October 10, 1918 
LAND ^ WATER 
The Balkan Situation: By Sir Valentine Chirol 
The Harvest of Hatred 
THE capitulation of Bulgaria, following upon the 
destruction of tlie Turkish armies in Syria, sounds 
the knell of the Kaiser's dreams of world- 
dominion. People in this country, h\'pnotised 
not unnaturally by the awful vicissitudes of the 
four years' struggle in France, which has been and still remains 
the vital theatre of war, have too often failed to grasp or to 
remember that Germany's political objective from the day 
when she decided" to embark on the great adventure has been 
the East, and not the West. France, as the ally of Russia, 
had to be crushed, arid as, contrary to German expectations, 
we too came into the war, Britain had to be castigated 
and her sea-power broken or paralysed. But these were 
only means to an end, and remained so even when, flushed 
with victory and believing that she could hold Belgium and 
Northern France indefinitely in pawn, Germany began to 
bluster loudly about the retention of the Channel ports and 
of some fat slices of- French territory particularly attractive 
from the point of view of industrial development. At the 
worst, the Kaiser always rehed, especially since the Russian 
debacle, upon the* East to redress any adverse balance in the 
West. For the mastery and exploitation of the East had 
been the Kaiser's own life-dream. The first serious differ- 
ence on foreign policy between him and Bismarck arose out 
of the Imperial visit to Constantinople the year" after William's 
accession to the throne. The old Chancellor merely wished 
to strengthen Germany's position in Turkey so that she 
could exercise a ponderating influence and avert the danger 
of a conflict between Russia and Austria-Hungary in the 
Near East, which he dreaded, lest it should force him to 
"break the wire" to Petrograd pr to part cpmpany with 
Vienna. The Kaiser, indoctrinated even as Prince William 
by General von der Goltz.-who was head of the German 
military mission at Constantinople, had vastly greater 
ambitions, which he unfolded to Bismarck in order to make 
him, too, realise that "Turkey must be Germany's bridge- 
head to world-dominion." Bismarck retorted that world- 
dominion was an expression he could not find in his political 
dictionary ; and because he could not find it there, the 
Kaiser dropped the old pilot overboard a few months after- 
wards. 
The Kaiser's Steam-Plough 
Austria-Hungary, on the other hand, was to be the 
Kaiser's steam-plough to break up the ground across the 
Balkan States, for German expansion towards her Turkish 
"bridge-head." The Near East Crisis of 1908, when, in collu- 
sion with Vienna and Beriin, King Ferdinand proclaimed 
the independence of Bulgaria, and Germany, "in shining 
armour," frightened Russia into leaving Serbia in the lurch, 
marked as big a step forward to the appointed goal as had 
the Bagdad Railway concession, which had been the price 
of Germany's acquiescence in the Arrnenian massacres. But 
the Turko-Italian War, in 191 1, proved an embarrassing 
episode, and the extremely disappointing outcome of the 
two Balkan Wars, of which -the first was disastrous for 
Turkey, and the second exalted Serbia and Greece over 
Bulgaria, badly queered the Kaiser's pitch. Serbia, especially, 
once more blocked the road to WiUiam's Turkish "bridge- 
head," and had to be removed at all cost. Hence the Austrian 
ultimatum to Serbia, and, as Russia was not this time to be 
frightened by Germany's "shining armour," the world war. 
