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1912] I WARN ST. PETERSBURG
diplomacy should consist in avoiding all conflict in the
Near East, I, as representative of Russia, was
completely at one with King Ferdinand the moment it was
a question of avoiding the possibility of war.
Consequently, in the course of conversation I tried to induce
him to express more definitely his dread of a collision
with Turkey; but the King avoided doing this : he truly
dreaded war, but he was not going to have it said that
he dreaded it.
In the dispatches which I sent off every fortnight
to St. Petersburg, to M. Neratoff and then to M.
Sazonoff on his return from Davos, I related in detail
the progress of the Serbo-Bulgarian negotiations ; but
each of my dispatches was accompanied by a private
and confidential letter in which I did not omit to point
out the danger of war which might be brought about by
the Serbo-Bulgarian agreement, so much extolled and
desired by us. I laid great stress on the facts that the
negotiations were now exclusively concerned with
territorial demarcation and with the defining of a
frontier in spe between Bulgaria and Serbia; that
throughout the conferences I could not observe a desire
to arrive at a really cordial agreement between the two
countries; that these conferences were assuming a
character of mere political opportunism, and that the
Italo-Turkish war which was going on meanwhile
certainly incited the Balkan States to action. Each time
the answer from St. Petersburg was to the effect that we
certainly would not hear of an armed collision in the
Balkans, and that everything must be done to prevent
such a collision, but that, on the other hand, a
Serbo-Bulgarian agreement would be particularly welcome and
agreeable to us, because it would constitute an effectual
barrier against Austro-German penetration in the
Peninsula. In the following dispatch I expressed my
complete adherence to this point of view of the Ministry,
but at the same time I reiterated my apprehensions.
To which the answer was once more that " although on
the one hand one would . . . etc. . . . notwithstanding,
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