Between the Greeks and Bulgarians there was never a truce save in winter, when the snow lay deep upon the Balkans, but sometimes the Serb would join the Greek bands in their attacks on the Bulgarians. Thus organised brigandage terrorised the countryside, and the bands, when they ran short of money or supplies, did not hesitate to rob even the people of their own kin, whose cause they were espousing, levying blackmail upon them, and burning their villages if demands were not satisfied. It is not to be wondered at that a large proportion of the Christian population found the succour of their ferocious brethren somewhat irksome, and were ready to welcome the pacific programme of the Young Turks. It will be remembered that when Bulgaria declared her independence last year the Bulgarian peasants in Macedonia held meetings at which they denounced the Principality and sent a memorial to Prince Ferdinand to warn him that they would hold him responsible for whatever evil might now befall them, as the result of his action. Of all these Christian propagandists the Bulgarians aroused most sympathy in Europe; for they are a brave and straightforward people. They had good reason to hate the Greeks, who had always persecuted them. When, in 1903, the Bulgarian exarchists in Macedonia, with their hundreds of small armed bands, carried on a gallant but hopeless guerilla war against the Turkish regular troops, the Greek Macedonians remained neutral, but worked against their fellow-Christians after a fashion characteristically Hellenic; they assisted the Turks by betraying and denouncing to them the Bulgarian rebels; for in their zeal to forward their ultimate political designs they were not ill pleased to witness the extermination by the Turks of their fellow-Christians who repudiated the Patriarch and refused to become Hellenised. It was not until 1904 that Greek bands, led by officers of the Greek regular army, crossed the frontier into Macedonia to wage war not only against the propaganda of the Bulgarian exarchists, but also that of the Wallach inhabitants, who desired to throw off the tyrannical supremacy of the Greek Patriarch and have an Exarch of their own, as the Bulgarians had, with their own schools and churches in which their national language could be used. The Sultan, who was ever playing one Christian sect off against another, and made no real effort to stop the fratricidal strife that served his designs, now gave his encouragement to the Wallach propaganda, for this did not threaten the integrity of his Empire as did the propaganda of the Greeks and Serbs, there being no question of annexation of any Wallach districts of Macedonia to the distant kingdom of the Wallachs’ kin, Roumania.