Reconsidering Perceptions of the Balkan Wars (1912-3) in British War Correspondence

Abstract

Historiography about external representations of southeastern Europe places significance on the Balkan Wars (1912-3) in cementing negative stereotypes of the region. Despite this, there have been few studies dealing specifically with British representations of these conflicts. This article scrutinises British journalistic correspondence from the wars, sources neglected by previous scholarship in favour of overtly literary depictions of the region and tangible forms of Anglo-Balkan political contact. Foregrounding domestic political culture which shaped representations, notably the publicity of the liberal Balkan Committee, and the practicalities of war correspondence, this article argues British perceptions of the wars were more sympathetic than typically assumed. Representations of the conflicts were based around patterns of perception originating in orientalist assumptions about the Ottoman Empire. Reporters welcomed allied victories as the triumph of Western ‘progress’ over Eastern ‘stagnation’ and instrumentalised violent stereotypes about the Ottomans to highlight the just cause of the allied offensive via atrocity propaganda. While recognising growing dissent in Britain over pro-Balkan reporting from organisations such as the Ottoman Association, this article concludes by emphasising how the ‘fratricidal’ Second Balkan War had less of an impact on patterns of perception due to its short duration.

Keywords:

• Balkan Wars
• war correspondence
• journalism
• balkanism
• Britain

Introduction

The study of external representations of the Balkans developed during the collapse of Socialist Yugoslavia in the 1990s as a response to the cultural reductionism behind media articles, travel writing, and films that presented southeastern Europe as ‘a swathe of barbarous territory … defined by such tribalism and violence that its peoples marked an alien, outlandish presence of European soil’.¹ Echoing Edward Said’s Orientalism, Maria Todorova’s influential discursive theory of ‘balkanism’ suggests that since the ‘intellectual discovery’ of the Balkans in the eighteenth century the peninsula was imagined by external observers as an ‘incomplete’ version of Europe because of its history of Ottoman rule. This was an image, so the argument goes, that was ‘conclusively sealed’ in the Western mind by atrocities committed during the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, which Todorova asserts were widely publicised by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s 1914 Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars.²

A number of historians have approached representations of the Balkans from the perspective of the balkanism thesis and attribute a similar degree of significance to the role of the Balkan Wars in cementing what Mika Suonpää describes as the region’s ‘negative connotations … reflecting images of violence, savagery and primitivism’.³ Mark Mazower suggests the ‘violence and bloodshed’ of the Balkan Wars encoded the region as beyond the pale of European civilisation and Misha Glenny finds that the peninsula was seen as ‘a toxin threatening the health of Europe’.⁴ Thomas Emmert summarises the historiographical consensus when he writes, ‘It was the brutality of the Balkan Wars that most blame for the extremely pejorative connotation associated with the term ‘Balkan’ and with many of the peoples who inhabited the region’.⁵

Despite the importance placed on the Balkan Wars in shaping derogatory ‘patterns of perception’, there have been few studies specifically examining British perspectives on the conflicts.⁶ The wars are typically subsumed into ‘the years of crisis’ encompassing the 1903 Serbian regicide and Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising, the 1908 Austro-Hungarian annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914.⁷ Andrew Hammond, for instance, claims that the cumulative effect of this series of regional political developments was ‘a certain intensification of balkanist discourse’.⁸ This aggregating tendency reflects the methodological focus of the balkanism thesis, which, according to Patrick Finney, ‘has been more concerned with outlining the lineaments of the discourse … than with tracing what precise political significance [representations of the Balkans] may have had at specific times and places’.⁹

Grouping the Balkan Wars alongside other regional crises, this article contends, has obscured historical contingencies that shaped images of the conflicts in Britain in a more sympathetic fashion than previous historiography suggests. By contrast to studies that subsume the conflicts in broader patterns of perception, this article analyses the singular historical moment of the Balkan Wars. The first of these conflicts was fought between an alliance of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro, known as the Balkan League, and the Ottoman Empire between October 1912 and May 1913. The second and much shorter conflict was fought between Bulgaria and its former allies (plus the Ottoman Empire and Romania) over the territorial settlement agreed at the Treaty of London.¹⁰ This article will primarily discuss British perceptions of the First Balkan War, as it received greater coverage in Britain than the Second Balkan War because the short duration of the latter conflict meant that few newspapers had time to get their correspondents back into the field.¹¹

