The Balkan Muddle.

New York Times 100 years ago today, February 8, 1913:
    It is a curious comment on the general belief that everything happening in the world is known to every one through the daily newspapers that none, not even the best informed, knows certainly what is going on in the Balkan Peninsula. Still less does any one know surely what is to be the immediate and the ultimate outcome. This is true not only of the military situation, but of the political international situation.
    When the peace conference broke up and the armistice was ended it was the confident boast of the Allies that Adrianople would fall within a week. The strong Servian reinforcements, with their heavy siege artillery, were to enable the Allies to smash in the defenses held by the starving and enfeebled Turks. Then the besiegers of Adrianople were to advance on the doomed lines of Tchatalja; an army of Bulgars and Greeks was to take the Gallipoli forts; the Sea of Marmora was to be entered by the Greek fleet, and the terms of peace were "to be written in Constantinople." Under the crushing burden of defeat the Young Turks would be unable to repress disorder, and even the Asiatic provinces were to fall away under the stress of civic conflict.
    Nothing of all this has yet happened. Adrianople holds out, with apparently little disturbance from the bombardment. The movement on the Gallipoli route has been begun, but little progress has been made, and the Greek fleet seems no nearer to a passage of the Dardanelles than ever, while Constantinople rests secure behind the fortifications on either side of the Marmora Sea. The only movement on the Tchatalja lines is a defensive withdrawal of the Bulgars toward the east to guard against an expected flanking by the Turks. These are, for the most part, negative facts, but they are all that the world gets from a field of operations swept clean, on both sides, of Newspaper correspondents. Meanwhile private dispatches report that the head of the Moslem hierarchy in Constantinople has declared a "holy war." That is a device that in its day has carried terror through Europe, but in these days it is not likely seriously to change the situation. The Moslem world is not necessarily concerned with the fate of the Sultan of Turkey. It has, with emotion, perhaps, but without lifting a finger to prevent, seen his dominion shorn of one slice after another. Within the past year it has seen him bereft of his possessions in Tripoli and beaten back from the Bulgarian frontier to the narrow strip behind the Tchatalja hills. In Tripoli the spiritual sway of the Sultan was safeguarded, as it will be, probably, in the Balkans, and that is all the Mohammedans scattered through the Orient really care for very much. The most that the Turkish Government could expect from such a plan is to arouse the bloodthirstiness of the Moslems of Turkey and the Peninsula toward their Christian neighbors. But that is a fearfully risky game to open. The so-called Christians are but too well versed in it.