8 
LAND 6? WATER 
October 10, 1918 
could less and less spare as the decision in their favour on 
the Western front continued, in spite of the Russian debacle, 
to hang fire. 
But many other besides miHtary considerations began 
to weigh more and more with tlie Bulgarians. A large 
part of the Bulgarian people had from the first dishked 
the idea of being at war with the Western Powers, to whom 
their essentially democratic instincts had always attracted 
them much more than to the Central Powers, and with 
Russia, who had, after all, been their hberator. German 
propaganda and German bribes had been lavishly and not 
unsuccessfully employed amongst the politicians and govern- 
ing classes whom Ferdinand had systematically laid himself 
out to debauch in order to strengthen his own hold upon 
them ; and though the time has not yet come to inquire 
how far the lamentable absence of any unity of purpose and 
vigorous leadership amongst the Entente Powers contri- 
buted to the whole Balkan imbroglio, British diplomacj- 
unquestionably played a singularly piteous part at Sofia 
until the arrival, when it was far too late, of Mr. O.'Bryne, 
one of the most promising of the younger British diploma- 
tists, afterwards drowned with Lord Kitchener, whom he 
was accompanying on his ill-fated mission to Petrograd. 
Afte the first intoxication of victory and revenge had worn 
off, the Bulgarians began to count the cost of the Teutonic 
aUiance, and it was not altogether to their liking. The 
Kaiser had promised them a short and merry war ; but it 
was not short, and it soon ceased to be merry when he com- 
menced to insist on Bulgarian divisions being sent to fight 
on other fronts far away from their own country. Two 
are believed actually to have been sent to the Russian front. 
To the Western front they were never sent. Then when 
difficulties arose between the Bulgarians and the Turks, 
and especially of late over the Dobrutscha, the Kaiser 
displayed an unpleasant inclination to favour the Turks 
rather than the Bulgarians. But still more intolerable to 
the Bulgarians was the heavy hand of the German task- 
master ; the arrogance of the German staff, which gave 
even the highest Bulgarian olficeri a taste of Prussian mili- 
tarism ; the brutality of the German soldiers, which gave 
even a stronger taste of it to the Bulgarian people at large ; 
the endless requisitions of food supplies for Germany, which 
left the Bulgarian peasantry to starve in a land until then 
of plenty. The Bulgarians grew sick not only of fighting, 
but of being bled white for the sake of hectoring allies, 
whom they had learnt to know at close quarters, and when 
once they realised that King Ferdinand, whorn they neither 
trusted nor respected, had perhaps, after all, jockeyed them 
into putting their money on the wrong horse, they deter- 
mined to retrace their steps as best they could. Malinoff's 
return to office was doubtless the beginning of the end, for 
of all the party leaders I saw whilst I was in Sofia in the 
summer of 1915, not even those whom King Ferdinand 
placed under lock and key during the war for their anti- 
German tendencies professed greater anxiety than he did 
to see the Entente adopt a policy which might stiffen Bul- 
garian resistance to the German tempter. The victorious 
onslaught of the Allied forces precipitated the process of 
conversion, for the Bulgarians knew that even if they were 
made to disgorge, they were not threatened with dismem- 
berment, and they could therefore afford to surrender with 
a relatively light heart, perhaps even with the hope of some 
future consolation stakes in a slice of Turkish Thrace. 
Turkey's Prospects 
Not so the Turks. They know that though analogous 
terms of capitulation may be offered to them, the fate 
that ultimately awaits them is a very different one. Meso- 
potamia, Syria, Arabia, with its Holy Places, are lost to 
them for ever. Such Armenians as have not yet been 
massacred must be liberated from the Turkish yoke. Turkey 
can no longer be allowed to possess — or, at any rate, to 
control — the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus. Public opinion 
amongst even the Mohammedan people of Turkey, if it were 
articulate or organised, would probably agree to anything 
in order to be quit of the w^r and of the Germans, who have 
made themselves no less hated in Turkey than elsewhere. 
In our "cages" in Palestine we have not always been able 
to prevent Turkish prisoners ixom flying at the throats of 
their German fellow-prisoners. But Enver and his friends 
can still defy their people as Ferdinand could no longer do 
in Bulgaria, and even if their fortunes were not irretrievably 
bound up with those of their German paymasters, and if 
the new Sultan, as some believe, is not the mere puppet 
that his predecessor was in their hands, the Goeben and tlie 
Breslau still command the Palace and the Porte. So long 
as the communications between Germany and Turkey are 
not entirely severed, the present rulers of Turkey, who have 
no comfortable estates in Central Europe to which they 
can safely retire, like King Ferdinand, can hardly be ex- 
pected to commit suicide. ^ 
How long those communications will remain open is largely 
a military problem which I am not qualified to discuss. 