Revisionist historians, such as Samuel Foster, have critiqued the ‘overgeneralised image of monolithic and continual misrepresentation’ theorised in Todorova’s balkanism thesis by granting greater consideration to how Britain’s domestic political culture shaped perceptions of southeastern Europe.¹² Eugene Michail and James Perkins have considered the political interventions of early twentieth century British liberals, often associated with the Balkan Committee, that promoted Balkan national movements as a means of ‘contesting the government’s authority’ on foreign policy issues, notably the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire as a buffer to Russian expansion in southeastern Europe.¹³ This article builds upon this revisionist historiographical trajectory by examining the domestic cultural and political dimension through which images of the Balkan Wars developed in Britain with a focus on the ways in which the ‘well-oiled publicity mechanisms’ of the Balkan Committee ‘paved the way’ for staunchly pro-Balkan reporting on the conflicts in Britain.¹⁴

A closer examination of the correspondence of British journalists reporting from the Balkan Wars reveals that perceptions of the conflicts revolved around patterns of perception originating in denigrating orientalist assumptions about the ‘backwards’ and ‘barbaric’ nature of Ottoman rule. The First Balkan War was conceptualised in admiring terms by British journalists as the conclusion of liberationist campaigns to free the Balkans from the Ottoman Empire. The rapid victories of the Balkan League were welcomed by observers as the triumph of Western ‘progress’ over Oriental ‘stagnation’, reflecting Said’s argument that Islamic Orient was defined as the West’s ‘contrasting image, idea, personality, experience’.¹⁵ British reporting on the First Balkan War can therefore be situated as the culmination of the shift away from the conservative preference for the Ottomans towards liberal support for South Slavic nationalities that Vesna Drapač identifies as beginning with William Gladstone’s ‘Bulgarian agitation’ in the 1870s.¹⁶ Moreover, correspondents instrumentalised orientalist stereotypes about the Ottomans as ‘agents of arbitrary and barbaric violence’ to highlight the injustice of their continued rule and the just cause of the allied military offensive.¹⁷ While violence against civilians committed by the Ottomans was condemned, allegations of similar atrocities committed by the Balkan League were whitewashed or treated leniently by British observers. In this context, this article challenges Mark Biondich’s claim that British observers of the Balkan Wars ‘immediately realised that the war was being persecuted against Muslim civilian populations’ and ‘provided poignant commentary on the calamity that had befallen them’.¹⁸

War correspondents and the Balkans in early twentieth century Britain

The body of writing examined in this article was produced by British war correspondents who travelled to southeastern Europe as war between the Balkan League and the Ottoman Empire appeared imminent in September 1912. These sources have rarely been considered by previous studies of representations of the Balkans, arguably because media history is ‘uncared for, marginalised, and visited only occasionally’.¹⁹ It is possible to divide existing historiography about images of southeastern Europe into two traditions. Literary scholars, including Hammond and Vesna Goldsworthy, primarily analyse travel writing and Ruritanian fictions, while revisionist historians, notably Suonpää, Foster, Michail, and Perkins, examine Anglo-Balkan political interactions.²⁰ War correspondence is situated ambiguously between these two poles, as it is too ‘factual’ in content for literary scholars and retains too great a reliance on individual narration and the subsequent tendency towards ‘exaggeration and contrast’ for revisionists.²¹ On the other hand, critics argue that media scholars have shown a reluctance to engage with the past. As Hans Fredrik Dahl notes, ‘they seem to resist historical exploration by their … insistence on dealing mainly with contemporary moments – today’s news, the situation now’.²² While this overlooks the development of media history as a distinct field of enquiry, it is accurate to say that research into the history of journalism has been primarily concerned with the profession’s contribution to processes of democratisation across Western societies in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.²³ In this context, war correspondence has received limited scholarly attention, as it is considered to be ‘an aberrant form of journalism’ taking place ‘under an abnormal set of circumstances, which bear no resemblance to the normal daily routines of the profession’.²⁴

