d Turkish
fortresses of Adrianople, Scutari, and Yanina must not be re-victualled,
and on December 16, 1912, peace negotiations were opened between
representatives of the belligerent countries in London. Meanwhile the
Germanic powers, dismayed by the unexpected victories of the Balkan armies
and humiliated by the crushing defeats in the field of the German-trained
Turkish army, had since the beginning of November been doing everything in
their power to support their client Turkey and prevent its final
extinction and at the same time the blighting of their ambitions
eventually to acquire the Empire of the Near East. During the conference
in London between the plenipotentiaries of the belligerents, parallel
meetings took place between the representatives of the great powers, whose
relations with each other were strained and difficult in the extreme. The
Turkish envoys prolonged the negotiations, as was their custom; they
naturally were unwilling to concede their European provinces to the
despised and hated Greek and Slavonic conquerors, but the delays implied
growing hardships for their besieged and starving garrisons in Thrace,
Epirus, and Albania. On January 23, 1913, a quasi-revolution occurred in
the Turkish army, headed by Enver Bey and other Young Turk partisans, and
approved by the Austrian and German embassies, with the object of
interrupting the negotiations and staking all on the result of a final
battle. As a result of these events, and of the palpable disingenuousness
of the Turks in continuing the negotiations in London, the Balkan
delegates on January 29 broke them off, and on February 3, 1913,
hostilities were resumed. At length, after a siege of nearly five months,
Adrianople, supplied with infinitely better artillery than the allies
possessed, was taken by the combined Serbian and Bulgarian forces on March
26, 1913. The Serbian troops at Adrianople captured 17,010 Turkish
prisoners, 190 guns, and the Turkish commander himself, Shukri Pasha.

At the outbreak of the war in the autumn of 1912 the Balkan States had
observed all the conventions, disavowing designs of territorial
aggrandizement and proclaiming their resolve merely to obtain guarantees
for the better treatment of the Christian inhabitants of Macedonia; the
powers, for their part, duly admonished the naughty children of
south-eastern Europe to the effect that no alteration of the territorial
_status quo ante_ would under any circumstances be toler