Four able and far-seeing men I have met in the Balkans: M. Nikolitch, President of the Serbian Parliament; General Demetrieff, Commander of the Third Army (which won the most notable Bulgarian victories), now commanding a Russian army; M. Venizuelos, Prime Minister of Greece; M. Take Jonescu, of the Roumanian Cabinet. All men of power, none seemingly has sufficient strength to impose his will not alone on his own country, but on the other Balkan States, and weld them into a Confederation which would be held together by a sense of common interests and common dangers.
King Ferdinand of Bulgaria has kept for years the centre of the Balkan stage to the European onlooker; and is still a great enough figure to give pause to those Bulgarian Nationalists who would exact from him reprisal for the terrible misfortunes of their country. But he is a man of audacity rather than of courage, and his ambition has been always more personal than national—to be Czar of the Balkans rather than to be the maker of a Balkan nation. Gifted with a great deal of diplomatic ability and with a soaring imagination, King Ferdinand has a serious obstacle in his personal timidity. To play a gambler's game one must be prepared at times to take the great risk. But King Ferdinand has many fears. He fears, for instance, infectious diseases morbidly, and the thought of a germ in the track could turn him from the highest of enterprises. Perhaps it was the fear of disease rather than of wounds that kept him so much in the rear of his army during the 1912 campaign against Turkey. But whatever the cause, his absence from the front showed a serious weakness of character in a man who aspired to carve out an empire for himself. The Bulgarian authorities, deceiving the Press almost as assiduously for the purpose as for the false representation that all the destruction of the Turkish forces was ascribable to the Bulgarian arms, gave to Europe inspiriting pictures of His Majesty following close on the heels of his soldiers in a military train which served him as a palace. The fact was that the ambitious but timid king kept very well to the rear, at Stara Zagora first and afterwards at Kirk Kilisse, with a great entourage of secret police. And when armistice negotiations were in progress he kept separate from his Cabinet as well as from his army. Affable in manner, industrious, pertinacious, well aware of the advantage of advertisement (my first meeting with His Majesty was due to the fact that he mistook my map case for a camera, and sent for me to photograph him while he stood on the bridge over the Maritza at Mustapha Pasha), of high ability, King Ferdinand did great things for his adopted country, but showed a fatal weakness of character when he had drunk deep of the wine of success. It is the fashion to blame him wholly now for the wild attack on Serbia and Greece. He may have been in part the victim of his advisers' folly in that. But without much doubt he could have vetoed the fatal move, if he had known his army from personal observation, if he had been down to the lines at Chatalja, and had looked closely into the besieging forces around Adrianople. Common sense would have told him that the attack on his allies was hopeless, if strength of character had not told him that it was wicked. But he neither knew the facts nor understood the ethics of the position.
General Demetrieff, Commander of the Third Bulgarian Army, the victor of Kirk Kilisse and of Lule Burgas, the reluctant attacker at Chatalja, impressed me as a man of fine character. For some few days I was a member of the officers' mess at Erminekioi, which was the headquarters of the Staff before the lines of Chatalja, and had the chance of seeing much of the general. He struck one as a frank, courageous man. He answered questions truthfully or not at all, and was notably kind to the very small group of correspondents who had got through to the front. His personal staff worshipped him, and told with pride that most of the staff work with him on the battle-field was under fire. When it was clear that the attack at Chatalja had failed, General Demetrieff neither attempted to tell falsehoods nor shut himself off from visitors. He ascribed the cessation of the attack to the outbreak of cholera in the Bulgarian lines (and the statement was probably in his mind not only the truth but all the truth: in any case one could not expect him to disclose the shortage of big gun ammunition): was avowedly disconsolate but not in the least discouraged. I cannot imagine General Demetrieff having any hand in the making of the second Balkan war against the Serbians and Greeks, and think that the Bulgarians had in him a man of honesty and courage as well as of great military skill. No other general of the Bulgarian Army impressed me in the same way, certainly not General Savoff.
