bitterness left by the treaty of Bucarest and the fixed idea that
Bulgarian Macedonia must come under the flag again. But though this was
true, and the army mobilized, and on a fine day every other man on the
streets of Sofia an officer, the stubborn Bulgars were still sitting
tight. If they got what they wanted without fighting for it, they were
not anxious to throw away another generation of young men as they had
thrown them away for nothing in the Balkan War.

By this negative policy--the pressure, that is to say, of not going to
war--Bulgaria had induced Turkey, by the time I came through Sofia again
three months later, to turn over enough territory on the east so that
the Bulgars could own the railroad down to Dedeagatch and reach the
Aegean without being obliged to go into Turkey and out again. It even
seemed that Bulgaria might be able to keep her neutrality to the end.
Her compromise with Turkey was not so odd as it seemed to many at first.
She had fought the Turks, to be sure, but now got what she wanted, and
when you come to think of it, it might well be more comfortable from the
Bulgars' point of view to have the invalid Ottomans in Constantinople
than the healthy and hungry Russians.

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