The Bulgarian delegate in London had been M. Daneff, a rude, overbearing Macedonian who incensed and irritated all those with whom he came in contact. The selection of this man for so delicate a mission was, to say the least, unfortunate. To many it appeared suspicious that M. Daneff should have been sent, when M. Gueshoff, the Prime Minister, and a man of reasonable and moderate views, could have gone in his place; it looked as if King Ferdinand of Bulgaria had already become entangled in the meshes of Austro-Hungarian diplomacy, whose object was the disruption of the Balkan League. M. Daneff rejected the overtures and proposals of Greeks, Serbs, Rumanians and Turks with equal contempt. As a result, Bulgaria became more and more isolated. Potential enemies surrounded her on every side, but, blinded by arrogance and false counsel, she disdained the alliance of any neighbouring State.

At the end of June, the storm broke. The signature of peace had enabled the Bulgarian Government to concentrate troops in Eastern Macedonia, in close proximity to the Servian army of occupation. The soldiers of the two armies fraternized with one another and, to all appearances, the Bulgars had the friendliest intentions. The first act of war took place before dawn on June 30 when, without warning, the Servian outpost line was attacked and driven in by a numerically superior force of Bulgars. The Serbs recovered themselves speedily, reinforcements were hurried to the front attacked, and a counter-attack was made which drove the Bulgars in confusion from the field. Servian successes had an immediate effect on the Government at Sofia. The treacherous offensive of June 30 was repudiated and ascribed to the personal initiative of General Savoff, one of Bulgaria’s most notorious “men of action” and a favourite of the King. The repudiation came too late. All the other Balkan States combined against Bulgaria, and within three months of the signing of peace in London, Greeks and Serbs were fighting their late ally in Macedonia, while Turks and Rumanians invaded her territory from the east and north.

The Bulgars soon found themselves in a desperate plight; no amount of stubborn valour at Carevoselo15 could protect Sofia against the Rumanians or save Adrianople from the Turks. By the end of July the Bulgarian Government was forced to sue for an armistice to save the country from utter ruin. The day of reckoning had come for an inexcusable and odious crime.

In the first week of August, the delegates of the Balkan States assembled at Bucharest to negotiate yet another peace. Their task was not an easy one. Public opinion in Servia and Greece was exultant and clamouring for vengeance; in Turkey, Enver Pasha, the saviour of Adrianople, was at the zenith of his fame. From elements such as these a judicial frame of mind was not to be expected; they were blinded by hatred, pent up through decades of jealousy and fear. Enver cherished ambitious dreams, counted on German help, and knew no scruples. The majority of the Greeks and Serbs aimed at reducing Bulgaria to a state of impotence. Had it been possible, they would have exterminated the entire race.

A few courageous voices were raised in protest against a too brutal application of the principle that every country has the government it deserves; they declared it a crime to visit the sins of the rulers on their hapless subjects; they claimed that the Bulgarian people, as distinct from their rulers, had been punished enough already; that Bulgaria had been bled white and had made many sacrifices in a common cause; that she had lost much of her power for evil, and might, if properly handled, lose the will; they pleaded that justice should be tempered with common sense, if not with mercy, and urged that the folly of exasperating millions of virile peasants, and thereby driving them into closer union with the Central Empires, against all their racial instincts, should be foreseen and checked.

The men who dared to speak with the voice of reason were called pro-Bulgars in Greece and Servia; they went to Bucharest, hoping to find a more objective spirit.

Many factors combined to make the Rumanian capital the most suitable meeting-place for the Balkan delegates on this momentous occasion. Rumania had struck the decisive blow without bloodshed; her army was intact and her treasury was not depleted; her territorial claims were inconsiderable and had been submitted to the Great Powers for arbitration; lastly, in her King, Rumania possessed a personage peculiarly fitted to mould and direct, dispassionately, the proceedings of the Conference.

King Charles was a man advanced in years who had served his adopted country both faithfully and well. The Rumanian people felt for him gratitude and respect. At this period they would have followed loyally in any course he chose to take. As head of the elder and Catholic branch of the Hohenzollern family, the King of Rumania was in close touch with the courts of the Central Empires and with King Constantine of Greece.

