THE BULGARIAN VICTORY.
OUR contemporaries are too pessimist about recent events in the Balkan Peninsula. They may lead to a great war, or to an agreement of partition ; but as yet, the gain to the cause of freedom and progress has been considerable. The sufferings of the armies engaged have, no doubt, been lament- able. Neither of them has been adequately supplied with surgeons, or hospitals, or ambulance corps ; and the Red Cross societies and Knights of St. John, noble as their efforts have been, cannot make up all the deficiencies of organisation. The Servians, too, badly supplied with food, indifferently com- manded, and exposed to incessant attack, became at last panic- stricken, and fled, leaving hundreds of their wounded ex- posed on the hill-sides to perish miserably from cold, wet, and want of the commonest necessaries of life. A man with his leg shattered on the field cannot even procure water for himself. The Bulgarians, who are at home, and who are not unkindly, have done what they could, sending the wounded of both armies to the rear, to be attended to by degrees ; but the area covered by the fighting cannot even have been searched while the advance was still proceeding, and the amount of human misery between Pirot and Sofia must have been enormous. Nevertheless, we all die, and most of us die in pain, and there is a per-contra side to be taken into account. A new and probably a fine people has been born. The Bulgarians have always been there, and latterly have been free ; but they have hardly been a people. The world knew them to be industrious and orderly, and singularly disposed to acquire instruction ; but another capacity, that of dying when called upon, is required of a free people, and it was sus- pected that the Bulgarians did not possess this. They had not fought the Turks. They did not avenge Batuk. The Servians despised them ; and even the Greeks held them to be the favourites of fortune, and in no way entitled to deal with themselves as equals. They were looked upon, in short, as we look upon the Greeks, as a people who may benefit by freedom, but who cannot be relied on to fight as they should for its imme- diate acquisition. The events of a week have changed all that. Led by a gallant and able soldier, who is also their own elected Prince, the Bulgarian soldiery, hardly yet drilled, and with all officers above the rank of captain suddenly recalled to Russia, have shown themselves capable of swift mobilisation, of determined resistance under fire, and of bayonet charges so strenuous and bold that the Servians, a Slav people trained to arms from childhood, have been driven before them in headlong rout. The Bulgarians, therefore, can win pitched battles against equal foes, they will never again lose self-confidence, and they will henceforward deal both with Turks and Russians upon a different footing and in a widely different tone. Either might possibly conquer them ; but a conquest which will cost two corps d'arnde is not lightly undertaken, nor is the friendship of a people who can at call place sixty thousand efficient troops in the field ever lightly regarded. The Balkan Penin- sula, like the Italian, now includes a Piedmont ; and all of this generation know the difference that Piedmont made to the fate of Italy. The solidly-knit little State of fighting men furnished the spear-head to the Italian shaft, and when the hour arrived, Italy was free.
But, it is argued, what is the use of all this, when the great Empires to the North intend to govern the Balkans, and are possessed of irresistible military force? All this expenditure of life and energy only tends, it is said, to the advantage of the Romanoffs and Hapsburgs. Those mighty potentates, intimates the St. James's Gazette, like ancient gods, lie quietly with their thunder in their hands, and hardly reek in their
security and strength of the little events which pass below them. That bold figure is not unjustifiable, and we have pointed out for years the terrible danger which the geographical posi- tion of the Balkans involves to the freedom of her people. Italy leads nowhere ; but the Balkan peninsula bars the free access of eighty millions of Slays to the open water, which every great race, even if not maritime, struggles ceaselessly to reach. But are these mighty Powers any stronger than the two which, before 1860, refused union and freedom to Italy ; or, being stronger, are they more likely to agrees When Cavour began his work, Piedmont was no stronger than Bulgaria may yet be, while France held Rome,. and Austria was directly or indirectly supreme in every other petty State of Italy. To make the chance of freedom in the two Peninsulas equal, Austria would have to be garrisoning Constantinople to protect the Sultan," as France was protecting the Pope ; while Russia had a
Grand Duke in Servia, in Montenegro, and in Bulgaria, ready at any moment to obey her behests or admit her troops. Italy nevertheless became free, and so may the broader Penin- sula, which, though less thickly populated by more separated races, contains at least fifteen millions of brave men, who sub- stantially speak only two languages, and are almost forced by their circumstances into confederation. The two Powers which threaten her must quarrel sooner or later ; and whenever they fight, an alliance of the small States, with their 400,000 soldiers, could make victory incline to either aide, and claim freedom as their reward. They, moreover, and not the Empires, will be supported by the Western Powers, who, it must not be for- gotten, can throw a heavy weight into the scale without moving a soldier, the two great cities of the Peninsula lying at the mercy of any first-class fleet. The end may be delayed for years, as, in the mysterious providence of God, it so often is delayed ; but we see no ultimate reason for despair, and certainly there is no reason in the consolidation of the Bulgarians, or in the rise of their brave Prince to an effective leadership throughout European Turkey. That rise of itself alters all the conditions of the problem, for it pre- sents Europe with a man who, if the States of the Balkan once desired federation, might be elected Sovereign in all, and who, if so elected willingly, would certainly make a splendid fight for the freedom of his dominions. That was, after all, the way in which the work was done in Italy ; and though no Cavour has as yet appeared, we have in Prince Alexander a very effective representative of the part played by Victor Emanuel.
Previous page
