As for the “floating” Bulgarians, after a Serbian occupation which had lasted only five months since the treaty of Bukarest, many of them already proclaimed themselves Serbs. For example, the Serbian mayor of the little town of Strouga had been in Turkish times the pillar of the Bulgarian propaganda in the district of Strouga. Similar cases were very numerous. The Bulgarians of Sofia, unable to deny this wholesale transformation into Serbians of quondam Bulgarians who had been raked into the fold by the propaganda of the Exarchate, gave out that this sudden conversion was the effect of that reign of terror which, according to them, the Serbians resorted to for the purpose of establishing their dominion in Macedonia. The allegation seems to me untenable. I traversed most of the roads of Serbian Macedonia in the winter (January, 1914), accompanied only by one or two persons. I very often met Serbian soldiers, who came from the garrisons on the Albanian frontier and were going on furlough to Northern Serbia. Now these soldiers were travelling singly or in groups of two or three. With nothing but a walking-stick in their hand they were making their way over the 60 or 70 kilometres which separated them from the nearest railway. If the country had really been inhabited by convinced Bulgarians who detested the Serbians, is it not evident that there would have been attacks on these isolated and defenceless Serbian soldiers? But there were no such attacks, and from personal observation I can affirm that the most complete tranquillity prevailed in Serbian Macedonia, which in the days of the Turks had been the scene of incessant murders; and these murders were generally brought about by the terrorist means employed by the Bulgarian propaganda. What is certain is, that at the beginning of 1914 the “floating” Bulgarians, who were in fact the more numerous, acquiesced without resistance in the Serbian rule and called themselves Serbians. The Bulgarian Exarch, Mgr. Joseph, who had organized and directed the Bulgarian propaganda since 1870, was not at all surprised at this result. He acknowledged to me at Sofia, in February, 1914, that the Bulgarian game was up in the south of Macedonia, and that in a short time most of the adherents whom he had enlisted in former days would prove themselves very good Serbians. Indeed, he had made up his mind to it, for he had been opposed to the attack of June, 1913, on the Serbians and the Greeks, and he thought that Bulgaria should accept a situation for which she herself was responsible, and of which she must bear the consequences.