No one's eyes had been more keenly trained on the Dardanelles operations during the spring and summer than those of Ferdinand, King and Tsar of Bulgaria. Descended from Orleanist Bourbons on the mother's side and from the house of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha on the father's, he was purely Prussian in his realpolitik, and observed no principle in his conduct save that of aggrandizement for his adopted country and himself. The treaty of Bukarest in 1913 had given them both a common and a legitimate grievance, and the great war was welcomed in Bulgaria as an opportunity for revenge. The means would be the assistance Bulgaria might render to the victor, and who that might be was a matter of indifference if he possessed the essential qualifications of victory and insensibility to the feelings of Bulgaria's neighbours and to the sanctity of scraps of paper. This was a defect in the Entente from Ferdinand's point of view. Bulgaria could with difficulty be satisfied except by Serbian sacrifices which the Entente was loath to make. The Central Empires had no scruples on that point; but Bulgaria also wanted something from Rumania, Turkey, and Greece, and Turkey was an ally, Rumania a neutral whom it was not wise to offend, and Greece had as its queen a sister of the Kaiser who was distinctly her husband's better half. The Balkans Serbia alone, however, had received by the Treaty of Bukarest enough territory claimed by Bulgaria to provide a sufficient inducement for Bulgaria's intervention in the war, once she was persuaded that a victory of the Central Empires would place it at their disposal. Efforts were made by the Entente during the summer to counteract this attraction by inducing Serbia to reconsider her annexations in Macedonia. But her successes in the autumn of 1914 had stiffened her attitude, and in any case she could not be expected to make that comprehensive surrender of Macedonia which the Central Empires were quite prepared to promise Bulgaria. The decisive factor in the diplomatic situation was, however, the progress of German arms and prospects of German victory; for it was only the victor who would have any favours to bestow, and the course of the war in the summer convinced the Bulgarian Government that Germany was the horse on which prudent people should put their money. On 17 July a secret treaty was concluded guaranteeing Bulgaria in return for intervention the whole of Macedonia possessed by Serbia as well as an extension of Bulgaria's frontiers at Serbia's expense farther north. Bulgaria was also allowed to extort a separate price from Turkey in the shape of a strip of land along the Maritza controlling that river and Adrianople. An even more sinister concession to Bulgarian exorbitance was that of Epirus, a district assigned to Albania in 1913 but populated by Greeks who had revolted and claimed incorporation in Greece. This Prussian complaisance was doubtless due to the fact that Venizelos, who had