Anonymous

“ Russia saw it as the triumph of the Slav race. France saw the Latin idea conquering Teuton “kultur.” Great Britain dreamed of the victory of Christianity over the heathen. And all the time Ferdinand stood by his throne at Euxinograd, and dreamed and schemed and plotted. Races and creeds alike were of no account to Ferdinand, the man of no race who had committed apostasy in the person of his own infant son. He, the fop, the scented darling of French drawing-rooms, saw himself the heir to Constantine, the successful imitator of the great Bulgarian Czars Samuel and Simeon. ”

“ The brutal irony of Wilhelm II was probably accepted by crafty Ferdinand as one more added to the long list of insults he has received at the Kaiser’s hands. The Czar of Bulgaria has had all sorts of good qualities claimed for him by his admirers, but the most servile of his flatterers has never ventured to claim that he has anything of the soldier in him. That he neglected the common employment of the youth of his time and his class for the fascination of the study of nature, and that military matters roused in him the deepest aversion, is conceded by friend and foe alike. ”

“ I bring to the cognisance of the Bulgarian nation that war is declared. I order the brave Bulgarian army to march on the Turkish territory; at our sides, and with us will fight, for the same object against a common enemy, the armies of the Balkan States allied to Bulgaria—Serbia, Greece and Montenegro. And in this struggle of the Cross against the Crescent, of liberty against tyranny, we shall have the sympathy of all those who love justice and progress.... ”

“ His creatures lived to murder Stambuloff’s friend Petkoff. They lived to wax fat in idleness in the cafés of Sofia; some of them are alive at this day. Their deeds are known and they make no concealment of them. For Ferdinand is on their side. Well has he kept his wise vow to be on the side of the assassins.
Not that he would stoop to assassination himself. He is always absent in Carlsbad when any of this vile work is in train. He himself has a sensitive disposition that revolts at all deeds of violence and bloodshed. As we shall see, he cannot even bear to see a dumb animal suffer. ”

“ In Bulgaria there were no inherited titles, no formalities, no niceties of social intercourse. Like many a man who is incapable of refinement and courtesy of manner, the Bulgarians, by exaggerating their defects, produced the impression of blunt honesty and straightforwardness. They prided themselves on their Spartan simplicity, and were for ever talking about it.
Their boastings about their lack of ceremoniousness gave Ferdinand the clue to the weak spot in the Bulgarian character. He knew that the truly simple and unaffected man is not even aware of the virtue of his simplicity ”

“ But if Ferdinand knows nothing else, he knows how to wait. He had waited many years for the chance of a Principality. He waited ages to bring about the downfall of Stambuloff. He waited even longer for the recognition by the Powers of Europe of his claim to be considered Prince of Bulgaria; and he waited nearly a quarter of a century to declare himself Czar of Bulgaria and independent of Turkey. None knows better than he the virtue of masterly inaction. ”

“ For the rest, the Prince Ferdinand who first affronted the eyes of the rough Bulgarians was an exquisite, with artificially waved and golden locks, white hands with long slim fingers, a small waist confined by obvious corsets, and cold blue eyes that sparkled with self-esteem.
A quarter of a century has not served to modify the dominance of his all-pervading nose, though it has altered the rest of the man in no small degree. ”

“ And there is the secret of the long reign of a Prince over whom the shadow of assassination and the dread of deposition have floated ever since his first appearance in Sofia. The Bulgarians despise what they understand, they have a contempt for those who stoop to please them. They keep a regard for Ferdinand because he treats them as an inferior race; in their heart of hearts they are proud to be ruled by this fine product of two races who, in the words of one of their own writers, “combines German steadiness with French dash.” ”

“ It must be remembered that the difficulty of disposing of Constantinople when the Turks shall have been deprived of its possession has remained for nearly a century the sole reason why the crescent still floats over the minarets of Stamboul. The inevitable end of Ottoman rule in Europe, though hastened by the fatal blunder which threw Turkey into the fray with the Teuton races, was none the less inevitable in the sight of all thinking men long before the first Balkan war. ”

“ At the present time the Bulgarian is emerging from the peasant stage. The leading men of the country are the educated sons of peasants, with the habits of peasants. The traditional simplicity of their class is a convenience to such men, and they have made a fetish of it. Among them has rapidly grown up a military caste, and a bureaucratic caste as well. Both have thriven in the hot-house atmosphere created by Ferdinand, with his ostentatious Court and his extensive secret service.
But the soul of Bulgaria is a peasant soul, brutalized by 500 years of repression and stagnation. ”

“ There can be no other inducement than the strong constraint imposed by the German forces who have taken possession of the Balkans. It is dangerous to prophesy with a man so elusive as Ferdinand, but he appears now to be on the threshold of the most difficult stage in his career. He has strong enemies within his own State, and will have to encounter the most bitter opposition from the open enemies arrayed in arms against him.
Some, at least, of his friends are palpably lukewarm. No genuine tie could possibly link Turkey with Bulgaria. ”

