d by Greece as
an essential condition of her entry into the war was, of course, a
natural result of their Bulgarian policy--a policy for which very
little could be said. Time perhaps was, at the beginning of the War,
when Bulgaria might have been won; for it is not necessary to adopt the
Graeco-Servian view that she had from the first decided to join the
enemies of the Entente and that no amount of reasonable concessions
would have satisfied her ambition; the Bulgars are a practical people,
and there was at Sofia a pro-Entente party which might have prevailed,
if the Entente Powers had, without delay, defined the proposed
concessions and proceeded to press Greece and Servia to make them--to
expect from either {44} State a voluntary self-mutilation was to expect
a miracle. By not doing so, by shilly-shallying at Athens, Nish, and
Sofia, they only lost the confidence of Greeks and Serbs without
gaining the confidence of the Bulgars, who could hardly take seriously
proposals so vague in their formulation and so uncertain of their
fulfilment. If, on the other hand, the Allies were unable to define
the concessions or afraid to shock public opinion by forcing them upon
Greece and Servia, then they ought to have dropped their hopeless
scheme, without wasting valuable time, and worked on the lines of
Graeco-Servian co-operation against Bulgaria. Instead, they squashed,
as we saw, every attempt which the Greek General Staff made to that end.

But it is not the only aberration with which history will charge our
statesmen and diplomats.

Greece was going through an internal crisis; and those who know Greece
will know what that means. In private life no people is more
temperate, more moderate, than the Greek: a sense of measure always
seasons its pleasures, and even the warmest passions of the heart seem
to obey the cool reflections of the brain. In public life, by way of
compensation, the opposite qualities prevail; and as citizens the
Greeks display an astonishing lack of the very virtues which
distinguish them as men. The spirit of party burns so hot in them that
it needs but a breath to kindle a conflagration. That spirit, whose
excesses had, several times in the past, brought the fundamental
principles of the Constitution into question, and the country itself to
the brink of ruin, was once again at work. Former friends had become
deadly enemies: the community was rent with dissensions and poisoned
with suspicions.