mind in which I packed my kit for the Balkans.

It is well to put on record that mental foundation on which I built up
my impressions of the Balkans generally, and of the Bulgarian people
particularly, for at the present time (1914) I think it may safely be
said that the Bulgarian people are somewhat under a cloud, and are not
standing too high in the opinion of the civilised world. Yet, to give
an honest record of my observations of them, I shall have to praise
them very highly in some respects. Whilst it would be going too far to
say that the praise is reluctant, it is true that it has been in a
way forced from me, for I went to Bulgaria with the prejudice against
the Bulgarians that I have indicated. And--to make this explanation
complete--I may add that I came back from the Balkans not a
pro-Bulgarian in the sense that I was anti-Greek or anti-Servian or
even anti-Turk; but with a feeling of general liking for all the
peasant peoples whom a cruel fate has cast into the Balkans to fight
out there national and racial issues, some of which are older than the
Christian era.

Yes, even the Turk, the much-maligned Turk, proved to have decent
possibilities if given a decent chance. Certainly he is no longer
the Terrible Turk of tradition. Most of the Turks I encountered in
Bulgaria were prisoners of war, evidently rather pleased to be in the
hands of the Bulgarians who fed them decently, a task which their own
commissariat had failed in: or were contented followers of menial
occupations in Bulgarian towns. I can recall Turkish boot-blacks and
Turkish porters, but no Turks who looked like warriors, and if they
are cut-throats by choice (I do not believe they are) they are very
mild-mannered cut-throats indeed.

Coming back from the lines of Chatalja towards the end of 1912, I had,
for one stage of five days, between Kirk Kilisse and Mustapha Pasha, a
Turkish driver. He had been a Bulgarian subject (I gathered) before the
war, and with his cart and two horses had been impressed into the
transport service. At first with some aid from an interpreter,
afterwards mostly by signs and broken fragments of language, I got to be
able to converse with this Turk. (In the Balkans the various shreds of
races have quaint crazy-quilt patchworks of conversational language.
Somehow or other even a British citizen with more than the usual
stupidity of our race as to foreign languages can make himself
understood in the Balkan Peninsula, whi