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Even if the question became one between Austria and Russia we should not feel called upon to take a hand in it. It would then be a question of the supremacy of Teuton or Slav a struggle for supremacy in the Balkans; and our idea had always been to avoid being drawn into a war over a Balkan question.
Keltic speech was perhaps a little more different owing to its absorption of non-Aryan elements; but if we can judge of prehistoric German from what its eastern sister, the Gothic language, was like as late as the fifth century B.C., we can, without too much straining of facts, say that the prehistoric Greeks, when they passed across Hungary into the mountainous regions of the Balkans, and equally the early Italic invaders of Italy, were simply another branch of the Teutonic peoples later in separation than the Kelts, with whom, however, both the Italic and the Hellenic tribes were much interwoven.... Very English or German in physiognomy were most of the notabilities in the palmy days of Greece, to judge by their portrait-busts and the types of male and female beauty most in favour as far south as Cyprus in the periods when Greek art had become realistic and was released from the influence of an Aegean standard of beauty.
Put a group of hungry and badly trained boys in a cake-shop; set over them as a Board of Appeal unjust, selfish, and intriguing masters; and you may not expect peace. That has been for nearly a century the position in the Balkans. The Balkan League between Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, and Montenegro, formed about 1912, offered the first steady hope of a peaceful settlement in the peninsula.
Save for neutral Greece and Rumania, the Italian foothold at Avlona and ours at Gallipoli, the whole of the Balkans had passed into the enemy's hands; for Essad's rule was as brief as it was circumscribed, and the Italians withdrew from Durazzo as the Austrians advanced to the southern frontier of Albania, and menaced Greek territory far beyond the reach of protection from Salonika.
I cannot tell you whether we are going to hit them in Norway, or through the Low Countries, or in France, or through Sardinia or Sicily, or through the Balkans, or through Poland or at several points simultaneously. But I can tell you that no matter where and when we strike by land, we and the British and the Russians will hit them from the air heavily and relentlessly.
My previous experience in the Balkans and all that ilk had given me a thorough distaste of the people there. There is no mixture of races so dangerous. Nearly every man is for a small sum a traitor and potential assassin. I had had a taste of their methods and I didn't want another. Von Stammer must have noticed my hesitation, for he grinned and said: "Nervous about it?" I frankly was.
He, moreover, made a Convention with Austria by which the frontiers and dynasty of Serbia were guaranteed. One of those many "scraps of paper" which fill the World's Waste Paper Basket. It was now plain that Milan, if allowed to gain more power, would be an obstacle to Pan-slavism in the Balkans. The claims of the disinherited and exiled Petar Karageorgevitch began to be talked of.
The contention between France and Germany for the control of Morocco, the contention between Russia and Austria for the control of the Balkans, the contention between Germany and the other Powers for the control of Turkey these were the causes of the war. And this contention for control is prompted at once by the desire for power and the desire for wealth.
Germany once beaten in the West, it was argued, there would be no need to trouble about the Balkans or the amateur strategy which looked to Laibach or Aleppo as the vital spot in the situation. This principle was erected into a dogma, and dogma is a dangerous impediment to the art of war. War is an art, and therefore consists in the adaptation of varying means to conditions which are not constant.
Large bodies of footmen are crossing the Hellespont at Gallipolis and the Bosphorus at Hissar; in the region of Adrianople the country is covered with hordes of horsemen speaking all known tongues and armed with every known weapon Cossacks from the north, Arabs from the south, Koords and Tartars from the east, Roumanians and Slavs from beyond the Balkans.