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Monastir is a filthy, ill-paved, characteristically Turkish town, which, before its decimation by the war, was credited with having some 60,000 inhabitants. Of these about one-half were Turks and one-quarter Greeks, the remaining quarter of the inhabitants being composed of Serbs, Jews, Albanians, and Bulgars.
And if they had been as weak as the King of Greece, as subservient as the King of Bulgaria, they would have had to reckon with a very different people from the Bulgars and the Greeks a nation that might quite conceivably have turned Italy into a republic and ranged her beside her Latin sister on the north in the world struggle.
Now that interest, it was obvious, could be so fully and rapidly furthered by the Central Empires, and in the judgment of the Bulgars with such finality and at the cost of so few sacrifices, that it was sheer impossible for the Entente Governments to attempt to compete with those. Bulgaria demanded immediate possession of Central Macedonia and the permanent weakening of the Serbian State.
But from the sixteenth century onwards the control of the Sultan declined, power became decentralized, the Ottoman Empire grew ever more anarchic and the rule of the provincial governors more despotic. But the Mohammedan conquerors were not the only enemies and oppressors of the Bulgars.
In the course of history this process has been emphasized rather than diminished, and to-day the Serb race is split up into six political divisions, while Bulgaria, except for those Bulgars claimed as 'unredeemed' beyond the frontier, presents a united whole.
The Bulgars were subjected to almost annual attacks on the part of Basil II; the country was ruined and could not long hold out. The final disaster occurred in 1014, when Basil II utterly defeated his inveterate foe in a pass near Seres in Macedonia. Samuel escaped to Prilip, but when he beheld the return of 15,000 of his troops who had been captured and blinded by the Greeks he died of syncope.
In the north-east are the Roumanians, a Romano-Slavonic race long ago Latinised in speech and habit of mind by contact with Roman soldiers and settlers on the Lower Danube. South of that river there dwell the Bulgars, who, strictly speaking, are not Slavs but Mongolians.
A branch of the Sofia-Constantinople railway line runs northeast to Yamboli, on the Bulgarian frontier. Between Yamboli and Kirk-Kilesseh is a highway the Turkish kind of highway and no unfordable streams or other natural obstacles to an army's progress. At Yamboli the Bulgars concentrated their third army corps, under General Demetrief, and a portion of their second.
Of the three Slavonic nationalities already mentioned, the two first, the Bulgarians and the Serbo-Croats, occupy a much greater space, geographically and historically, than the third. Of the Bulgars and Serbs it may be said that at the present moment the former control the eastern, and the latter, in alliance with the Greeks, the western half of the peninsula.
Long before the war-cloud burst, the history makers of Berlin recognized the fact that the key to the Dardanelles lay in Sofia, and not only to the Dardanelles, but also the key to the Near East. The statesmen of Austria and Germany discerned that the Bulgars under their guidance could be got to do for Turkey what Japan hoped, and still hopes, to effect for China.
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