But the Central Powers can scarcely now hope to hold against 
the victorious Allies the great trunk line right through 
Bulgaria to Constantinople without withdrawing from 
Rumania and Ukrainia forces which can ill be spared if they 
are to preserve their alternative hues to the Black Sea. And 
how long can they preserve even these ? For neither the 
Rumanian people nor "the population of Ukrainia have yet 
been subdued. They are merely held down by brute force. 
The Germans themselve; are quite aware how weak their 
position has remained, and of late they have betrayed great 
anxiety as to what they call the rebellious attitude of the 
Rumanian C-ourt at Jassy. They know they have failed to 
conquer the spirit of King Ferdinand of Rumania and of 
his consort — half-British and half-Russian by birth — and in 
that corner of Moldavia there is still a small Rumanian 
army in being with which they may have to reckon. Through 
Bulgaria the Allies may before very long get into touch 
with it, and then Germany's hold on Southern Russia and 
the Black Sea will depend in the last resort upon the pre- 
carious good-will of her Bolshevist friends. F'or the resur- 
rection of Rumania may well prove no less wonderful than 
the resurrection of heroic little Serbia. Nowhere, indeed, 
has the Kaiser played his winning cards with more crass 
stupidity than in Rumania. When she came into the war 
there was no strong anti-German feeling amongst her people, 
nor even any strong anti-Austrian feeling, except in so far 
as the Germanic Powers stood for the perpetuation of the 
Hungarian yoke on three millions of Rumanian necks. 
Germans were • not individually popular They never are. 
But they and the Austrians had don^e a great deal for the 
industrial and commercial development of Rumania, and 
they had the Rumanian business world pretty well in their 
grip. German propaganda, nowhere carried on with more 
profuse extravagance, appealed moreover, to the Rumanians 
intense distrust of Russia ever since she filched Bessarabia 
from them after the Russo-Turkish War. Rumania's entry 
into the war was dictated mainly by political considerations, 
for which the masses had but little understanding, and the 
enthusiasm was for the most part confined to the intelli- 
gentsia of the large towns. Her military disasters produced 
a rapid revulsion of feeling against the Entente Powers, 
and especially against Russia, who laid herself open to the 
charge of having dragged Rumania into the war, and then 
left her in the lurch. Had the Germans only dealt decently 
with the Rumanian people, and shown the slightest generosity 
towards the rulers, they might easily have turned Rumanian 
discontent with the Entente into something like friendliness 
towards Germany. But as in Bulgaria and to a perhaps 
lesser degree in Turkey, because • more remote, and as in 
Serbia, too, where the Germans now are even more detested 
than the Austrian and Magyars, German "frightfulness" 
has sown in Rumania a harvest of popular hatred which 
Germany yet has to reap. The characteristically "German" 
peace of Bukarest, which grafted economic on to political 
enslavement, has completed the lessons already taught to 
the Rumanian people for two long years by the truculence 
of the German soldiery and by the systematic plundering 
of villages and cities to feed and supply the Fatherland. 
The Dominant Factor 
Paradoxical as it may seem, it is the very magnitude of 
Germany's military successes during the earlier stages of 
the war which, when once they have been turned to disaster, 
will be found to have permanently and irretrievably wrecked . 
the Kaiser's dreams of marching triufnphantly through 
South-Eastern Europe to world-dominion. For enemies 
and aOies, Serbs and Rumanians, Turks and Bulgars, Russians 
and Greeks have come to know, as never before, what the 
German stands for when he is victorious and unashamed, 
and if, when peace comes, he tries to resume the old innocent 
mask of "peaceful penetration," they will remember "the 
great, blonde beast" grinning behind it, whose teeth have 
left so many enduring marks upon their bodies. Tliis is 
for the future, long after peace shall have been restored, 
the dominant factor in the Balkan sitAiation. The military 
and political liberation of the Balkan States, though in sight, 
is not yet consummated, but the souls of their peoples are 
already and for ever redeemed th ough untold sufferings 
from Germanic thraldom, and the Kaiser's policy has per- 
ished even more shamefully by his own ruthless sword than 
by the heavy but honourable strokes of enemy swords. 