The practice of sending special reporters to cover conflicts developed in the early nineteenth century, although there is a lack of consensus as to which individual was first accorded the moniker ‘war correspondent’.²⁵ Notable early war correspondents included Henry Crabb Robinson, reporter for The Times during the Peninsular War (1807-14), and Charles Lewis Gruneisen, who covered the First Carlist War (1833-40) for the London Evening News.²⁶ Until the Crimean War (1853-6), however, it remained common practice for British newspapers to ‘steal’ reports of war from foreign newspapers or employ junior officers to send letters from the battlefront.²⁷ The ‘father of war correspondents’ is therefore widely recognised as William Howard Russell.²⁸ Sent by The Times to report on developments in Crimea, Russell ‘inaugurated modern war correspondence’ through his lively dispatches and cemented the profession’s celebrity status in Britain.²⁹ Russell’s renown was confirmed by his bestselling impressions of war, titled The British Expedition to Crimea (1858).³⁰ As David Welch notes, it quickly ‘became de rigueur for correspondents to publish their memoirs of war’, a trend that continued in the Balkan Wars as a steady stream of reporters published narratives of their experiences.³¹

By the end of the nineteenth century, war correspondents were ‘firmly established as a part of every respectable newspaper’s staff’.³² The expansion of war correspondence as a journalistic profession was aided by technological innovations, such as the telegraph and photography, which bestowed reports with a sense of greater immediacy and veracity, and the emergence of a tabloid press that foregrounded sensational stories to appeal to a mass readership.³³ As Kenneth O. Morgan argues, these changes in news reporting culminated around the turn of the twentieth century making the Second Boer War (1899–1902) the first ‘media war’.³⁴ The growing number of war correspondents present on battlefields was indicated by the Hague Convention of 1899, which stipulated that if captured by the opposing side correspondents had the right to be treated as prisoners of war so long as they held accreditation papers of the army they were following.³⁵

Nearly all major British newspapers dispatched correspondents to the Balkan Wars.³⁶ According to Philip Gibbs of The Graphic, the correspondents sent to southeastern Europe ‘made a big battalion in themselves. There were enough of them to guard a mountain pass’.³⁷ Most British reporters arrived in Sofia and Istanbul, as Thrace was rightly expected to be the most important theatre of war because of its proximity to the Ottoman capital and undulating terrain that permitted the movement of large armies.³⁸ The landscape, a correspondent wrote, ‘was a compromise between the high veldt of South Africa and the grassy uplands of Sussex and Hampshire’.³⁹ Reginald Rankin, the special correspondent for The Times attached to the Bulgarian army, noted that the Hôtel de Bulgarie in Sofia and the famous Pera Palace in Istanbul were the meeting points for British journalists arriving in these cities.⁴⁰ Smaller numbers of reporters also established themselves in Belgrade, Cetinje, and Athens. According to Leon Trotsky, writing for the Russian newspaper Kievskaya Mysl, British correspondents ‘filled all the hotels, cafes, and ministerial waiting rooms’ in the Balkan capitals.⁴¹

Most reporters in the Balkan Wars had significant experience covering previous conflicts, such as the Second Boer War, the Philippine-American War (1899–1902), and the Russo-Japanese War (1904-5).⁴² A handful of the journalists who travelled to southeastern Europe were already well-known figures in the British public sphere, such as The Daily Telegraph’s Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, who had previously reported from battlefields in Port Arthur and Morocco and authored popular accounts of his wartime experiences.⁴³ The Balkan Wars were not Ashmead-Bartlett’s first conflicts in southeastern Europe, as at the age of sixteen he had travelled with his father to report on the battles of the Greco-Turkish War (1897).⁴⁴ Other notable reporters included Maurice Baring and Lionel James, both of whom worked for The Times and had published memoirs of their time ‘with the Russians in Manchuria’, and Henry Nevinson, a radical journalist and Balkan Committee member who covered the Greco-Turkish War, the Boer siege of Ladysmith, and the 1905 Russian Revolution for The Daily Chronicle as well as the slave trade in Portuguese Angola for Harper’s Monthly Magazine.⁴⁵

The Balkan Wars garnered public attention in Britain for a number of reasons. As Iakovos Michailidis argues, newspaper editors wanted first-hand reporting from the conflict as it was viewed as an opportunity to observe new military technologies, such as aeroplanes and rapid firing artillery, in action on European battlefields.⁴⁶ For instance, Wolfgang Höpken notes that Bulgarian aircraft ‘drew considerable attention both domestically and internationally’ during the conflicts, even although their role was primarily limited to intelligence gathering and flights were routinely cancelled due to supply and weather problems.⁴⁷ There were also broader concerns about the war’s destabilising impact on the balance of power, as through secret negotiations the Balkan states had bypassed the great powers that had hitherto determined the geopolitical configuration of southeastern Europe.⁴⁸

