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HOW BULGARIA CAME INTO THE WAR

In the course of the year 1915 Ferdinand of Bulgaria, with his
henchman Radoslavoff, was arranging to come into the War. Public
opinion in that country was smarting under the drastic Treaty of
Bucharest, which had been imposed by the victors of the second Balkan
War. It was Roumania which had inflicted the shrewdest wound by taking
the whole of the Dobrudja as a recompense for a military promenade,
during which she lost a few men who deserted, and a few officers who
were shot in the back. The Dobrudja is a land whose people cause it to
resemble a mosaic--Greeks, Turks, Roumanians, Tartars, Bulgars,
Armenians and gipsies are to be found--but the southern parts are
undoubtedly Bulgarian. After the great outcry which the Bulgars had
raised over the surrender of one town, Silistra, it can be imagined
that the loss of the whole land came as an unendurable sentence. Quite
apart from Bulgaria's Macedonian aspirations, it was felt in Belgrade
that Ferdinand, by pointing to the Dobrudja, would be able to drive
his kingdom into an alliance with the Central Powers, an alliance
whose aim, as far as he was concerned, was to leave him Tzar of the
Balkans. The photograph which he circulated of himself, seated in a
splendid chair upon a promontory by the Black Sea, wearing the
appropriate archaic robes, and with a look of profound meditation on
his otherwise Machiavellian features, was exactly what he thought a
Balkan Tzar should be.

The Serbs were in favour of delivering an attack upon the Bulgars
before they had mobilized and concentrated their troops. This would
not have warded off the Teutonic invasion, but the Serbs would have
been able to maintain contact with Salonica, thus facilitating the
evacuation of their army. And who knows whether this diversion would
not have induced the Greeks and the Roumanians to change their
attitude? However, the proposal was vetoed by Serbia's great Allies,
who thought that their diplomacy might work upon the Bulgars. Many
worthy people said that it would be quite inconceivable for the
Bulgarian army to oppose the Russian, seeing that this would be
terrible ingratitude. But they forgot that if the Russians had been,
not for purely altruistic motives, the kind patrons of the Bulgars,
they had recently--when the Tzar Nicholas and the Tzarina came to the
Constanza fetes--made open cause with Bulgaria's opponents. They were
also forgetting, rather inexcusably,