There is, of course, a certain amount of Serb intolerance in that letter, but it represents on the whole the truth.
So much for the different nations of the Balkans. The personalities of the Peninsula might provide a happy solution for the problems which the conflict of these mutually antipathetic racial elements create: for there is no fact more clear than that the general interest of the countries could best be served by a wise policy of compromise and co-operation, bringing its different elements together as the Swiss were brought together by a geographical rather than a racial reason. But unfortunately there are no personalities alike honest in outlook and great in power.
Four able and far-seeing men I have met in the Balkans: M. Nikolitch, President of the Serbian Parliament; General Demetrieff, Commander of the Third Army (which won the most notable Bulgarian victories), now commanding a Russian army; M. Venizuelos, Prime Minister of Greece; M. Take Jonescu, of the Roumanian Cabinet. All men of power, none seemingly has sufficient strength to impose his will not alone on his own country, but on the other Balkan States, and weld them into a Confederation which would be held together by a sense of common interests and common dangers.
King Ferdinand of Bulgaria has kept for years the centre of the Balkan stage to the European onlooker; and is still a great enough figure to give pause to those Bulgarian Nationalists who would exact from him reprisal for the terrible misfortunes of their country. But he is a man of audacity rather than of courage, and his ambition has been always more personal than national--to be Czar of the Balkans rather than to be the maker of a Balkan nation. Gifted with a great deal of diplomatic ability and with a soaring imagination, King Ferdinand has a serious obstacle in his personal timidity. To play a gambler's game one must be prepared at times to take the great risk. But King Ferdinand has many fears. He fears, for instance, infectious diseases morbidly, and the thought of a germ in the track could turn him from the highest of enterprises. Perhaps it was the fear of disease rather than of wounds that kept him so much in the rear of his army during the 1912 campaign against Turkey. But whatever the cause, his absence from the front showed a serious weakness of character in a man who aspired to carve out an empire for himself. The Bulgarian authorities, deceiving the Press almost as assiduously for the purpose as for the false representation that all the destruction of the Turkish forces was ascribable to the Bulgarian arms, gave to Europe inspiriting pictures of His Majesty following close on the heels of his soldiers in a military train which served him as a palace. The fact was that the ambitious but timid king kept very well to the rear, at Stara Zagora first and afterwards at Kirk Kilisse, with a great entourage of secret police. And when armistice negotiations were in progress he kept separate from his Cabinet as well as from his army. Affable in manner, industrious, pertinacious, well aware of the advantage of advertisement (my first meeting with His Majesty was due to the fact that he mistook my map case for a camera, and sent for me to photograph him while he stood on the bridge over the Maritza at Mustapha Pasha), of high ability, King Ferdinand did great things for his adopted country, but showed a fatal weakness of character when he had drunk deep of the wine of success. It is the fashion to blame him wholly now for the wild attack on Serbia and Greece. He may have been in part the victim of his advisers' folly in that. But without much doubt he could have vetoed the fatal move, if he had known his army from personal observation, if he had been down to the lines at Chatalja, and had looked closely into the besieging forces around Adrianople. Common sense would have told him that the attack on his allies was hopeless, if strength of character had not told him that it was wicked. But he neither knew the facts nor understood the ethics of the position.