CHAPTER V
A CHAPTER IN BALKAN DIPLOMACY
Watching through many exciting weeks the course of a Balkan Peace Conference, I had the opportunity of seeing another phase of the Near Eastern character in its various sub-divisions—the Turkish, the Grecian, the Roumanian, the Bulgarian, and the Serbian. It was in certain general characteristics the same character with certain points of difference, ranging from almost purely Oriental through various grades until it reached to a phase which was rather more than half European. In various aspects it was naïve, wily, deceitful, vainglorious, truculent, servile, stubborn, supple. At times it was very trying. Usually it was distinctly amusing. There were some exceptions among the Balkan statesmen, but as a rule they were men of very ordinary ability and very extraordinary conceit. Close association with them dissipated for a time the extremely good impression that Bulgarian, Serbian, Grecian, and Roumanian peasants and officials and traders had made on me, meeting them as soldiers or as wayside hosts.
When the Bulgarian progress towards Constantinople was stopped at Chatalja, the Bulgarian authorities favoured negotiations for peace. To this Greece very strenuously, and Serbia more gently, objected. They offered as an alternative suggestion to send aid to the Chatalja lines to help Bulgaria to force things to a conclusion there. But by this time the Balkan Allies were at least as much suspicious of one another as they were hostile to the Turk. The troubles after the fall of Salonica had given a picturesque illustration of the hollowness of the Balkan League. Greece and Bulgaria had raced armies down for the capture of that city, and the Greeks had won in the race by bribing the Turkish commander to surrender to them—the Bulgarians said sourly (an absurd accusation!). Now Bulgarian and Greek were at the point of open war in Salonica, and were doing a little odd killing of one another to keep their hands in practice. Around Adrianople Bulgarian and Serbian were growling at one another, the Bulgarians treating their friends rather badly, so far as I could judge. Both racial sections of the army of siege were inclined to do very little, because each was waiting for the other to begin. Bulgaria, too, was extremely anxious to have no more friendly allied troops in the areas which she had marked out for herself. She was aware that the Greek population of Thrace was agitating for an autonomous Thrace instead of a Bulgarian annexation, and feared that the presence of a Greek army in the province would strengthen this movement.
In the upshot Serbia and Montenegro supported Bulgaria in the signing of an armistice. Greece refused to sign an armistice, but joined in the negotiations for a final peace which opened at the Conference of St. James's, London, in December 1912. This Conference quickly resolved itself into a wonderful acrobatic display of ground and lofty fiction, of strange childish "bluffs," of complicated efforts at mystery which would not deceive a Punch-and-Judy show audience.
In the East and the Near East, the man who wants to buy a horse goes to the market-place in the first instance, and curses publicly all horses and thoughts of horses. He proclaims that he will see his father's tomb defiled before he will ever touch a horse again. Hearing of this, a man who wishes to sell a horse appears in public, and proclaims that the horse he has in his stall is the sun and the moon and the stars of his life: that sooner than part with it he would eat filth and become as a dog. At this stage the negotiations for a bargain are in fair progress. After some days—the East and the Near East is not very thrifty with time—a satisfactory bargain is struck.
The Balkan Peace Conference was carried on very much on those lines. In a London winter atmosphere, among the unimaginative and matter-of-fact London population, the effect was strangely fantastic. In an early stage of the negotiations the Turkish delegates (who were out to gain time in the desperate hope that something would turn up) said one day that they must ask for instructions on some point, about which they were as fully instructed as it was possible to be: said the next sitting day that unfortunately their instructions had not arrived: and the next sitting day that their instructions had arrived but unfortunately they could not decipher some of the words, and must refer to Constantinople again! With all this it was difficult to believe that we lived in a civilised age of telegraphs and newspapers and railway trains. The mind was transported back insensibly to the times of the great Caliph of Bagdad.
Whilst the Turks dallied in the hope that something would turn up, and devoted a painstaking but painfully obvious industry to the task of trying to sow dissensions among the Balkan Allies, these Balkan Allies engaged among themselves in a vigorous Press campaign of mutual abuse and insinuation. The seeds of dissension which the Turk was scattering refused to germinate, because already the field which was sown had a full-grown crop. But the Balkan Allies had one point of elementary common sense. They were resolved to take from the Turk all that was possible before they fell out among themselves as to the division of the spoil. (As it happened, they forgot to take into account the contingency that after the division it would still be within the power of the Turk to seek some revenge if they abandoned their League of Alliance, which alone had made the humiliation of the Turkish Empire possible.)