“It’s our own fault,” an Englishman said to me, speaking somewhat sardonically of the failure of the Rumanians to go in with Italy in spite of having accepted a timely loan from England.  “We put our money on the wrong horse!  No, they’ll keep on talking—­they’re the chaps who want to get something for nothing.  Think of the treaty of Bucarest and the way we patted Rumania on the back—­she was the gendarme of Europe then.  ‘Gendarme of Europe!’ ...  I tell you that any army that would do what the Rumanians did to Bulgaria has something wrong with its guts!”

An army goes where it is ordered, of course, but it is true, nevertheless, that the Bulgarians are likely to think of their neighbors on the north as people who want to get something for nothing, and that they who had borne the brunt of the war with Turkey lost everything they had gained.  The Turks, “driven from Europe,” calmly moved back to Adrianople; Rumania took the whole of Dobrudja; Bulgarian Macedonia went to Serbia and Greece.  However much Bulgaria may have been to blame for the break-up of the Balkan League—­and she was stubborn and headstrong to say the least—­there is no denying that the treaty of Bucarest did not give her a square deal.  It was one of those treaties of peace (and you might think that the men who sit around the green table and make such treaties would learn it after a time) that are really treaties of war.

No, Bulgaria was not looking for adventures, nor accepting promises unless she had securities that they would be carried out.  You could not talk to any intelligent Bulgarian five minutes without feeling the bitterness left by the treaty of Bucarest and the fixed idea that Bulgarian Macedonia must come under the flag again.  But though this was true, and the army mobilized, and on a fine day every other man on the streets of Sofia an officer, the stubborn Bulgars were still sitting tight.  If they got what they wanted without fighting for it, they were not anxious to throw away another generation of young men as they had thrown them away for nothing in the Balkan War.

By this negative policy—­the pressure, that is to say, of not going to war—­Bulgaria had induced Turkey, by the time I came through Sofia again three months later, to turn over enough territory on the east so that the Bulgars could own the railroad down to Dedeagatch and reach the Aegean without being obliged to go into Turkey and out again.  It even seemed that Bulgaria might be able to keep her neutrality to the end.  Her compromise with Turkey was not so odd as it seemed to many at first.  She had fought the Turks, to be sure, but now got what she wanted, and when you come to think of it, it might well be more comfortable from the Bulgars’ point of view to have the invalid Ottomans in Constantinople than the healthy and hungry Russians.