The Kaiser felt confident that in Turkey and Bulgaria 
he held two big trump-cards in his hand, and also strong, 
though more doubtful, ones in Greece and in Rumania. The 
Hohenzollern King Carol was the first to prove a broken 
reed, for at the great Crown Council held at Bukarest a 
few days after the outbreak of war, only one Rumanian 
statesman stood by him when he urged an immediate mobilisa- 
tion of Rumania on the side of the Teutonic Powers, whilst 
an influential minority wanted her to throw in her lot at 
once with the Entente, and neutrahty, modelled on the 
attitude of Italy, was finally adopted as a compromise, and 
largely out of deference to the feelings of an aged and respected 
sovereign wlio, it was feared, would abdicate rather than 
break with Germany. With his death, two months later, 
Rumania's entry into the war on the side of the Entente 
became largely a question of tiine and opportunity. King 
Constantine was able to hold the Greek fort much longer 
fo^Ti^mDcrianjrothc^i^aw^^ out of sheer hatred of 
Venizelos, who, when called to office by King George in 1910 
to save the dynasty, had insisted that the heir-apparent 
— then intensely unpopular — should be sent abroad for a 
time. Constantine proceeded to Berlin, and returned ulti- 
mately to Greece imbued with Prfissian mihtarism and a 
profound behef in the invincibility of Germany. The vic- 
tories of the Greek armies under his command during the 
Balkan wars suddenly made him the idol of his people, and 
his recovery from death's door in the summer of 1915, which 
they attributed to a visible miracle wrought through a most 
sacred ikon brought up from the Peloponnesus, confirmed 
their faith in his predestined name. A protracted course 
of perfidy, and especially the betrayal of Eastern Macedonia 
and of the Greek forces that held it into Bulgarian hands, 
opened his people's eyes ; but it required two years to con- 
' vince the Allies that the heart of the Greek nation was no 
longer with him, but with the Provisional Government, 
which had been in the meantime established in defiance of 
Constantine at Salonica by the indomitable energy of 
Venizelos, whose faith in the Allied cause and in the future 
of the Greek race which he believed to be bound up with it, 
had never wavered. 
Exploiting the Turk 
In Constantinople the Young Turks, backed by the big 
guns of the Goeben and the Breslau, promptly fulfilled the 
Kaiser's most sanguine expectations. The failure of our 
ill-directed effort at Galhpoli, though its ultimate effects 
in wearing do\yn Turkish man-power have perhaps been 
under-rated, served for tlif time being to make good for 
Enver the failure of his own pet scheme to drive us out of 
Egypt, and even the menacing achievements of the Russian 
armies during the first two years of war in Asia Minor. So 
whilst the Kaiser, as Hajji Muhammed Wilhelm, exploited 
Turkish Pan-Islamism, of which he had proclaimed himself, 
twenty years ago, the protector in front of Saladin's tomb 
at Damascus in the hope of mobilising Mohammedan fanaticism 
all over the East against the Allies, and especially against 
Britain, the Young Turks gambled on Pan-Turanianism 
^-the Turkish facsimile of Pan-Germanism — and dreamed 
of establishing an OsmanH Empire on the model of the German 
Empire, in which the Shah of Persia, the Ameer of Afghanistan, 
the Khans of Central Asia, and even the Mohammedan princes 
of India, were cast for parts similar to those played in Ger- 
many by the federal sovereigns who fetch and carry for the 
supreme Hohenzollern War-Lord. 
No other of his trump-cards did the Kaiser play so effec- 
tively as Turkey. Not even Bulgaria. For though the 
crafty King Ferdinand rendered Germany an immense 
service by bringing Bulgaria down on the "Teutonic side of 
the fence, the Bulgarian war-aims were from the very first 
too definite and too circumscribed to ensure the permanent 
and unquestioning acquiescence^ of the stiff-necked Bul- 
garian people in every order that might issue from Berlin. 
In fact, the rapidity with which Bulgaria achieved most of 
her war-aims went far towards Germany's and Ferdinand's 
undoing. The object of the Bulgarians was to undo the 
disastrous Treaty of Bukarest and to recover the hegemony 
and the territories to which they had taught themselves to 
beUeve they were imprescriptibly entitled in the Balkan 
peninsula. Revenge, too, on the once-despised Serbians, 
who had shattered the results of Bulgaria's prolonged and 
intensive propaganda in Western Macedonia, was sweet — 
and easy. For the Bulgarians had only to attack Serbia 
in the rear whilst she was being overwhelmed on her other 
fronts by German and Austro-Hungarian hosts. In Eastern 
Macedonia, King Constantine himself placed the Bulgarians 
in possession of a large part of what they most coveted from 
Greece. When Rumania came into the war, they promptly 
recovered from her Silistria, and with Mackensen's armies 
ejected her from the whole of the Dobrudja. What was 
then left for the Bulgarians to fight for ? Turkey was their 
ally, and so long as the AlMance endured, Adrianople and 
Thrace were sour grapes. They no doubt still hankered 
after Salonika ; but with Anglo-French troops covering it, 
the Greek Army, in process of reorganisation after Con- 
stantine's fall, and even a new Serbian Army reforming 
steadily out of the old shattered fragments, Salonika was 
too hard a nut for the Bulgarians to crack unless the Central 
Powers could send very considerable f(jn:fs, whicli (licy 
