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When hostilities broke out in 1914, when Serbia was defending herself against the Austrians, King Ferdinand of Bulgaria, the secret ally by treaty of Austria, did everything possible to forward his designs against the Serbs and sent armed Bulgar bands into Serb Macedonia.
Medjidis, cheriks, piastres, and paras now take the place of Serb francs, Bulgar francs, and a bewildering list of nickel and copper pieces, down to one that I should think would scarcely purchase a wooden toothpick.
You can not laugh at a Hindoo or a Korean; you can hardly force a smile to your lips over the conduct of a Bulgar, a Serb, or a Slovak. You are beginning to find something comic in the Italian, because you are beginning to know him. And all the world laughs at the Irishman, because all the world knows him and loves him.
In Albania, as elsewhere, the feuds of rival races had drenched the Balkan lands with blood; Greek and Bulgar forces had fought near Salonica, and there seemed slight chance of a peaceful settlement in Central Macedonia.
The Greek element tends to predominate towards the coast and the Bulgar towards the interior, but there are broad zones where Greek and Bulgar villages are inextricably interspersed, while purely Greek towns are often isolated in the midst of purely Bulgar rural districts.
The ethnographical questions have been ignored. A portion of each race has been handed over to be ruled by another which it detests. Servia has acquired a population which is mostly Bulgar and Albanian, though of the latter she has massacred and expelled many thousands.
But in reality the Bulgar population in what was European Turkey was found only eastward of the Struma in Thracia including Adrianople. Those regions formed the ample and legitimate field of ambition for the unification of the Bulgars.
I returned to London and read shortly afterwards in The Times that Macedonian troubles had settled down and recollecting that at Ipek I had learnt they had not yet begun I wrote and told The Times so. But it was far too well informed to print this statement. Had it not withdrawn its correspondent? And, as Rizoff had told me, a general Bulgar rising broke out all through Macedonia in August.
The eastern section, conveniently known as Thrace, consisted of the lower basin of the Maritsa. As far as Adrianople the population was Bulgar, but south of that city it was succeeded by a Greek element, with a considerable sprinkling of Turkish settlements, as far as the sea.
"Is it a wonder that we were a conquering race, that we were proud, that when the Magyar, the Lombard, the Avar, the Bulgar, or the Turk poured his thousands on our frontiers, we drove them back? Is it strange that when Arpad and his legions swept through the Hungarian fatherland he found us here when he reached the frontier, that the Honfoglalas was completed there?
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