Regarding the present situation, I suspect that you already know everything I can say about it.  You know from the press and the English parliamentary debates that at present one can say in the Orient, “The arms are idle, and the storms of war are hushed”—­God grant, for a long while!  The armistice which has been concluded grants the Russian army an unbroken position from the Danube to the sea of Marmora, with a base which it lacked formerly.  I mean the fortresses near the Danube.  This fact, which is nowhere denied, seems to me to be the most important of the whole armistice.  There is excluded from the Russian occupation, if I begin in the north, a quadrangular piece, with Varna and Shumla, extending along the shore of the Black Sea to Battshila in the north, and not quite to the Bay of Burgas in the south, thence inland to about Rasgrad—­a pretty exact quadrangle.  Constantinople and the peninsula of Gallipoli are also excluded, the very two points on whose independence of Russia several interested powers are laying much stress.

Certain peace preliminaries preceded the armistice, which at the risk of telling you things you already know I shall nevertheless review because they will answer the question whether German interests are at stake in any one of them.  There is, in the first place, the establishment of Bulgaria “within the limits determined by the majority of the Bulgarian population, and not smaller than indicated by the conference of Constantinople.”

The difference between these two designations is not of sufficient importance, I believe, to constitute a reasonable danger to the peace of Europe.  The ethnographical information which we possess is, it is true, not authentic nor without gaps, and the best we know has been supplied by Germans in the maps by Kiepert.  According to this the national frontier—­the frontier of the Bulgarian nationality—­runs down in the west just beyond Salonica, along a line where the races are rather unmixed, and in the east with an increased admixture of Turkish elements in the direction of the Black Sea.  The frontier of the conference, on the other hand, so far as it is possible to trace it, runs—­beginning at the sea—­considerably farther north than the national frontier, and two separate Bulgarian provinces are contemplated.  In the west it reaches somewhat farther than the national frontier into the districts which have an admixture of Albanian races.  The constitution of Bulgaria according to the preliminaries would be similar to that of Servia before the evacuation of Belgrade and other strongholds; for this first paragraph of the preliminaries closes with these words, “The Ottoman army will not remain there,” and, in parenthesis, “barring a few places subject to mutual agreement.”

It will, therefore, devolve upon the powers who signed the Paris treaty of 1856 to discuss and define those sentences which were left open and indefinite there, and to come to an agreement with Russia, if this is possible, as I hope it may be.