IV. [Europe in Africa in 1914]
V. [Belgium and the Franco-German Frontier]
VI. [Europe in 1914]
FOREWORD
On a July day in 1908, two American students, who had chosen to spend the first days of their honeymoon in digging the musty pamphleteers of the Ligue out of the Bodleian Library, were walking along the High Street in Oxford, when their attention was arrested by the cry of a newsboy. An ha'penny invested in a London newspaper gave them the news that Niazi bey had taken to the Macedonian highlands, and that a revolution was threatening to overthrow the absolutist régime of Abdul Hamid. The sixteenth century was forgotten in the absorbing and compelling interest of the twentieth.
Two weeks later the students were entering the harbour of Smyrna on a French steamer which was bringing back to constitutional Turkey the Young Turk exiles, including Prince Sabaheddine effendi of the Royal Ottoman House. From that day to this, the path of the two Americans, whose knowledge of history heretofore had been gained only in libraries, has led them through massacres in Asia Minor and Syria, and through mobilizations and wars in Constantinople, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, and Albania, back westward to Austria-Hungary, Italy, and France, following the trail of blood and fire from its origin in the Eastern question to the great European conflagration.
On the forty-fourth anniversary of Sedan, when German aëroplanes were flying over Paris, and the distant thunder of cannon near Meaux could be heard, this book was begun in the Bibliothèque Nationale by one of the students, while the other yielded to the more pressing call of Red Cross work. It is hoped that there is nothing that will offend in what is written here. At this time of tension, of racial rivalry, of mutual recrimination, the writer does not expect that his judgments will pass without protest and criticism. But he claims for them the lack of bias which, under the circumstances, only an American—of this generation at least—dare impute to himself.
The changes that are bringing about a new map of Europe have come within the intimate personal experience of the writer.
If foot-notes are rare, it is because sources are so numerous and so accessible. Much is what the writer saw himself, or heard from actors in the great tragedy, when events were fresh in their memory. The books of the colours, published by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs of the countries interested, have been consulted for the negotiations of diplomats. From day to day through these years, material has been gathered from newspapers, especially the Paris Temps, the London Times, the Vienna Freie Press, the Constantinople Orient, and other journals of the Ottoman capital. The writer has used his own correspondence to the New York Herald, the New York Independent, and the Philadelphia Telegraph. For accuracy of dates, indebtedness is acknowledged to the admirable British Annual Register.