d that the issues of the war with
Turkey have been decided mainly by Servian valour....

If this is the way in which Servians are wearing their laurels,
it can be imagined what the effect of recent events has been on
impressionable Greece. To the trepidation with which the war was
entered has succeeded the feeling of boundless self-reliance.
All sense of reality and proportion has been banished, and there
is no exploit which seems beyond the reach of Greek effort.

The outbreak of a fresh Balkan war would, in the present
circumstances, prove little short of a world-wide calamity.
Should, however, Europe succeed in localising such a conflict,
its miseries will, to a certain extent, be compensated by one
very important advantage. A trial of forces between the various
Balkan competitors will clear the atmosphere and settle in the
only efficacious way the sore problem of Balkan hegemony, which
is at the bottom of Balkan unrest. It will fix for a long term
of years the respective positions of the parties. Just as the
Servo-Bulgarian War in 1885 proved a blessing in disguise, so
this time also the arbitrament of the sword might create
conditions more favourable to the political stability of the
Peninsula. And this will be a gain not only to the Balkan
nations, but to the whole of Europe.

The last thing of which that Bulgarian writer dreamt was the actual
result of the fresh Balkan war, which did break out and which ended in
the humiliation of Bulgaria. He contemplated the necessity of palliating
to European minds the enormity of a fratricidal war between allies who
had sanctioned their war against Turkey as a struggle of the Cross
against the Crescent; but he had no idea that there was the barest
possibility that Bulgaria would have to suffer complete defeat instead
of explaining victory.

The Conference of London which endeavoured to arrange a peace after the
first phase of the Balkan war met first in December 1913. I watched
closely its deliberations, had several friends among the delegates, and
was in a position to see at close hand the play of jealousies and
ambitions which made its work futile. From the first the very
desperation of Turkey raised a difficulty to quick peace negotiations.
She had lost so much as to be practically bankrupt, and was in the
position of a reckless man with no more possible losses to suffer,
anxious by an