[Footnote 541:  See Times of May 30, 1913; Rankin, op. cit. p. 517.]

They may be disregarded here; for they were soon disregarded by all the Balkan States.  Seeking to steal a march upon their rivals, the Bulgar forces (it is said on the instigation of their King and his unofficial advisers) made a sudden and treacherous attack.  Now, the dour, pushing Bulgars are the most unpopular race in the Peninsula.  Therefore not only Serbs and Greeks, but also Roumanians and Turks turned savagely upon them[542].  Overwhelmed on all sides, Bulgaria sued for peace; and again the Great Powers had to revise terms that they had declared to be final.  Ultimately, on August 10, 1913, the Peace of Bukharest was signed.  It imposed the present boundaries of the Balkan States, and left them furious but helpless to resist a policy known to have been dictated largely from Vienna and Berlin.  In May 1914 a warm friend of the Balkan peoples thus described its effects:  “No permanent solution of the Balkan Question has been arrived at.  The ethnographical questions have been ignored.  A portion of each race has been handed over to be ruled by another which it detests.  Servia has acquired a population which is mostly Bulgar and Albanian, though of the latter she has massacred and expelled many thousands.  Bulgars have been captured by Greeks, Greeks by Bulgars, Albanians by Greeks, and not one of these races has as yet shown signs of being capable to rule another justly.  The seeds have been sown of hatreds that will grow and bear fruit[543].”  Especially lamentable were the recovery of the Adrianople district by the Turks and the unprovoked seizure of the purely Bulgar district south of Silistria by Roumania.  On the other hand, Kaiser William thus congratulated her king, Charles (a Hohenzollern), on the peace, a “splendid result, for which not only your own people but all the belligerent States and the whole of Europe have to thank your wise and truly statesmanlike policy.  At the same time your mentioning that I have been able to contribute to what has been achieved is a great satisfaction to me.  I rejoice at our mutual co-operation in the cause of peace.”

[Footnote 542:  Roumania’s sudden intervention annoyed Austria, who had hoped for a longer and more exhausting war in the Balkans.]

[Footnote 543:  Edith Durham, The Struggle for Scutari, p. 315.]

This telegram, following the trend of Austro-German policy, sought to win back Roumania to the Central Powers, from which she had of late sheered off.  In other respects the Peace of Bukharest was a notable triumph for Austria and Germany.  Not only had they rendered impossible a speedy revival of the Balkan League which had barred their expansion towards the Levant, but they bolstered up the Ottoman Power when its extrusion from Europe seemed imminent.  They also exhausted Servia, reduced Bulgaria to ruin, and imposed on Albania a German prince, William of Wied, an officer in the Prussian army, who was destined to view his principality from the quarter-deck of his yacht.  Such was the Treaty of Bukharest.  Besides dealing a severe blow to the Slav cause, it perpetuated the recent infamous spoliations and challenged every one concerned to further conflicts.  Within a year the whole of the Continent was in flames.