Most importantly, the outbreak of war in the Balkans generated widespread interest in Britain because it promised to be the latest instalment in ‘the Balkan drama’ that the British press had been following since the Eastern Crisis of the 1870s. This series of peasant rebellions and wars against the Ottoman Empire gained domestic prominence through William Gladstone’s ‘Bulgarian agitation’ that challenged Conservative support for the Porte.⁴⁹ Gladstone’s polemical pamphlet, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (1876), highlighted the ‘cruelty, tyranny, and rapine’ experienced by Christians living under Ottoman rule.⁵⁰ Selling over 200 000 copies in the month following its publication, Gladstone’s pamphlet struck a raw nerve in British society, particularly with the liberal and evangelical middle classes who were incensed by the mistreatment of Christians by Muslims on European soil.⁵¹

War correspondents were critical in generating public disquiet about the condition of the subject nationalities in ‘Turkey in Europe’ during the Eastern Crisis. Januarius Aloysius MacGahan, already distinguished for his reporting on Russian campaigns in Central Asia, reported for The Daily News on atrocities committed by Ottoman irregulars around Batak.⁵² According to Philip Knightley, ‘it is difficult to overestimate’ the impact MacGahan’s dispatches had on British public sentiment and on the development of war correspondence as a profession.⁵³ In the wake of Gladstone’s campaign and MacGahan’s reportage, a flurry of humanitarian organisations were established in Britain and numerous relief workers and journalists authored accounts of their experiences in southeastern Europe.⁵⁴ According to Lord Salisbury, no other issue had ‘so deeply excited the English people’ than the Bulgarian agitation.⁵⁵

British support for the Balkan nationalities was rekindled in the early twentieth century by the Balkan Committee, a liberal pressure group that Davide Rodogno characterises as a ‘direct descendent’ from the Bulgarian agitation.⁵⁶ Founded by the reformist politicians Noel and Charles Roden Buxton in 1903, the committee aimed to pressure Whitehall to abandon its longstanding support for the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire in southeastern Europe and rectify the perceived injustices of the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which ended the Eastern Crisis by undoing the Russian brokered Treaty of San Stefano (1878) and re-establishing Ottoman authority in Macedonia.⁵⁷ The committee disseminated this message through an intensive programme of public engagement, including lectures, pamphlets, press circulars, and the articles and books of individual members.⁵⁸ According to Foster, the success of the organisation lay in its position ‘as a conduit between the, hitherto closed, world of foreign policy activism and the wider public sphere’, as Noel and Charles Buxton, alongside other notable members such as the journalists Henry Noel Brailsford and David Bourchier, the anthropologist Mary Edith Durham, and the historian Robert Seton-Watson, connected Balkan issues to domestic concerns about rural depopulation and unsatisfactory working class living conditions.⁵⁹

Less discussed in recent historiography was the success of the Balkan Committee in operating through provincial branches, which disseminated the organisation’s message across the country via meetings held in town halls and nonconformist churches often attended by mayors, bishops, councillors, churchmen, and the local professional class.⁶⁰ As outlined in the committee’s ‘objectives’, these meetings were the primary means of ‘focussing public opinion’.⁶¹ Following the Ilinden-Preobrazhenie Uprising in Macedonia by pro-Bulgarian paramilitaries, the committee hosted upwards of three-hundred public meetings across Britain and its founders boasted that public opinion was ‘with very few exceptions, in sympathy with the Balkan cause’.⁶² This support was evidenced by the great number of petitions organised by the committee that were sent to the Foreign Office from diverse sections of British society, including nonconformist congregations, trade unions, women’s associations, town councils, and ‘brotherhoods’, which expressed ‘horror and indignation at the present condition of Macedonia’.⁶³

The Balkan Committee maintained a relatively high public profile in the years between the Macedonian uprising and the Balkan Wars. A.G. Gardiner, the editor of The Daily News, was on the Balkan Committee’s executive committee, Brailsford, Bourchier, and Nevinson reported from the Balkans for various British newspapers, and sympathetic parliamentarians (notably H.F.B. Lynch and Charles Masterman) ‘ensured’ that southeast European issues were discussed at Westminster.⁶⁴ According to Michail, the committee ‘achieved the formidable task of bringing about continued and positive coverage of Balkan affairs in the British public sphere’.⁶⁵ This assessment was mirrored at the time by the ‘pacifist-progressive’ diplomat George Young who found that the committee did a ‘very creditable’ job at mainstreaming pro-Balkan politics in Britain.⁶⁶

