in: there was a brief armistice; a conference in London was apparently on the point of achieving a settlement, when the Young Turks suddenly recovered control at Constantinople and rejected the peace terms. The fighting started again in February. Janina, Adrianople, Scutari fell in rapid succession. The Powers stepped in again, the armistice was renewed, the London conference was reopened, and at the end of May, 1913, the treaty of London was signed.
Much as after Japan's triumphant victory over China, the Powers which had merely leaked on and wait ten notes arranged matters according to their own ideas, to the unmitigated dissatisfaction of every one of the states which had shared the triumphs of the war. But the most — and most justly — dissatisfied was Bulgaria, which had been allotted the hardest task, achieved the most striking victories and got next to nothing for her pains. In an evil hour Bulgaria resolved to remedy the injustice by a sudden attack (June 29) on Serbia, to which had been allotted portions of Macedonia that she regarded as rightfully her own. The Serbs defeated the Bulgars, the Greeks came in to the support of the Serbs, Rumania joined in on her own account, and the last state of Bulgaria was worse than the first. In August she was compelled to accept the treaty of Bukarest, whereby she lost territory to Rumania, to Serbia, to Greece and finally to Turkey. Before, if she had not the spoils she had at least the honours. Her tragic blunder had lost her the honours, and subjected her to actual spoliation; but it had done more. It had shattered the new accord among the Balkan states, and brought back the old atmosphere of brooding and vindictive suspicion.
The Central Powers would have profited by Bulgaria's victory over the other members of the now shattered league, of which, on the other hand, the consolidation would have been particularly inconvenient for Austria. As matters stood, the state which gained most by the war was the one whose depression she most desired — Serbia. But Serbia had failed to gain access to either the Adriatic or the Aegean sea; her want of a seaboard made it the easier to bring a strangling economic pressure to bear on her, and she had been deprived of Monastir, which she had captured, and on the acquisition of which she and Greece and Bulgaria were all set. Monastir would be a bone of contention calculated to keep alive the mutual jealousies and suspicions of