the desire to make capital out of
my silence. I am the more pleased to address you with complete
frankness, because the interpellation and the way it was introduced
have given me the impression that if the German policy wishes to
correspond to the majority opinion of the Reichstag--in so far as I
may consider the recent comments an expression of this opinion--it has
only to continue along the path which it has thus far followed.

Regarding the present situation, I suspect that you already know
everything I can say about it. You know from the press and the English
parliamentary debates that at present one can say in the Orient, "The
arms are idle, and the storms of war are hushed"--God grant, for a
long while! The armistice which has been concluded grants the Russian
army an unbroken position from the Danube to the sea of Marmora, with
a base which it lacked formerly. I mean the fortresses near the
Danube. This fact, which is nowhere denied, seems to me to be the most
important of the whole armistice. There is excluded from the Russian
occupation, if I begin in the north, a quadrangular piece, with Varna
and Shumla, extending along the shore of the Black Sea to Battshila in
the north, and not quite to the Bay of Burgas in the south, thence
inland to about Rasgrad--a pretty exact quadrangle. Constantinople and
the peninsula of Gallipoli are also excluded, the very two points on
whose independence of Russia several interested powers are laying much
stress.

Certain peace preliminaries preceded the armistice, which at the risk
of telling you things you already know I shall nevertheless review
because they will answer the question whether German interests are at
stake in any one of them. There is, in the first place, the
establishment of Bulgaria "within the limits determined by the
majority of the Bulgarian population, and not smaller than indicated
by the conference of Constantinople."

The difference between these two designations is not of sufficient
importance, I believe, to constitute a reasonable danger to the peace
of Europe. The ethnographical information which we possess is, it is
true, not authentic nor without gaps, and the best we know has been
supplied by Germans in the maps by Kiepert. According to this the
national frontier--the frontier of the Bulgarian nationality--runs
down in the west just beyond Salonica, along a line where the races
are rather unmixed, and in the east with an increased admixture of