the close camaraderie of officers and men. The first use made of her
victories over the Turks was the occupation of northern Albania, her only
possible outlet to the sea so long as Dalmatia remains in Austrian hands.
Austria-Hungary, who had only remained inactive because she had taken a
Turkish victory for granted, now intervened, and by the creation of an
artificial Albanian State vetoed Serbia's expansion to the Adriatic. The
Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, short-sighted and indolent then
as now, failed to realise that the North Albanian harbours, for obvious
reasons of physical geography, could never be converted into naval bases,
save at a prohibitive cost, and that their possession by Serbia, so far
from being a menace to Austria, would involve the policing of a mountainous
tract of country, inhabited by a turbulent and hostile population. It ought
to have been obvious to him that the moment had arrived for tempting
the Serbs into the Austrian sphere of influence by the bait of generous
commercial concessions through Bosnia and Dalmatia. Several far-sighted
politicians in Austria urged this course upon him, and the Serbian Premier
actually approached Vienna with far-reaching proposals in this very sense.
Their contemptuous rejection by Berchtold and the little clique of Foreign
Office officials who controlled his puppet figure, naturally strengthened
still further the bonds which united Belgrade and Petrograd. Serbia, shut
out from the Adriatic, had no alternative save to seek her economic outlet
down the valley of the Vardar towards the Aegean, and in so doing she came
into violent conflict with Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia. These facts
alone would justify the assertion that the war between the Balkan allies
was directly due to Austro-Hungarian initiative; but it has also transpired
that the dissensions between Sofia and Belgrade were actively encouraged
from Vienna, that Magyar influences were brought to bear upon King
Ferdinand, and that war material was sent down the Danube from Hungary to
Bulgaria. The outward and visible sign of these intrigues was a speech of
the Hungarian Premier, Count Tisza, opposing the Tsar's intervention in
favour of peace and virtually inciting Bulgaria to fight it out. The
break-up of the Balkan League was the first condition to that Austrian
advance on Salonica which has always remained the ideal of the advocates
of a forward policy in Vienna and Budapest, and which