In short, fate had conferred on this Hohenzollern prince unrivalled authority in his own country, access to powerful channels of persuasion, and in relation to the other Balkan States, forces sufficient to impose his will. He could, had he willed, have been arbiter of the Balkans and might have changed the course of history. In the event, he preferred to stand aside.

History is full of such “might have beens.” Time is a kind of fourth dimension affecting every human action. King Charles’s opportunity occurred when he was old and tired. Made over-cautious by his knowledge of the play of external forces on the Balkan situation, he feared a general conflagration, which might consume his life’s work at a stroke. And so he left ill alone, and hoped to end his days in peace.

Probably the best known of King Charles’s ministers in 1912 was M. Take Jonescu, whose tireless energy in the cultivation of relationships and souvenirs in foreign capitals had earned for him the title of “the Great European.” This title was not undeserved, though applied ironically in nine cases out of ten. M. Take Jonescu had acquired the habit of generalizing from Rumanian affairs so as to make them embrace the whole of the old world and the new; this had enlarged his horizon and given him a vision which at times was startlingly prophetic. He recognized more clearly than any of his countrymen the rôle of Rumania at the Conference and what could and should be done. The restless, versatile man of the people was fascinated by the splendid possibilities of a bold and imaginative Rumanian policy. Not so his colleagues of the Conservative Party; they opposed inertia to ideas, and behind them stood the King. M. Take Jonescu had a lawyer’s training and was no champion of lost causes. This cause was lost indeed while King Charles was on the throne; only a cataclysm could have saved it—a “Cascade des Trônes.”16 The Rumanian statesman foresaw, and in his vaguely anarchic fashion wished for this consummation, about which he was to write a few years later, but the lawyer threw up his brief and devoted his undoubted talents to bargaining and the conclusion of a Treaty which King Charles himself described as a “drum-head truce.” In the Near East, men have a passion for subtle and tortuous negotiations, which are comprehended in the phrase “un marchandage Balkanique,”17 which end in compromises, effect no settlement, and serve to postpone the evil day.

The Austro-Hungarian representative in Bucharest must have heaved a sigh of relief when it became clear that Rumania’s participation in the Conference would be restricted to land-grabbing in the Dobruja.18 Silistria and a district from which one of the best Bulgarian infantry regiments drew its recruits were claimed, and eventually annexed, by Rumania. No great extent of territory this, but enough to hurt.

The French and British press, skimming lightly on the surface of the Conference, dealt with personalities in preference to principles. M. Venizelos was their favourite delegate, and held that position to the end. Success in any walk of life is profitable; success in rebellion is the shortest road to fame. M. Venizelos had begun his career as a Cretan rebel. In 1913 he shared with King Constantine the honours of two victorious campaigns in Macedonia, and was credited with the resurrection of the old Hellenic spirit. At Bucharest this remarkable man was in a difficult position; his sole rival in the affections of the Greek people was his sovereign, to whom he owed the allegiance of a subject and with whom his personal relations were far from cordial. The considered judgments of M. Venizelos favoured concessions to Bulgaria in regard to Cavalla and its hinterland; to any such suggestions the King replied with a categorical refusal. Fearful of forfeiting popularity by any act which would diminish the aggrandizements of Greece, M. Venizelos was perpetually balancing between his conception of Balkan statesmanship and concern for his own reputation. Eventually, the latter gained the day. Cavalla was retained by Greece and another bone of contention was created between Greeks and Bulgars. The presence of Servian and Turkish delegates at Bucharest was purely formal. Like the daughters of the horse-leech, their cry was—give; to have given them more than what they had already taken would have brought on another war, and no one was prepared for that. Servia’s retention of Monastir was sanctioned, the Turks remained at Adrianople. The Bulgars, crestfallen and daunted for a time, retained a part of Thrace, including Dede Agatch and Porto Lagos; they were alone and friendless; the sympathies of Russia, the one-time liberator, had been estranged. They turned their eyes, reluctantly, towards the Central Empires and nursed a fell revenge.

