The Bulgars soon found themselves in a desperate plight; no amount of stubborn valour at Carevoselo[15] could protect Sofia against the Rumanians or save Adrianople from the Turks. By the end of July the Bulgarian Government was forced to sue for an armistice to save the country from utter ruin. The day of reckoning had come for an inexcusable and odious crime.
In the first week of August, the delegates of the Balkan States assembled at Bucharest to negotiate yet another peace. Their task was not an easy one. Public opinion in Servia and Greece was exultant and clamouring for vengeance; in Turkey, Enver Pasha, the saviour of Adrianople, was at the zenith of his fame. From elements such as these a judicial frame of mind was not to be expected; they were blinded by hatred, pent up through decades of jealousy and fear. Enver cherished ambitious dreams, counted on German help, and knew no scruples. The majority of the Greeks and Serbs aimed at reducing Bulgaria to a state of impotence. Had it been possible, they would have exterminated the entire race.
A few courageous voices were raised in protest against a too brutal application of the principle that every country has the government it deserves; they declared it a crime to visit the sins of the rulers on their hapless subjects; they claimed that the Bulgarian people, as distinct from their rulers, had been punished enough already; that Bulgaria had been bled white and had made many sacrifices in a common cause; that she had lost much of her power for evil, and might, if properly handled, lose the will; they pleaded that justice should be tempered with common sense, if not with mercy, and urged that the folly of exasperating millions of virile peasants, and thereby driving them into closer union with the Central Empires, against all their racial instincts, should be foreseen and checked.
The men who dared to speak with the voice of reason were called pro-Bulgars in Greece and Servia; they went to Bucharest, hoping to find a more objective spirit.
Many factors combined to make the Rumanian capital the most suitable meeting-place for the Balkan delegates on this momentous occasion. Rumania had struck the decisive blow without bloodshed; her army was intact and her treasury was not depleted; her territorial claims were inconsiderable and had been submitted to the Great Powers for arbitration; lastly, in her King, Rumania possessed a personage peculiarly fitted to mould and direct, dispassionately, the proceedings of the Conference.