Ferdinand of Bulgaria: The Amazing Career of a Shoddy CzarAnonymous
History
Ferdinand of Bulgaria: The Amazing Career of a Shoddy Czar
Anonymous
Ferdinand I, Czar of Bulgaria, 1861-1948
Such was the double treachery of which Ferdinand was guilty in 1914 and
1915. His treaties with the Teuton Powers appear to have been two. The
first was made with Austria in 1913, when he pledged himself to common
action against Serbia with that Power; and so, it may be, paved the way
to the assassination of the heir-apparent to the Austrian throne. The
other was made with Germany in July, 1915, when Ferdinand was
guaranteed Thrace, and a strip of Greek territory along the Ægean,
including the ports of Kavalla and Salonica.
In April of 1915 the Rumanian Minister at Sofia warned his government
that the agreement had been made, and Rumania in its turn warned the
Entente Powers. Later Greece warned the Entente of what was going on at
least twice. In the face of these warnings, the Entente Powers
continued to believe in Ferdinand. The Serbians, who knew his villany,
and were certain that he was casting in his lot with their oppressors,
wished to take the bull by the horns and attack Bulgaria while its
powerful friends were fully occupied with Russia and on the western
front. They were restrained by the Entente Powers; otherwise they would
have altered the whole course of the war.
I repeat that the Entente must have had better assurance than mere
protestations from Ferdinand to have trusted him so implicitly. His
reputation and his past career were for any one to read; yet in face of
all suspicious circumstances he was trusted. M. Joseph Reinach states
that when the documents of the negotiations are published by the
Entente Powers they will constitute a record in baseness and treachery.
For my own part, I conceive that nothing less than a treaty signed by
Ferdinand and his ministers will be brought forward in justification of
the latitude that was allowed to him.
The mobilization of the Bulgarian army was finally ordered upon the
flimsiest of pretexts, and its concentration upon the Serbian frontier,
concurrently with the advance of the German and Austrians upon the
doomed kingdom, follows inevitably. The rest is a matter of recent
history, still an incomplete chapter in the story of the Great War.
One effect of Ferdinand’s intervention was to unite Constantinople with
Berlin, and to make the British evacuation of the peninsula of
Gallipoli a necessity. Thus the Czar of Bulgaria was instrumental in
striking the hardest blow at the prestige of the British arms that has
been inflicted in the memory of living man. He effected it, not by
prowess in the field, but by an act of base and shameless treachery,
which involved his turning his back upon all the nations which he had
extolled as liberating influences, to which Bulgaria owed its very
existence. It involved him in an alliance with Turkey, the Power
against which he had been for a generation declaiming. But it was a
shrewd blow nevertheless, and it will be the fault of Great Britain
itself if the punishment for it is not conceived on a similar scale of
magnitude.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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