Of the Bulgarian politicians, M. Gueshoff, Prime Minister at the outbreak of the first war, and M. Daneff, chief Bulgarian delegate at the Peace Conference and Prime Minister at the outbreak of the second war, had the chief parts in the glories and tragedies of 1912-13. M. Gueshoff seemed a well-meaning but weak man. He was fond of insisting upon his English education and of advancing that as a proof of his complete candour. I imagine that he played no directing part in the drama of his country's sudden rise to power and more sudden fall, but did just as his king directed, sometimes probably under protest. M. Daneff was a more virile man, and his force of character, with little guidance from experience, of liberal education, or from wise purpose, had much to do with the downfall of Bulgaria. Of the Balkan Peace Conference which met first in London in December 1912, M. Daneff attempted from the outset to be dictator. He never lost a chance of being rude to an opponent or fulsome to a supporter. He diplomatised by pronunciamento and made a vigorous use of the minor newspaper Press with the idea of overawing the chancelleries of Europe. I am sure that the British Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had nearly as much amusement as chagrin from the incidents of the Conference. Just when the Turkish delegates were being gently coaxed up to drink the hemlock, Bulgaria would publicly dance a wild triumph of joy, and announce that the very last drop had to be absorbed or Bulgaria would not be satisfied. When the Turkish delegates were thus startled away and all the pressure of European diplomacy was being brought to bear upon the Turkish Government to bring them back to the point, Bulgaria threatened publicly to break up the Conference and resume the war. Europe was given a short time-limit in which to act.
M. Venizuelos, Prime Minister of Greece, has proved in his own country a great capacity for good government and wise diplomacy. There was a strong movement made at the outset of the Balkan Peace Conference to have him appointed head of the Balkan delegation. Success in that would have made the chances of peace better; and probably he had an expectation of being chosen as being the senior in official rank of all those present. But the jealousy and distrust of Greece was great: and M. Venizuelos did not prove himself the man of genius who could overcome the handicap which his nationality imposed. True, the task was almost impossible. But still nearer to the impossible would it be now to unite again the warring factions in the Balkans. M. Venizuelos, of the highest talent though he be, will not be the maker of a Balkan Confederation.
M. Nikolitch, President of the Serbian Parliament, is an amiable and clever man with far more culture than is usual in the Balkans. He has translated English classics into the Serbian tongue, and is an industrious student of social and political philosophy. But he has nothing of the brute force that is needed to control the warring passions of the Balkan States. As the Minister of a Balkan Union to a great Power he would be admirable, for he has tact and wit, and a knowledge of the value of truth. When it was made plain that Austria was to have her way and Serbia no territory on the Adriatic, the disappointment of Serbia was bitter: and there was some special blame of Great Britain that she "had not considered her obvious interests," and brought this friendly little state to the sea. M. Nikolitch had the diplomat's faculty of taking a defeat smilingly. "The most unhappy thing about it," he said to me, "is that now Serbia will not have England on her frontier." It was a neat touch to speak of the sea as British territory.
There remains to be considered M. Take Jonescu, who is credited with the chief share in the unscrupulous diplomacy which has made Roumania for the while paramount in the Balkans. It was certainly a masterpiece of Machiavellianism, applying the tenets of "The Prince" with cold precision, and marks its author as the master mind of the Balkans to-day. Give such a man a good soldier people to follow him and an honest purpose, and a Balkan Confederation might be achieved, with some further blood-letting perhaps. But it is not possible to believe that the Roumanians, frivolous, pleasure-loving, untenacious, could impose their will for long upon the coarser-fibred but more virile Slavs of the Peninsula.
No, there is not a personality in the Balkans to-day at once forceful enough, honest enough, and skilful enough to give the Peninsula a union which would enable it by means of a bold decision now to ensure internal peace and freedom from outside interference. A great man could build up a greater Switzerland, perhaps, of the Slavs, the Greeks, and the Roumanians in the Balkan Peninsula with Great Britain, Russia, and France as joint sponsors for the freedom of the new Federation. But one hardly dares to hope for such a happy ending to the long miserable story of the Balkans.