Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [92]
If the Rumanians were the Neapolitans of the Balkans, the Bulgarians, some five million of them in 1919, were the lowland Scots. Dour, hardworking, thrifty and taciturn, they had a reputation for stubbornness. As a local proverb had it, “The Bulgarian will hunt the hare in an ox-cart, and catch him.”3 In the Great War, the hare Bulgaria wanted above all else was Macedonia, a goal that was shared by their king, an ambitious and wily German prince known to Europe as Foxy Ferdinand. Possession of Macedonia would give them control not only of the Aegean coast but also of the valleys and railways that linked central Europe with the south and the Middle East. After some calculation, Ferdinand and his government decided that the Central Powers offered the better deal and so in the autumn of 1915 Bulgaria attacked Serbia. The Allies declared war. Bulgaria enjoyed a brief period of success, during which it seized the southern Dobrudja and much of Macedonia, but by 1918 its armies, short of weapons and food, could no longer fight. Bulgaria was the first of the Central Powers to surrender.
With Bulgaria’s defeat, Ferdinand abdicated and went back to his considerable estates in Austria-Hungary and to bird-watching, his one great passion in life apart from his mother. His successor was his son Boris, a thin and unhappy young man. Boris’s main pleasure was driving trains; engine drivers on the Orient Express were warned not to let him anywhere near the cab. The young king’s new subjects thought him a fool or worse; most observers did not think he would last long on the throne, a view he himself shared. The Allies fretted from a distance. Would Bulgaria go communist? What if it refused to sign a peace treaty? As the British military representative pointed out in the summer of 1919, “the Allies had no troops, and, if a national uprising were provoked, it would be impossible to stop it.”4
Much depended on the flamboyant figure of Alexander Stamboliski, “like a brigand, moving through a blackberry bush” in the view of a British observer. The leading republican in Bulgaria, Stamboliski was the opposite of Boris in every way: powerful, crude, self-confident and energetic. He did an hour of gymnastics a day in his little farmhouse. Unlike Boris, he was not remotely in awe of Ferdinand. When Bulgaria was tilting toward Germany and Austria-Hungary, he had not only attacked the king in a private audience but had published the details in his paper, for which he was sent to prison.5
Stamboliski gloried in his peasant background. Although he had gone to university in Germany, his language was vivid with bulls mating and chickens clucking. He was not, as many suspected, a communist, but rather a peasant socialist, suspicious of both communism and capitalism; this was an appealing combination in a country where there were many small farmers. He articulated their suspicions of townspeople and the upper classes. “Who sent you to the trenches?” he asked. “They did. Who made you lose Macedonia, Thrace and Dobrudja?”6
In September 1918, as the Bulgarian armies collapsed, Ferdinand, in one of his last acts, sent for his old enemy. Stamboliski calmed the mutinous soldiers. By the following autumn he was prime minister. Curiously, he made no move to abolish the monarchy, perhaps because he had developed a soft spot for the “kinglet” Boris. The truth was, Bulgaria could not afford further upheavals. The Turks and the Bulgarians had loathed each other for years. Rumania had troops on the northern border and was preparing to move south. Greece was massing troops on the southern border and complaining about Bulgarian crimes, including the theft of cows. Only Yugoslavia offered some hope for friendship. An old dream that Serbia and Bulgaria might form a great South Slav state was not completely dead in either country. (Indeed, it was