farm laborer. When he speaks in public, a rare voice adds to his distinction of manner and the charm and magnetism of his personality. He grips and holds silent every audience he addresses. Such voices are not rare in Crete; "it takes the heart," as the French say. He always calls the people Paidia-Children.

VENIZELOS VERSUS GERMANY

The first thing Venizelos did was to take away from the royal princes all military rank except honorary distinctions. By so doing he promptly antagonized them all. There were four of them. Also, he called the second French military mission in 1908, whose main work was the establishment of the Greek commissariat and field artillery which counted, more than any other military ingredient, for the unexpected success of the Greek armies in their wars against Turkey and Bulgaria in 1912-13.

When the Balkan War broke in October, 1912, the world suddenly became aware of the real power of Venizelos, for he it was who had performed the impossible: had knit together the supposedly irreconcilable Balkan states into a compact Confederation, and had done his work so quietly that in all the diplomatic and secret services of all the Powers of Europe no one had an intimation of his plans until Montenegro suddenly jumped in on October 8th. Within a week the combined armies of the Confederation were driving the Turks helter-skelter out of Macedonia and Thrace. Almost they drove the Sultan and his Empire and his armies across the Bosphorus into Asia where they belong.

And at the head of the efficient Greek army, a surprise to all the world with its new commissariat and its new field artillery, Venizelos had the patriotism, the good sense, and the nerve to put the same Prince whom he had pulled down after the military revolution at Athens in 1906. In the intervening years he had studied that Prince. He had discovered his strong will, his high seriousness, his courage, simplicity, and native democracy. He knew that the military collapse of 1897 had occurred in spite of anything that Constantine could have done. The appointment of the hereditary Prince also

suppressed jealousies among the other generals, coördinated the army, and probably saved the transplanted monarchy, which at that time was tottering on its foundations. Another unsuccessful campaign in 1912 would have overthrown it.

Greece, as many people do not know, is a country managed by 500 families who hate one another like poison in true classic Greek fashion. The peasants, the hackdrivers, and the fishermen talk radical politics all day long, but when election day comes they vote for a member of one of these big aristocratic-i. e., "best," in the Greek sense-families. A republic for Greece would mean anarchy, chaos.

No one then appreciated, no one now appreciates, this situation more than Venizelos. Naturally and necessarily he is a monarchist. He would retire rather than threaten the monarchy. He has often been credited with presidential ambitions, but no supposition could be more wrong. In placing Constantine at the head of the army in 1912 he had the courage of his convictions.

As all the world knows, Constantine more than made good, more than justified the judgment of Venizelos. He was in Salonica within a few weeks, beating out the Bulgars into that much-desired haven by three hours. He fought some battles creditable to his leadership even though won against disorganized second-line Turkish troops, and he took the fortified city of Janina against a determined and able Ottoman resistance. When he marched home again at the end of the war he found himself as popular as he had been unpopular before. More than that, he found he had become a kind of demigod to the army.

WHAT HOLDS THE GREEK ARMY Constantine is the handsomest sovereign in Europe; a strong, tall figure, a strong face, pale, fair-haired, a Dane. Before the last wars he had become, in comparative idleness, rather stout. But a year of hard campaigning trained him down fine, made a Viking of him. His personality is like his figure and his face-strong. Less intelligent than his father, the late King George, he also lacks his father's magnetism and vivacity. He is rather heavy and slow

of address. It is a pleasure to hear him or any one of the princes, his brothers, speak, their voices are so deep and clear. But Venizelos could easily win a crowd away from him by sheer magnetism. In some respects he resembles in character the King of the Belgians, but is perhaps less chivalrous than Albert, less domestic, though equally honest, candid, and obstinate. He combines the rare genuineness of being in his court all king and in camp with other soldiers nothing but a soldier. He loves hard and he hates hard, is a man of deep passions, resentful, exceedingly proud.

You can imagine the hold a man of this kind maintains automatically upon soldiers. No wonder they adore him, with success as an additional reason. The Greek army is not aristocratic. In that it is like the French and Turkish armies and unlike the British and Russian armies. Peasants' sons are high officers in it. Constantine is exactly the same to all of them. The army is a unit behind him now and that is why what the King thinks or feels, and what the King decides to do, makes a difference in Greece.

Now let us turn for a moment from this consideration of personalities to matters geographical and political which will help to make clear the relation of Greece to Bulgaria and the relation of both to the gigantic European struggle.

