s yet to suffer again perhaps, from lack of experience to instruct his
practical mind. If the national pride would allow of it, an excellent
thing for Bulgaria would be to import half a dozen skilled officials
from, say, England and France to nurse her departments through the stage
of infancy. The nation has plenty of natural genius but makes mistakes
through inexperience.

CHAPTER IX

THE TRAGEDY OF 1914

When the war between the Balkan States and the Turkish Empire was
brought to a close for the time being by an armistice signed on the
battlefield of Chatalja, to which Bulgaria, Servia, and Turkey were
parties, and by the summoning of the Conference of London, to which
Greece also was a party, the prospects for Bulgaria's future were
singularly bright. As a power in the Balkans Turkey had ceased to exist.
She had been driven out of all Albania, Macedonia, Epirus, and Thrace,
except that beleaguered garrisons held the fortresses of Scutari,
Janina, and Adrianople and the Dardanelles forts, whilst behind the
lines of Chatalja a small area of Turkish territory remained under the
Crescent. The area held by the Bulgarian armies was greater at this time
than the territory assigned to her by the Treaty of San Stefano, and
promised to be extended as the result of the peace negotiations. In the
war which had just been waged the exploits of Bulgarian arms had
attracted the widest attention in Europe. Public opinion in most of the
capitals of the world assigned the future hegemony of the Balkan
Peninsula to the Bulgarian nation. But all this fair-seeming prospect
was the prelude to one of the greatest national tragedies in history.

I cannot better preface a relation of the facts of that tragedy than by
giving a summary of the position early in 1914, as it was given
anonymously by a noted Bulgarian diplomat to the _National Review_. He
wrote:

It is too late for pretending that all is well with the Balkan
League. Even in official quarters, where pessimism is generally
discouraged, it is no longer denied that relations between the
Allies have reached a critical stage.... It would form a sad
epilogue to a noble story if what began as a crusade of
liberation were to end in fratricidal strife.... Nominally, the
quarrel turns on the interpretation of treaties and their
bearing on the situation created by the war. But underneath all
these arguments there lurk preoccupations far transce