At heart, the Bulgarians would be very glad of peace, since a continuation of the war can hardly procure for them any accession to what they already hold. On the other hand, the offensive of the Allies from Salonika, if it is well organized, ought to mete out to the Bulgarians the chastisement which they dread, especially since the check to the Germans before Verdun and the Russian successes in Armenia. The Bulgarian people is moreover deeply discontented at the heavy losses which it has already sustained by the sword and by disease in the campaign against Serbia. They see the whole of Bulgaria in the hands of German officers. As for the Bulgarian army, it is in a very unsatisfactory state, which has already led to local mutinies and many desertions. In these circumstances Bulgaria would evidently on all accounts do a good piece of business if she were to make a separate peace with the Allies. It must be clearly understood that this Bulgarian manœuvre is not openly avowed at Sofia; it is only carried on underhand, and probably, for the reasons we shall see, with the connivance of Berlin. Nevertheless, it is very dangerous, for, it must be said in the interest of the common Allied cause and of the truth, it has found supporters in the Allied countries among those who combine an invincible fatuity with ideas on the Balkans which are forty years behind the time. There are also some Russians who still imagine that in 1915 the Allied diplomacy made a mistake in not undoing the consequences of the treaty of Bukarest; whereas in point of fact that is just what has been done, and what, as we saw in Chapter II., § I., constituted the fundamental error of the Allied policy in the Balkans. According to these Russians the treaty of Bukarest should have been set aside in order to restore Bulgaria to the limits assigned to it by the treaty of San Stefano. This is the point of view maintained as late as March, 1916, by M. Milioukoff from the tribune of the Duma. I have explained (p. 138), why on the west the Bulgaria of the San Stefano treaty by no means corresponded to the racial facts, and for what reasons Macedonia, forming the south of Serbia, is very far from being Bulgarian. A striking proof of it is that the Bulgarians have just massacred there a quantity of Serbians. With regard to the ethnography of the region we may introduce into the discussion a new argument, as original perhaps as it is convincing. To tell the truth the most accurate account of the ethnographic position of Macedonia is that which has been handed down to us for generations by the Cooks—it is a _Macédoine_. In the great dictionary of Larousse, vol. x, p. 855, edition of 1873, and therefore anterior by five years to the treaty of San Stefano (1878), we read: “_Macédoine_ (Macedonia), a dish composed of a great number of different vegetables or fruits. ‘This word,’ says Ch. Nodier, ‘was probably first applied to a very