Although the Balkan Committee aimed to shape opinion about southeastern Europe ‘in a way which left no room for emotional and crude appeals’, Douglas Dakin notes that it harboured ‘many preconceived ideas and was not, in fact, very well informed’.⁶⁷ Noel Buxton’s 1907 book Europe and the Turk epitomised the prejudicial views of the committee that favoured the Balkan nationalities, particularly Bulgaria whose territorial claims in Macedonia were promoted over those of Serbia and Greece, and vehemently condemned the Ottoman Empire. For Buxton, and many of the committee’s members, the Balkans were ‘the field of the great battle between East and West – between barbarism and civilisation’ and the reimposition of Ottoman rule in 1878 had been ‘the greatest atrocity on the surface of the world’.⁶⁸

At times during the Edwardian period, this simplistic ‘cross versus crescent’ view of conflict in southeastern Europe was hard for the Balkan Committee to sustain as news of atrocities committed by rival nationalist paramilitaries in Macedonia filtered through to the British public.⁶⁹ When the committee published a series of atrocity photographs, Buxton could not help but admit that ‘many of the recent murders have been due to the feud of Greece and Bulgaria’.⁷⁰ Nevertheless, as Dakin notes, the outbreak of the Balkan Wars and the Christian composition of the Balkan League gave further weight to the committee’s ‘nonsense’ interpretation of southeastern European history as a struggle between Christianity and Islam.⁷¹ The outbreak of the conflict was therefore ‘widely seen as the culmination of decades of liberationist wars in the Balkans’.⁷² Arthur J. Evans, the Balkan Committee member and noted archaeologist, expressed this best when he wrote that the war represented ‘the closing scenes’ in ‘a chain of events … unbroken’ since the upheavals of the 1870s.⁷³

‘A just, great and sacred struggle of the cross against the crescent’

Numerous journalists affiliated with the committee reported on the Balkan Wars, including Buxton, Bourchier, Durham, Nevinson, and John MacDonald. For Peter Kardjilov, correspondents linked to the committee tended to set the pro-Balkan tone of reporting for journalists not associated with liberal campaigns about southeastern Europe.⁷⁴ This assessment is borne out by the pervasive media bias in favour of the Balkan League, which made the Islamic scholar Marmaduke Pickthall leave Britain for Anatolia during the early stages of the conflict to ‘escape’ what he described as ‘an atmosphere that sickened me’. The British public, he continued, had ‘responded with fanaticism to the cry of a Crusade against the Turk raised by some cunning Balkan rulers’.⁷⁵ Ernest Bennett, who served as a censor for the Ottomans during the conflict, likewise fumed in The Edinburgh Review that the Turks were ‘practically undefended at the court of public opinion in England’ and ‘not a single newspaper expressed sympathy with the Ottoman cause’.⁷⁶ Support for the Ottomans was certainly a minority view with even typically pro-Ottoman conservative newspapers, such as The Times, aligning themselves with the Balkan allies.⁷⁷

Beyond the domestic campaigning of the Balkan Committee, the favourable perspective on the Balkan League expressed by correspondents can be attributed to the harsh regime of censorship journalists attached to the Ottoman army faced.⁷⁸ Censorship was not unknown to war correspondents in the early twentieth century. Since 1889 the British army had a system to register journalists who were then permitted to draw rations and use military telegraphs, allowing military authorities to control what information was transmitted from the battlefield.⁷⁹ Michael MacDonagh, a noted correspondent from the Second Boer War, wrote that censorship ‘immensely restricted his freedom of action in the field; his zeal, energy, and enterprise’.⁸⁰ An anonymous journalist likewise lamented that ‘the spacious days when a Russell, a [Archibald] Forbes, or a MacGahan could go to the front, could wander about pretty much as he pleased, and could send home his letters and telegrams with little or no hinderance are definitely at an end’.⁸¹ Commentators declared that censorship would mean ‘the death of the war correspondent’, particularly following the restrictions of the Russo-Japanese War which were of ‘a new and unexpected magnitude’.⁸²