The Conference of London, which concluded the first Balkan War in 1913, partitioned Macedonia fairly accurately on the basis of work done by the various Balkan states in overwhelming Turkey. It was arranged that Bulgaria should have Kavala and the rich tobacco region around Seres; Servia, which took a big slice of Macedonia, should nevertheless be cut off from access to the Ægean or Adriatic; Greece came up northeastward around the corner to the rich port of Salonica. The Treaty of Bukharest, which concluded six months later the second brief war between the members of the broken Balkan League, resulted in great territorial gains for Servia and Greece, obtained at the expense of Bulgaria. After all their heroic fighting all that was left to the Bulgars was about one fourth of their original Macedonian territory and the open Ægean

roadstead at Dedeagatch, where you can't unload a schooner when the wind blows strong from the south. strong from the south. Greece spread out eastward from Salonica to include Seres and Kavala; Servia walked off with all the rest of Macedonia and an Adriatic port.

It is this territorial situation which has formed for many months the crux of the Balkan deadlock. During fourteen months of the war it kept any one of the three states of Greece, Bulgaria, and Roumania from entering the conflict, and the inability of the Allies to solve it threw Bulgaria at length in October into the Germanic alliance while Roumania and Greece remained still nominally neutral.

The scene in which the great personalities, the diplomacy, and the international politics involved struggled during August and September for mastery may be called the field of Seres-Kavala. There, for two months, it was the Emperor versus Venizelos, or rather, the Emperor plus the Queen and the Greek King with the army behind him, plus the Greek expansionist ambition-all that line-up versus Venizelos and all the rest of Greece. (Greek expansionists must be carefully distinguished. Those just alluded to are the Greek continental expansionists; Venizelos himself wants-and has worked forGreek expansionism in the Ægean isles and the coasts of Anatolia.)

The Kaiser, as we all know, never wanted the Balkan Confederation to form again. The best way to prevent its forming was to keep Greece and Bulgaria irreconcilable on the question of their debated boundaries. Accordingly he created between them an Alsace-Lorraine called Seres-Kavala.

A good topographical map will show, east of Kavala, a natural boundary line of mountains and defiles forming an excellent basis for defensive works. Between Kavala and Salonica, on the contrary, the hills are rolling and low; it is an unnatural, a surveyor's, boundary, without even an ethnic value to recommend it. Furthermore, the territory all about Seres, between Salonica and Kavala and commercially drained through the latter port, is the richest in all Macedonia, particularly in tobacco for cigarette manufacture. A

large proportion of all our "Turkish" and "Egyptian" cigarettes come from the Macedonian plantations around Seres.

Neither Kavala as a port nor Seres as a gold mine was necessary to Greece, with plenty of similar territory and as good or better ports. Both were vital to an impoverished Bulgaria, without any unobstructed ports at all. But the commercial side of Greece is in many respects the heart of Greece; a typical Greek merchant makes a Jew look like a spendthrift. Commercial Greece craves Seres. And, more important still, the Greek General Staff sincerely believes Kavala is a necessity for Greece on account of the strategic value of the frontier. They know that the Salonica frontier is weak and could be defended only with great difficulty. The General Staff, therefore, organized and trained on French lines, is in its logical military ambitions working along lines which are in reality pro-German. Here, then, is where the King comes in with this military opinion strongly supporting him in what amounts to a pro-German attitude. The Chief of the General Staff, General Dousmenis, is another personality to be reckoned with in this military impasse. He comes of noble Venetian blood, was born in the Ionian Islands, and got all his military education in Germany. Grim, vain, hard-working, he resembles a German officer closely enough to be one, and he strongly supports the views of the King in favor of holding on for dear life to Kavala. Leaving personalities and politics quite out of the question, the dominant idea of the King and his General Staff was that Greece could not enter the war unless Bulgaria entered on the same side. It was for a long time abundantly evident that Bulgaria would under no circumstances enter the war on the Allies' side unless her territorial demands, including Kavala and, more recently, Salonica also, were complied with. So all through those long first fourteen months of the war Kavala held the key to Balkan disunion for the Kaiser.

Venizelos tried his best to deal with this situation and to defeat German diplomatic tactics. With the same unprejudiced same unprejudiced vision which he had brought to other

military affairs he clearly saw trouble in keeping Kavala away from the Bulgars. In his vehement desire to purchase the reëstablishment of the Balkan League and thus swing Greece into line against Germany he inevitably "got in wrong" with the King, the grasping commercial class, and the army, and that combination broke him for the second time in October. The trouble was that he had to fight almost single-handed. He was handicapped by what may variously be regarded as an unenlightened, or a stupid, British policy.

