Both these small states, in their present hopes, fears, and, dangers, are an instructive spectacle to those who fancy that in the crowded arena of Europe a little nation can always do as it wants to, or that its neutrality is always the simple open-and-shut matter it looked to be, for instance, in the first weeks of August, 1914.  We are likely, at home, to look on all this cold-blooded weighing of the chances of war with little patience, to think of all these “aspirations” as merely somebody else’s land.  Fear or envy of our neighbors, international hatred, is almost unknown with us.  All that was left behind, three thousand miles away, and the green water in between permits us to indulge in the rare luxury of altruism.  Yet these hatreds, these fears, and ambitions, inherited and carefully nourished, are just as real—­ particularly in little states like these—­as the fact, odd and apparently unreasonable as it may be, that in a bit of country, which might be included in one of our larger States, one lot of people should speak French and think like Latins, and another speak Slavic and think another way, and that neither wants to be absorbed by the other any more than we want to be compelled to speak Spanish or be absorbed by the Mexicans.

The “aspirations” of both these little countries have realities behind them.  It is a fact that one gets a whiff of French clarity and verve in Rumania, though it comes from a small minority educated in France, and the Rumanian people may be no more “Latin” than we are.  And it is an interesting notion—­though perhaps only a notion—­that Rumania should be the outpost or rear-guard of Latinism in this part of the world; a bit of the restless West on the edge of the Orient.

For virility and earnestness like that of the Bulgars there is a place, not only in the Balkans, but everywhere.  The qualities they have shown in their short life as an independent nation are those which deserve to be encouraged and preserved.  And if it were true that this war were being fought to establish the right of little nations to live, one of the tasks it ought to accomplish, it seemed then, was to give the Bulgars back at least part of what was taken from them.

Chapter X

The Adventure Of The Fifty Hostages

Gallipoli lies by the Sea of Marmora, and looks out across it to the green hills of Asia, just where the blue Marmora narrows into the Dardanelles.  It is one of those crowded little Turkish towns set on a blazing hillside—­tangled streets, unpainted, gray, weather-warped frame houses, with overhanging latticed windows and roofs of red tiles; little walled-in gardens with dark cedars or cypresses and a few dusty roses; fountains with Turkish inscriptions, where the streets fork and women come to fill their water-jars—­a dreamy, smelly, sun-drenched little town, drowsing on as it has drowsed for hundreds of years.  Nothing