I reached Belgrade early in April, 1914. The city had resumed its normal aspect. The General Staff were talking and planning war, the general public was more interested in the working of the Commercial Convention with Greece. In political and diplomatic circles vague references were made to certain concessions to Bulgaria in the Vardar Valley. These latter appeared to me to be so inadequate as to be hardly worth discussing, and yet, as matters stood, the Serbs refused to offer more. This attitude, however unfortunate, was more reasonable in 1914 than at any previous period. In the absence of direct railway communication between Greece and Servia, the Commercial Convention would lose half its point, since the only railway line available passed by the Vardar Valley through the heart of the “Contested Zone.” No practicable trace for another line existed, except a tortuous route impinging on Albania.
Ethnical and geographical conditions had conspired to make Macedonia a “Debatable Land,” the creation of an independent Albania had added fuel to the flames of discord, it had not only shortened the Serbo-Greek frontier and prevented all communication by sea, but, by thwarting Servian and Greek aspirations in that direction, had engendered in both countries an uncompromising state of mind. Bulgaria’s claims remained unaltered, they had become crystallized by defeat and disappointment; amid the shifting sands of Balkan politics they stood out like a rock.
The Great Powers had sacrificed the interests of Greece and Servia directly, and those of Bulgaria indirectly, on the altar of an Autonomous Albania. Ingenuous people claimed that this course had been dictated by high-minded motives, by a benevolent, if tardy, recognition of the principles of self-government, whose application in other lands could wait on this strange experiment. Naïveté is charming when not contaminated with hypocrisy, but one swallow does not make a summer; a single act, however specious, cannot efface a decade of intrigue.
An active economic policy in Macedonia had already been initiated by the Austro-Hungarian Government. The first move was characteristic, a share in the control of the Belgrade-Salonika Railway was claimed, on the ground that a large part of the capital for its original construction had been subscribed by citizens of the Dual Monarchy. British newspapers dealt fully with the financial aspects of the case, but refrained from criticizing a proposition which deprived a sovereign independent State of the sole control of a railway within its frontiers. The Servian Government tried to float a loan with which to buy out the foreign shareholders, but failed--high finance is international and obdurate to the poor. _On ne prête qu’aux riches_.[20]