THE AUCTION POOL

In the auction pool in the southeast of Europe, where the nations which once constituted the Powers were frantically bidding against each other for Balkan support while their armies were fighting over most of the rest of Europe, the Allies made these offers-they made them, but they did not make them strong enough, did not insist upon them, buy them, compel them: They offered Kavala and Seres to Bulgaria and encouraged the reëstablishment of the Balkan League; likewise they offered to give back a good slice of Old Servia to King Ferdinand, except a generous strip bordering Albania, which would serve to keep the Servian-Greek frontier intact; they offered to compensate Servia with Bosnia and Herzegovina and such seaports on the Adriatic as Italy didn't want; and they offered to Greece her long-desired Ægean isles, populated almost entirely by Greeks since ancient times, Smyrna, and the rich Turkish Asiatic province of Aidin. In such a redrawing of the map Russia was to get both sides of the Dardanelles, Syria went to France, and England was to run the German-built Bagdad Railway down through the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates to a British Persian Gulf. But all this is dreaming. Let us get back to the facts.

In August and September both Greece and Bulgaria began to see things differently. It was not so much that they questioned the good faith of the Allies, but they began seriously to doubt the ability of the Allies to pay. And the farther into Russia Mackensen and Leopold and Hindenburg blasted their seemingly irresistible

way the lower fell the credit of the Allies, especially in Bulgaria. And all the time, day and night, Germany was busy working, persuading, buying, drugging, hammering away by any and whatsoever means to hold the Balkans safe until they could attend to them.

Since July, Greece has been overrun with Frenchmen and Englishmen, but plenty of Germans have been there, too. At the same time, on the far side of those mountains eastward from Kavala, Bulgaria is and has been for several months alive with Germans. They are on the railroad trains, on the tramcars, in the restaurants, in the factories. The infiltration is thorough, civil as well as military, and was recognized long before the time when, in October, German uniforms began to appear at the Bulgar concentration camps. The camps. The newspapers have been filling us up with wrong ideas about Bulgaria. The Bulgar's hatred of the Turk is now a long way in the background. Straight up in front of their eyes looms the vivid hate they feel for Servia, Roumania, and Greece, in that order. "Gott straffe Servia," they would say, if they could speak German, and in the case of Greece and of Roumania their hatred is further intensified by contempt.

The attitude of the Bulgar toward his Roumanian neighbor across the Danube is a good deal like that of a Texan toward his Latin neighbor across the Rio Grande. And the attitude of the Bulgar toward the Greek is like that of nearly all bigoted Christian communities toward the Jews, except that you must realize, in accounting for Bulgar or Turkish provincialism, that in the Levant a Greek is a Jew raised, or lowered, to the nth power.

The Greek military performance in 1912 and 1913 has done something to raise them in the estimation of the rest of Europe but it has not qualified either Ottoman or Bulgar opinions of them. Roumania has done nothing at all since Plevna to justify the military rating commonly accorded that country. For a number of years it has been credited with a paper strength which has made it appear the most formidable of the Balkan nations. When it comes to the acid test of actual

war on even terms or against great odds it may prove to be the weakest. It lacks the morale of Bulgaria. It lacks the unity of Servia. The Latin in its ethnic admixture has given it a lighter, a more trivial, flavor. Travelers get and propagate favorable ideas of the country because they are more comfortable there than in Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, or Turkey. There is more steam heat, electric light, open-faced plumbing; they are less bitten by bugs; there are more roads to motor over, pleasanter cafés to sit in; more amusement. You would think at evening time in any Turkish city that the coffeehouse life was the dominant social note of the town. So it is. But not in the sense of Paris, or Vienna, or Bukharest. You will never find a woman in a Turkish coffeehouse and the Turks never drink anything there but coffee.

In quite another sense café life is the dominant note of Roumanian cities. Coffee and conversation are minor considerations there. The impression conveyed in the cafés is borne out by men of different points of view who have lived in the country. In Transylvania, across the border, in the region colonized by half a million Roumanians, they are regarded by the AustroHungarian population as the gypsies are in southern France, almost as the Negroes are in our Southern States.

England and her allies missed their diplomatic chance in the Balkans. It was perhaps impossible for them to get enough concessions from Servia and Greece to buy Bulgaria's aid as they were allied to Servia and hoped for Greek aid. On the other hand it was comparatively easy for Germany to offer Bulgaria anything Servian which Bulgaria wanted, for Germany was already at war with Servia. But the Entente Allies not only failed to hold Bulgaria's neutrality but failed to gain Greece and Roumania as allies to meet the first shock of the Bulgar attack. Their diplomatic problem was greatly increased by the German military successes in Poland, which convinced Czar Ferdinand of Bulgaria that it was safe to take the Teuton side and made Roumania and Greece consider whether or not it was safe to join the Allies.