In the first place, it is useless to reckon, as some misguided people have done, on a really effective popular Bulgarian rising against the government. Tsar Ferdinand has always done just what he pleased in Bulgaria, and now that he is hand in glove with Berlin, the Germans will furnish him with the force needed to keep him on the throne. As for the Bulgarian people, they are no doubt the victims of the present situation, but so they will remain. Unquestionably they possess some sterling qualities. They are industrious, energetic, and sober. But they resemble the Prussians in many points, as the new German minister to Sofia announced recently (see _Le Temps_, 18th March, 1916). In fact the Bulgarian people has the keen eye to the main chance, the duplicity, and the domineering spirit of the Brandenburgs. Moreover, the Bulgarian people is the prey of the Bulgarian politicians, who, with the stubbornness of mules and a doggedness of which it is impossible to convey an idea, are perfectly irreconcilable on the question of Macedonia. No doubt the most astute among them might very well, as in 1915, pretend to negotiate with the Allies for the purpose of delaying the attack from the side of Salonika, of which Berlin is extremely afraid; but to believe it possible to come to a sincere and durable understanding with Bulgaria is merely to nurse the most pernicious of chimeras. To conclude a premature peace with Bulgaria would also entail on the Allies other fatal consequences, which it is easy to demonstrate. A treaty with the Bulgarians, who in complicity with the Germans have just massacred systematically an enormous number of Serbians, would be a manifest act of treason to Serbia; it would be to treat the crimes of the Bulgarians as if they actually conferred rights on the criminals. Clearly the public opinion of the Allied nations would never tolerate such an infamy. Besides, from a military point of view the calculation would be wrong. In order to avoid giving battle to 350,000 Bulgarians, whose forces must be divided between the Roumanian front and the Salonika front, the Allies would be obliged, in the first place, to dispense with the assistance of 150,000 Serbian soldiers, who obviously would refuse to march the day that the Allies entered into negotiations with the Bulgarians. Moreover, an understanding with Bulgaria would have the effect, at once political and military, of undermining the favourable disposition of the Greeks and Roumanians towards the Entente. As I have shown in Chapter VII, the hatred of the Roumanians and the Greeks for the Bulgarians is the great psychological factor in the Balkans.