has failed to gain. There is, of course, not a little irony in the fact that at the close of a war which she entered so perfidiously, conducted so brutally, and ended so disastrously, Bulgaria should still be clamoring that to the vanquished belong the spoils, and should be demanding that the Entente hand over to her, at the expense of its Greek and Serbian allies, the lands which she hoped to gain by fighting throughout the War on the side of the Germans. But there is another way of looking at the matter. Bulgaria and her many friends abroad regard the Peace of Bucharest as a monstrous iniquity—the dismemberment of the Bulgarian nation at the hands of its rapacious neighbors. Therefore, it is argued, at a time when the victorious Allies are remaking the map of Europe on the basis of the principle of nationality and of impartial even-handed justice, it is only right that ‘the crime of 1913’ should be undone, and that Bulgaria should be allowed to attain her national unity, as Greece, Serbia, and Roumania are doing in such rich measure. And unless that is done, it is said, there can be no stable peace in the Balkans.
Since the discussion of the new settlement thus turns largely on the merits of the Peace of Bucharest, it is necessary to revert briefly to the main facts connected with that treaty.
In the First Balkan War (1912-13), the four small allies—Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro—had brought the Turkish giant to earth with an ease and rapidity that astonished the world, and themselves, perhaps, most of all. By the peace treaty signed at London May 30, 1913, all of the Turkish possessions in Europe were ceded to the victors, except for the district along the Straits, bounded by the famous Enos-Midia line, which was to be left to the Sultan, and Albania, which was to be made independent—the one case in history of a people that owes its liberty to Austria-Hungary. As everyone remembers, there then arose a dispute among the victors as to the distribution of the spoils. While negotiations were still going on and the other states were willing to accept the proffered arbitration of Russia, Bulgaria, carried away by a truly Prussian arrogance and recklessness, attempted to seize what she wanted by suddenly and treacherously attacking her late allies. This precipitated the Second Balkan War, in which the despised Greeks and Serbs were completely victorious, while Roumania and Turkey also intervened to complete Bulgaria’s discomfiture. The upshot was the Peace of Bucharest, of August 10, 1913.
By that famous treaty, Macedonia, the chief object of the dispute, was divided up between Serbia and Greece, the former taking the northern and central parts, the latter the southern and southeastern. Bulgaria received only a small fragment of Macedonia—the Strumica salient—together with some territory in Western Thrace, which gave her a narrow frontage on the Aegean and the two mediocre harbors of Porto Lago and Dedeagach. Eastern Thrace, including Adrianople, was restored to Turkey. Finally, Bulgaria had to cede to Roumania the territory called the Southern Dobrudja.
The net result was, in the first place, a great shift in the Balkan balance of power in favor of Greece and Serbia, both of which had formerly been far smaller and weaker than Bulgaria, but both of which, after nearly doubling their territories, had now virtually caught up with their neighbor; and, secondly, that Bulgaria came forth from the crisis mortally exasperated over the loss of her old territory in the Dobrudja and of the new territories she had hoped to gain in Thrace and Macedonia. It is, above all, the Macedonian question that has rankled in her mind ever since. For many decades Macedonia has been the Promised Land to the Bulgars: it has undoubtedly meant for them at least as much as Alsace and Lorraine to the French. Once they had had it in their grasp, in 1878 when Russia won it for them by the treaty of San Stefano—and then the Congress of Berlin restored it to Turkey. Again in 1912 they believed that they had secured it—and it was taken away from them by their allies. A third time they had it, during the present War,—and the Peace Conference has restored it to Greece and Serbia, in accordance with the Peace of Bucharest.