Correspondents attached to the Ottoman armies faced a strict and sometimes bewildering set of regulations. Upon arrival in Istanbul, correspondents had to secure recommendation from the British Embassy and sign a declaration that they would remain with the Ottoman army until the conclusion of hostilities.⁸³ As Ashmead-Bartlett noted, the latter stipulation ‘alienated’ many British reporters as ‘our papers might wish to recall us and the South African War had lasted no fewer than three years’. The Code of Regulations drawn up by the Ottoman War Office, headed by Nazim Pasha, further complicated the situation for British reporters by requiring telegrams to be written in French if they were to be transmitted to Istanbul. Ashmead-Bartlett continued that this caused real issues for British correspondents, many of whom had only ‘a most rudimentary knowledge of that language’.⁸⁴ Herbert Baldwin, a photojournalist for the Central News, revealed that once near the frontline telegrams ‘had to be written in duplicate’ and were ‘read and discussed by half-dozen officials’ with ‘any information of an alarming nature or unfavourable to Turkey’ being ‘deleted with a blue pencil’.⁸⁵ This blatant censorship made correspondents feel like feel like they were ‘putting their head in a noose’, as James phrased it, and led to further ‘estrangement’ between correspondents and Ottoman officialdom.⁸⁶

Journalists following the armies of the Balkan League faced less intrusive forms of censorship. Gibbs recalled that once registered with the ‘most polite’ Bulgarian War Office he was given a ‘red brassard’ marking him as a foreign correspondent and promptly permitted to board a train to Stara Zagora, the headquarters of the Bulgarian army.⁸⁷ Rankin noted that the Bulgarian censors, through whom all telegrams and letters from the frontlines had to pass, were professors at the University of Sofia and ‘treated [correspondents] with such uniform consideration’.⁸⁸ Attached to the Greek army fighting in Epirus, Albert Trapman, The Daily Telegraph correspondent, found that although ‘the duties of a censor are not such as are likely to ingratiate him with journalists’, the Greek censors were ‘two gentleman [who] did all that they could … to render our mutual relations as amicable as possible, by giving us such advice and facilities as lay in their power’.⁸⁹

British correspondents were occasionally given preferential treatment by the governments of the Balkan states. For instance, Buxton had privileged access to the Bulgarian general staff because of the Balkan Committee’s support for the Bulgarian cause in Britain.⁹⁰ Likewise, Rankin was permitted to tour Bulgarian frontlines because of his acquaintance with the country’s Prime Minister, Ivan Geshov.⁹¹ In Montenegro, Horace Grant initially struggled to gain accreditation as a photojournalist, but his chance meeting with the country’s Princess Vjera in Cetinje led to King Nikola granting him permission to cover the conflict.⁹² The only allied country known for its oppressive regulations was Serbia, where censorship was controlled by Dragutin Dimitrijević-Apis.⁹³ According to Lancelot Lawton, Serbian censorship was harsher than that implemented by the Japanese during the Russo-Japanese War and correspondents who left Serbia for neutral territory to file dispatches over an uncensored wire were banned from re-entering the country.⁹⁴ The rigorous methods employed in Serbia may have come as little surprise to British journalists who had previously complained that ‘the Serb suspects everyone that crosses his frontier and believes he has come for obscure political reasons’.⁹⁵

The better relations between British correspondents and the Balkan states reflected the latter’s ‘systematised propaganda methods’ that were skilled at shaping flows of information to the outside world.⁹⁶ Y. Dogan Çetinkaya notes that from the late nineteenth century onwards the Balkan states had well-staffed press offices that controlled ‘information channels’ and sought to influence Western public opinion through ‘atrocity propaganda’, which will be discussed further below.⁹⁷ As a journalist noted, the Balkan states ‘proved themselves very adroit at handling public opinion in Europe during the war’.⁹⁸ This strategy went hand in hand with domestic propaganda that mobilised the Balkan home front by ‘galvanising emotions’ and rallying nations around their respective leaders.⁹⁹ Eyal Ginio points out that the Ottoman authorities tried to similarly shape Western opinion during the wars by encouraging correspondents to write about the suffering of Muslim populations in the Balkans.¹⁰⁰ This strategy does not seem to have been particularly successful; Ashmead-Bartlett dismissed Ottoman propaganda as a ‘foolish and short-sighted policy’ that further alienated British journalists.¹⁰¹

By contrast to Ashmead-Bartlett’s criticism of Ottoman propaganda, correspondents adopted the crusading rhetoric of the Balkan League which declared the offensive war to be ‘a just, great and sacred struggle of the Cross against the Crescent’ to liberate co-religionists from the rule of the Ottomans.¹⁰² The dominant perspective among British journalists was that the war was motivated by a higher purpose than what the illustrator Bernard Granville Baker called ‘the wars of previous days, which were waged unblushingly to gain some national advantage, to acquire territory, or even merely flatter national vanity’. ‘No, this is a very different war’, he continued, ‘informed by the same spirit … which moved the Crusaders in their thousands to the Holy Land’.¹⁰³ Socialist commentators on the periphery of mainstream discourse were some of the few dissenting voices who argued that the war was motivated by material conditions rather than religion.¹⁰⁴ For Trotsky, the war waged by the Balkan allies was an example of ‘crude capitalist banditry’ with the aim of ‘creating a broader basis for their economic development’.¹⁰⁵

