8 Balkan War

The course of the struggle is described elsewhere in this volume. Its event illustrates the danger of an alliance succeeding beyond the expectations in which it was formed. The constituent powers had looked for a stiff struggle with the Ottoman armies, but for final success sufficient to enable them, at the best, to divide Macedonia among themselves, at the worst, to secure its autonomy under international guarantee. Neither they nor any one else expected such an Ottoman collapse as was in store. Their moment of attack was better chosen than they knew. The Osmanli War Office was caught fairly in the middle of the stream. Fighting during the revolution, subsequently against Albanians and other recalcitrant provincials, and latterly against the Italians, who had snatched at Tripoli the year before, had reduced the Nizam, the first line of troops, far below strength. The Redif, the second line, had received hardly more training, thanks to the disorganization of Abdul Hamid’s last years and of the first years of the new order, than the Mustafuz, the third and last line. Armament, auxiliary services, and the like had been disorganized preparatory to a scheme for thorough reorganization, which had been carried, as yet, but a very little way. A foreign (German) element, introduced into the command, had had time to impair the old spirit of Ottoman soldiers, but not to create a new one. The armies sent against the Bulgarians in Thrace were so many mobs of various arms; those which met the Serbs, a little better; those which opposed the Greeks, a little worse.

It followed that the Bulgarians, who had proposed to do no more in Thrace than block Adrianople and immobilize the Constantinople forces, were carried by their own momentum right down to Chataldja, and there and at Adrianople had to prosecute siege operations when they ought to have been marching to Kavala and Salonika. The Serbs, after hard fighting, broke through not only into Macedonia but into Albania, and reached the Adriatic, but warned off this by the powers, consoled themselves with the occupation of much more Macedonian territory than the concerted plans of the allies had foreseen. The Greeks, instead of hard contests for the Haliacmon Valley and Epirus—their proper Irredenta—pushed such weak forces before them that they got through to Salonika just in time to forestall a Bulgarian column. Ottoman collapse was complete everywhere, except on the Chataldja front. It remained to divide the spoil. Serbia might not have Adriatic Albania, and therefore wanted as much Macedonia as she had actually overrun. Greece wanted the rest of Macedonia and had virtually got it. Remained Bulgaria who, with more of Thrace than she wanted, found herself almost entirely crowded out of Macedonia, the common objective of all.

Faced with division ex post facto, the allies found their a priori agreement would not resolve the situation. Bulgaria, the predominant partner and the most aggrieved, would neither recognize the others’ rights of possession nor honestly submit her claims to the only possible arbiter, the Tsar of Russia. Finding herself one against two, she tried a coup de main on both fronts, failed, and brought on a second Balkan war, in which a new determining factor, Rumania, intervened at a critical moment to decide the issue against her. The Ottoman armies recovered nearly all they had lost in eastern and central Thrace, including Adrianople, almost without firing a shot, and were not ill pleased to be quit of a desperate situation at the price of Macedonia, Albania, and western Thrace.

Defeated and impoverished, the Ottoman power came out of the war clinging to a mere remnant of its European empire—one single mutilated province which did not pay its way. With the lost territories had gone about one-eighth of the whole population and one-tenth of the total imperial revenue. But when these heavy losses had been cut, there was nothing more of a serious nature to put to debit, but a little even to credit. Ottoman prestige had suffered but slightly in the eyes of the people. The obstinate and successful defence of the Chataldja lines and the subsequent recovery of eastern Thrace with Adrianople, the first European seat of the Osmanlis, had almost effaced the sense of Osmanli disgrace, and stood to the general credit of the Committee and the individual credit of its military leader, Enver Bey. The loss of some thousands of soldiers and much material was compensated by an invaluable lesson in the faultiness of the military system, and especially the Redif organization. The way was now clearer than before for re-making the army on the best European model, the German. The campaign had not been long, nor, as wars go, costly to wage. In the peace Turkey gained a new lease of life from the powers, and, profligate that she was, the promise of more millions of foreign money.

Over and above all this an advantage, which she rated above international guarantees, was secured to her—the prospective support of the strongest military power in Europe. The success of Serbia so menaced Germano-Austrian plans for the penetration of the Balkans, that the Central Powers were bound to woo Turkey even more lavishly than before, and to seek alliance where they had been content with influence. In a strong Turkey resided all their hope of saving from the Slavs the way to the Mediterranean. They had kept this policy in view for more than twenty years, and in a hundred ways, by introduction of Germans into the military organization, promotion of German financial enterprise, pushing of German commerce, pressure on behalf of German concessions which would entail provincial influence (for example, the construction of a transcontinental railway in Asia), those powers had been manifesting their interest in Turkey with ever-increasing solicitude. Now they must attach her to themselves with hoops of steel and, with her help, as soon as might be, try to recast the Balkan situation.

The experience of the recent war and the prospect in the future made continuance and accentuation of military government in the Ottoman Empire inevitable. The Committee, which had made its way back to power by violent methods, now suppressed its own Constitution almost as completely as Abdul Hamid had suppressed Midhat’s parliament. Re-organization of the military personnel, accumulation of war material, strengthening of defences, provision of arsenals, dockyards, and ships, together with devices for obtaining money to pay for all these things, make Ottoman history for the years 1912-14. The bond with Germany was drawn lighter. More German instructors were invited, more German engineers commissioned, more munitions of war paid for in French gold. By 1914 it had become so evident that the Osmanlis must array themselves with Austro-Germany in any European war, that one wonders why a moment’s credit was ever given to their protestations of neutrality when that war came at last in August 1914. Turkey then needed other three months to complete her first line of defences and mobilize. These were allowed to her, and in the late autumn she entered the field against Great Britain, France, and Russia, armed with German guns, led by German officers, and fed with German gold.