Paris Peace Conf. 184.01102/3½
Professor A. C. Coolidge to Professor Clive Day, of the Commission to Negotiate Peace
Dear Day: I have just had a long and interesting interview with Gueshov.2 As Bulgaria is perhaps out of the bounds of my vague bailie-wick, I am writing to you directly instead of reporting to the Commission. Gueshov, as you know, has been out of his country for some months and finds it difficult to keep in touch with it. He has almost no direct news from Bulgaria and not much from elsewhere except what appears in the papers. His main point was that according to the eleventh of the Fourteen Articles the Balkan questions will be settled according to principles of justice and that justice is all [Page 222] that Bulgaria asks for. I gently suggested to him that everybody else said the same thing, but he of course has no doubt in the justice of his own claims. He regards Macedonia as incontrovertibly Bulgarian and took the line that one ought to disregard all that was said by Bulgarians and Serbians, (he naturally has no use for Cvjich3), and confine oneself to the testimony of competent neutrals who were in a position to know. He instanced the Carnegie Report,4 the Encyclopedia Britannica (Bourchier), and the American Missionaries in the Balkans. I hinted that some of these authorities if neutral were not exactly impartial. A thing he laid particular stress upon, as do naturally the Austrians, Magyars and others here, was the unfairness of having their fate decided upon without their being consulted. Gueshov asserted that as Bulgaria had not been at war with the United States it would be unjust to her to have her destiny settled on the base of the Eleventh Article without her voice being heard. Incidentally he made the rather amusing point that if the Serbian view was accepted that the Macedonians were Serbians, why then so were the Slavs within the Greek boundaries, in which case the cry of a Serbia Irredenta would be soon be raised in a country much larger and more powerful than Greece.
I told Gueshov a little about the Division of Information in Paris and said that the Legation here could send to it any literature that he wished to furnish it, but advised him to spare you common or garden propaganda. He spoke bitterly of the Greek charges of Bulgarian atrocities, stating that it was just what the Greeks had done five years ago. They had cut off the Bulgarians from any communication with the outside world, and had then accused them of atrocities which were afterwards proved to be false. Here he referred to the Carnegie Report. He asked if I included anti-atrocity literature in the material it was useless to send. I said that the contradiction of any story was always worth while.
Gueshov took up the question of Bulgaria’s part in the present war. He declared she had been forced into it by the king and by her geographical position against the will of the great majority of the population and that the Bulgarian soldiers had been no more willing combatants against the Allies than had the Czecho-Slovaks and the Croatians. He adverted to the point that one of the three Yugo-Slav commissioners in Paris, the Slovenian Zolger, had been one of the chief aides of Seidler in Austria and contrasted this with the Bulgarian lack of representation. He said that he and the opposition had done everything they could to prevent the king from taking the fateful step, but unlike Venizelos they had had no Allied support to bring pressure, [Page 223] that they had asked for a landing at Saloniki, Dedeagatch or Varna, but they had been refused, that if Rumania had gone into the war when Italy did, as was expected, Ferdinand would never have dared to stir. He said that from Switzerland last summer he had implored the Malinov Ministry to prevent the king from going on his last visit to Germany, but that he supposed that Malinov had felt if he should do so, it would merely mean the recall of Radoslavov. He said that Ferdinand would never have come to Bulgaria if Alexander III had not refused to allow Prince Waldemar of Denmark to accept the crown offered to him, (in those days England was Ferdinand’s chief friend and supporter), that this foreign prince has brought untold evil on his people, and that it was most unjust that they should have to suffer for all the things he had done.
Finally he expressed the hope that if it was impossible for any Bulgarian representative to get to Paris, someone of you familiar with Balkan subjects might come to confer with him and others here.
I have also had an interview with Professor Constantine Stephanov, a professor in the University of Sofia. He is a Macedonian by birth and feeling. He declares that the Macedonians were largely responsible for the fact that Bulgaria joined the Central Powers in 1915 because their ill-treatment at the hands of the Serbians was such and their desire for the reunion of the different parts of their territory was so great that they did much to influence Bulgarian opinion. Professor Stephanov regards Macedonia as one and indivisible and also as overwhelmingly Bulgarian, though this last was not the line of argument he pursued. He declared that the only just thing to do as had already been indicated in the usual inevitable telegram to President Wilson was to have the whole of Macedonia occupied by impartial Allied troops and then a plebiscite taken of the wishes of the inhabitants. I asked him if that plebiscite were in favor of Serbia whether he would be willing to accept it for the whole of the country including even the most eastern and Bulgarian portion of it. He wriggled a little, but in general said yes, evidently not regarding the contingency as possible. I asked him how he should feel about the same plan being tried in Thrace. He expressed a willingness to which I do not believe Gueshov would agree. He repeated that the Macedonians had a strong local sentiment of their own and that they would prove practically impossible to govern against their own consent. We skirmished a little as to just what was Macedonia. He seemed to me not very practical, but sincere and interesting as expressing the Macedonian point of view.
We are delayed here by the length of the holiday but hope to get off Friday. Happy New Year.
Very truly yours