“ Of course it is not possible to speak with any confidence of the manner of a man so entirely artificial as Ferdinand. He has a separate manner for every occasion and for every person with whom he comes into contact. As we have seen, his manner to the Sofiotes is ever one of aloof and portentous gravity. This pose of the monarch absorbed in the affairs of State is not an original one. It is copied from the Kaiser, who has for many years taken the utmost pains to avoid smiling in public. ”

“ For twenty years the Lesser Czar has walked under the shadow of that dead hand; has walked so warily that the horrid death for which his enemies destine him has not yet overtaken him.
For Ferdinand had taken his precautions long ere he had his enemy done to death by hired braves. He knew he was going to a land where the knife played an important part in affairs of State. “In our future dominions,” wrote the Count de Grenoud, who accompanied him on this journey in disguise to Bulgaria to assume the purple, “people are assassinating each other. ”

“ The influence of the heir to the throne ran through all the affairs of Austria, and it was Ferdinand’s lot to come under that powerful influence at the very time when he was deprived of his loving and long-tried adviser, the woman who had shaped his life to success.
Austria to-day remains the sole Power of Europe where the old order still reigns. ”

“ But Ferdinand has maintained his distance with the new Bulgarians as with the old. To be hooted at the theatre by a mob of students is no rare experience with him; it drives every vestige of colour from his flabby cheeks. ”

“ THE DEAD HAND In a little house in Sofia lives the widow of Stambuloff, once the most brilliant and beautiful woman in Sofia, now a withered crone who continues to live on for a cherished purpose. Her most treasured possession is the withered hand of a dead man; the hand of Stambuloff, the Bismarck of the Balkans. The woman and the dead hand wait Christian burial until the day when vengeance shall have been exacted from his murderer, Ferdinand, Czar of Bulgaria. ”

“ Ferdinand was aided in his scheme of governing Bulgaria by the very mixed state of the political parties in that country. Of these parties there are no less than ten, a circumstance which in itself is most favourable to the underhand methods which are a second nature to the man who calls himself the Czar of the Bulgarians. But the foreign policy of this parvenu principality involved the exercise of an immensity of tact and discretion, and Ferdinand found the experience, the ability and the connexions of his mother more than invaluable; they were indispensable. ”

“ Ferdinand, on the other hand, had an upbringing that was essentially characteristic of the old France; not that new France which fills the whole civilized world with delight and admiration. He has constantly posed as French in culture, in sympathy and in aim. France early took him to its generous arms, and there is every excuse for the French trusting in his blandishments; the generous spirit of France is incapable of crediting that any man of French extraction could stoop to such perfidy as Ferdinand has displayed. ”

“ In the year 1913 Bulgaria liberated, at great sacrifices also, 3,000,000 of her population in Macedonia and Thrace, which Russia took and distributed among her new protégés, Rumania, Serbia and Greece. And to-day Bulgaria and Russia are quits. We have paid all our debt to Russia. To-day we can say: We have secured our own liberty by our own arms. ”

“ He sought the first excuse for returning to Sofia, and only breathed freely when safe again under the care of his trusted Court physician.
Ferdinand ought to be inured to threats of assassination, for not a week passes but he gets threatening letters by the post. But the receipt of a bottle labelled “typhus bacilli” never fails to make him livid with fear. The sight of men cleaning off from the palace walls drawings of himself suffering hideous deaths—Ferdinand is easy to draw, and it is a favourite students’ amusement—always sets him chattering with rage. ”

“ Black, purveyor of meat, is in reality none other than that dangerous alien Herr Schwartz, the maker of German sausages. Our gallant allies of France have been apt to wonder at the laggard hesitation of us British in learning and applying this lesson. Yet when the history of the great war comes to be written frankly and fully, it may well be revealed that one of the hardest knocks delivered to the allied cause was due to the incurably optimistic idea prevailing among Frenchmen in the highest places that Ferdinand Saxe-Coburg Cohen was really Ferdinand de Bourbon. ”

“ With the exception of the expensive capital, Bulgaria remains as Stambuloff left it. He claims, this shoddy Czar, that he has worked unremittingly to improve a semi-barbarous kingdom; while he has been engaged in the most trifling and useless occupations. Beyond ministering to his own inordinate vanity, and scheming darkly to some one else’s disadvantage, all his occupations are as childishly futile as those I have described. ”

“ Thus Tino the Undecided on his quondam Allies, who from time immemorial were held by the Greeks to be barbarians pure and simple. The taxes of Stambuloff and the sophistication of Ferdinand may have sufficed to convert Sofia from a city of sewers and filthy mosques to a modern capital with electric light and tramways, gardens, museums and broad boulevards, but a quarter of a century has not changed the heart or the outlook of a single Bulgarian peasant. ”