In due course, the Treaty of Bucharest was signed by the contracting parties. It has never been officially recognized by the Great Powers, yet by many it is accepted as a basis for future readjustments in the Balkan Peninsula. Fallacies are of rapid growth, they none the less die hard. The negotiations had been, in fact, a diplomatic duel between Russia and Austria-Hungary, the first clash between two mighty movements—the “Drang nach Osten”19 and Pan-Slavism. Austria-Hungary had won. The new frontiers were a triumph for her diplomacy. Servia, though victorious, was enclosed as in a net; on the East an irreconcilable Bulgaria; on the West, Albania torn by internal discord, and fast becoming an outpost of the Central Empires; on the South Greece, where German influence was daily gaining ground. Killed by its authors, the Balkan “Bloc” was dead. A new element had been introduced into the balance of power in Europe. Servia and Bulgaria were doubtful States no longer, they were in opposite camps, and, when the lassitude caused by two cruel wars had passed, they could be set at each other’s throats again to fight for interests not their own.

Great Britain had held aloof from the proceedings of the Conference. Our Minister in Bucharest had received instructions to take neither part nor lot in the negotiations; if called upon for an opinion he was to endorse that of his Russian colleague. If the British Government had any Balkan policy at all it was, apparently, a Russian policy, a vicarious partnership, an acquiescence in the pernicious doctrine that two wrongs may make a right.

A gaping wound had been made in Europe’s side, the surgeons had met together at Bucharest, and fearing to probe had sewn it up with clumsy stitches. Wounds are not healed by surgery such as this, not only do they open up again, their poison spreads, attains some vital organ, and causes death. Good surgery needs knowledge, foresight, courage, the power and will to act. The men, who from ignorance or inertia neglected and dallied with the Balkan problem, were scarcely less guilty than the criminals who, of set purpose, made a peace which sowed the seeds of war.

During the summer of 1913 a spell of intense heat occurred in the fertile plains of the Danube valley. In every village dirt and insanitary conditions encouraged flies, winged insects swarmed by night and day, revelling in filth and carrying disease. The Rumanian peasants who had marched into Bulgaria had been attacked by a more deadly enemy than the Bulgarian hosts—the cholera microbe pursued them to their homes; the malady assumed an epidemic form and raged at first unchecked.

To some it seemed an act of retribution for an unrighteous peace, a manifestation of stern justice, dubbed divine, although its victims were the innocent and weak. The rich escaped by fleeing to hill stations or the sea, the poor, perforce, remained and died by hundreds, their families were decimated, their fields were left untilled, a blight had fallen on this pleasant land.

In her hour of trial Rumania discovered an unexpected source of strength and consolation. Calamity had called, and from her castle in the mountains an English Princess came, leaving the fragrant coolness of the woods for stifling heat and misery in myriad shape, down in the sun-scorched plain. In every cholera camp her white-clad form was seen moving from tent to tent, bringing the tonic of her beauty, restoring hope, dealing out pity with a lavish hand. To humble folk weighed down by suffering, it was as though an angel passed, and memories cluster still around those days, weaving a web of gratitude and loving kindness, a web to outward seeming, frail and unsubstantial, but unbreakable, surviving all the shocks of war, binding the people to their Queen.

I returned to London through Sofia and Belgrade. After the festivities of Bucharest the aspect of both these Capitals was sad indeed. Victor and vanquished alike were reaping the aftermath of war; bedraggled soldiers thronged the streets, no longer saviours, not even heroes, merely idle citizens, useless until demobilized.

From Belgrade my duties called me to Vienna. As the train crossed the railway bridge to Semlin, I saw again the guns and searchlights on the Save’s Hungarian bank. Austria-Hungary had not yet decided on her course of action, but she was ready. The Balkan Allies of 1912, like rabbits unconscious of the presence of hungry pythons, had had their frolic. Now, they had paused for breath and had time to think. No longer Allies, they were helpless. Victims, not wholly innocent, they would crouch and wait; already it seemed as if a Python-State had stirred.