British journalists were initially surprised at the speed of the victories achieved by the Balkan League. The rapidity of the Bulgarian advance in Thrace, particularly the capture of Kirklareli (24 October 1912) and Lüleburgaz (4 November 1912) caught journalists attached to the warring armies unprepared, partly because Ottoman officials prohibited those attached to the Ottoman armies from observing ongoing battles and hindered their access to up-to-date information.¹⁰⁶ Ottoman authorities, a reporter noted, had ‘a mania for dissimulation and for keeping up false pretences’.¹⁰⁷ Prevented by Ottoman officials from travelling further than Çorlu, which was forty miles from the frontline, Bernard Grant of The Daily Mirror reported his ‘amazement’ when he heard that Kirklareli had fallen to the Bulgarians.¹⁰⁸ The first awareness James had ‘that a disaster of very grave nature had overtaken the Turkish army’ was when his train from Istanbul to Kirklareli was stopped by crowds of refugees fleeing the advancing Bulgarians.¹⁰⁹ Although not as well documented by British journalists, these successes were replicated by the other members of the Balkan League. On the same day as the Bulgarian victory at Kirklareli, the Serbs defeated the Ottomans at Kumanovo and on the 19 November captured Bitola, ending Ottoman rule in Macedonia. The Greeks were equally successful and entered Thessaloniki on 8 November, much to the anger of their Bulgarian allies who claimed the city as their own outlet to the Mediterranean.¹¹⁰

Surprise at the speed of the allied victories gave way to enthusiasm for the ‘efficiency’ of the Balkan League’s war effort.¹¹¹ The Bulgarian artillery was said to have ‘played a matchless role’ that ‘crushed every offensive movement by the rapidity and deadly accuracy of its fire’, while Bulgarian war plans were ‘a masterpiece of organisation’.¹¹² Gibbs wrote that the Bulgarian victories ‘were the beginning of a masterly plan’ that ‘was put into practice with a power of organisation which has never been surpassed in the history of war’.¹¹³ The coordination of the allies was compared by MacDonald to ‘clock-like precision and simultaneity’.¹¹⁴ Cyril Campbell of The Times likewise praised ‘the rapidity and smoothness’ and ‘perfectly logical’ mobilisation of the Balkan armies.¹¹⁵ For British correspondents, the allies demonstrated rationality, efficiency, and organisation – the same qualities typically associated with the West – in a subversion of balkanist discourse that historians suggest ‘symbolically differentiated’ the Balkans from Europe.¹¹⁶ As Young argued, the First Balkan War represented the peninsula’s ‘final annexation to Western civilisation’.¹¹⁷

Interpreted as a praiseworthy moment of political development, British correspondents viewed the First Balkan War as maturing the ‘naughty children of the Balkans’ into ‘a new military power … which even the Great Powers will not be able to disregard’.¹¹⁸ Dismissing ‘all ideas of comic opera and all that pertains to Ruritania’, Maurice Baring of The Times argued that the Bulgarians had become ‘businesslike, brisk, capable, tough and strong’. Sofia was not the capital of ‘an antiquated kingdom’ but ‘the up-to-date centre of a Confederation which is a Great Power, and a Great Power of unguessed of capabilities’, he enthused.¹¹⁹ The Bulgarian capital was said to have advanced from ‘a sordid little village’ to ‘one of the most progressive cities in Europe’ and commentators speculated that ‘Salonika, Serres, Monastir, Uskub’ would follow suit by developing into modern metropolises now they were liberated from Ottoman rule.¹²⁰ Mabel St Clair Stobart, the suffragist head of the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps, which was invited to assist the Bulgarian army by the country’s Queen Eleonore, believed that with the expulsion of the Ottomans ‘the evolutionary process in the Balkans will probably soon be in full swing’.¹²¹ The widespread view among correspondents that the Balkan states had reached ‘maturity’ certainly undercuts the balkanism thesis, which suggests the region’s nationalities were treated by Western observers like ‘children with no right to exercise their own voice’.¹²²

