Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [93]
Surprisingly, the Bulgarians awaited the start of the Peace Conference with considerable optimism. The American representative in Sofia found their view “peculiar”: they somehow considered themselves one of the Allies. “They realize that they committed a ‘crime,’ as the Prime Minister called it, but once having admitted this fact, they seem to think that this is the end of the matter, and cannot seem to understand why there should be any hard feeling or resentment among the Allies towards Bulgaria, or why there is anything to prevent Bulgaria from resuming her pre-war position as ‘The Spoiled Child of the Balkans.’” Artlessly, the Bulgarian prime minister admitted that his country had made a huge mistake in joining Germany and Austria: “Bulgaria would never have gone into the war if it had realized that it would have to come into conflict with England and the great powers.” The Bulgarian people themselves had always opposed their wartime alliance, which had been imposed on them by “a small band of unscrupulous politicians in the pay of Germany.” The victorious Allies, in fact, owed Bulgaria a debt of gratitude for suing for an armistice and thus starting the process that ended the war.8
The Bulgarian government put particular faith in one power: the United States. Wilson was, it was said, widely admired by Bulgarians; in particular, they liked his principle of self-determination. This was shrewd: Bulgaria was not formally at war with the United States, and Americans were generally sympathetic, encouraged by the enthusiastic lobbying of American missionaries from the Protestant Board. (It was suggested by a cynic that the latter were uniformly pro-Bulgarian because Bulgaria was the only Balkan country where they had enjoyed any success.) American experts favored giving Bulgaria access to the Aegean, the southern Dobrudja and perhaps part of Macedonia. Bulgaria itself would have settled for even more. Like the other defeated nations—Germany, Austria, Hungary and Turkey—it was anxious to see the terms of its treaty. The government sent a memorandum to Paris with its demands, which included the whole of Thrace; “unreal and unworthy of its subject” was the view in the British delegation.9
Bulgaria’s southern boundaries could not be decided until a peace was worked out with the Ottoman empire, which was clearly not going to happen for some time. As far as Macedonia was concerned, the Allies eventually decided that they had enough to do without worrying about that unhappy, much disputed piece of territory. The British and the French agreed that it was dangerous to start meddling with borders established in the Balkans before 1914. Macedonia was left alone, even though this would leave a considerable number of Bulgarians under Yugoslav rule.
The British and the French might have been persuaded to break their own rule (as they later did when they took western Thrace from Bulgaria and gave it to Greece) if they had felt Bulgaria deserved it. They did not. When Yugoslavia claimed territory on Bulgaria’s western frontier to protect crucial railway lines and Belgrade itself against future attack, the British and the French were prepared to listen. The Italians, hostile to Yugoslavia, objected. Italian soldiers in the Allied occupying forces apparently let Bulgarian prisoners escape, dragged their feet on disarming the Bulgarian army and even supplied it with weapons. Eventually, over Italian objections, four pieces of territory, mainly inhabited by Bulgars, were handed over to Yugoslavia—not as much as it wanted, but too much for Bulgaria, which complained bitterly that it had lost all the strategic points in the mountains dividing