British reporters constructed the Ottoman Empire as the Balkan League’s contrasting and inferior image through crude orientalist stereotypes. The mainstream interpretation was that the Ottomans lost the war because Turkish culture was characterised by ‘incoherence, ignorance, stupidity, indolence’.¹²³ This agonistic representation of the conflict was fully expressed by Buxton in his description of captured Turkish defences at Kirklareli where he found the differences between Occident and Orient ‘symbolised in the very digging of the trench’. The ‘neatly finished’ Bulgarian lines, contrasted against the ‘futile spade-scratches’ and ‘muddle and disorder’ of the Ottoman trenches, ‘graphically presenting the different outlook of the European’.¹²⁴ According to Walter Harrington Crawfurd Price, the Ottomans were ‘utterly unable to assimilate the teachings of modern science as applied to the art of human slaughter’ and did not comprehend the utility of new technologies, such as field telephones, aeroplanes, and fuse timings.¹²⁵ Journalists usually attributed this cultural stagnation to Islam, a faith they characterised as ‘the negation of swift and sudden progress’.¹²⁶

More nuanced explanations for the Ottoman defeat were also premised upon the incompatibility of Turkish culture with Western civilisation. Baker wrote about the ‘doomed’ attempts of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) to impress ‘the spirit of change brought from the West’ upon the empire.¹²⁷ After the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, the CUP brought in German army officers to reform the armed forces and conscripted Christian subjects in accordance with their priority of bringing equality to the empire’s ethnic elements.¹²⁸ Reforming the army ‘on German lines, suitable only to German people’ and permitting Christians into its ranks, Baker argued, ‘hastened the downfall of the Ottoman Empire in Europe’ as it ‘disregarded the national peculiarities’ of the Turks and alienated the ‘simple-minded’ Anatolian peasants who viewed war as ‘a religious commandment, a sacred matter in which infidels can have no part’.¹²⁹ Ashmead-Bartlett concurred with this assessment and wrote of ‘the difficulties of attempting to graft modern civilisation on to a Mahommedan community without infringing the sacred code of Islam’.¹³⁰

The victories of the Balkan allies were framed by correspondents as the Ottoman Empire’s ‘annihilation by the tide of progress’.¹³¹ The view that the Balkan states had mastered the destructive potential of modern warfare attracted the impresario Filippo Tommaso Marinetti to cover the conflict for the Parisian newspaper L’Intransigeant.¹³² Marinetti’s Futurist movement celebrated speed, destruction, and violence and believed that war could revitalise Western civilisation, which he saw as having ‘fallen from ancient grandeur, drugged by the morphine of nauseating cowardice and debased by the habit of shady business’.¹³³ Marinetti’s experiences as a correspondent inspired his onomatopoetic poem ‘Zang Tumb Tumb: Adrianopli Ottobre 1912 Parole in Libertá’, which evoked the sounds of the Bulgarian bombardment of Edirne. British journalists were enthralled by Marinetti’s performances of early versions of this poem. According to Gibbs, the Futurist was ‘a fellow of infinitive vivacity, of explosive eloquence, of declamatory genius’ and at ‘the slightest provocation’ would recite poetry that ‘upheld the ideals of his destructive creed’.¹³⁴ Nevinson struck up a close friendship with Marinetti and thought the impresario’s account of Edirne captured the Bulgarian onslaught with ‘such passion of abandonment that no one could escape the spell of listening’.¹³⁵ Hearing Marinetti perform in the Balkans was ‘one never-to-be-forgotten occasion’ in Nevinson’s life, according to his son Christopher.¹³⁶

Debating atrocities

As British praise for Marinetti’s poem about the destruction of Edirne suggests, admiration of the allied war effort regularly bypassed the civilian suffering it entailed. As Richard C. Hall explains, the Balkan Wars were marked by the ‘tendency to regard civilian populations as targets of war’ and atrocities were committed by all belligerents with the intention of erasing specific populations to achieve homogonous nation states.¹³⁷ In particular, the Balkan League has been noted by historians for its prosecution of war against Muslim civilians ‘deemed to represent the progeny of the Ottoman state’.¹³⁸ As a Bulgarian officer remarked to a British correspondent before the First Balkan War broke out, ‘This will be a cruel war. … There will be no non-combatants and no quarter’.¹³⁹ It is important to note, however, that the methods of warfare utilised by the Balkan states were not significantly different from broader European developments, as Social Darwinism and the emergence mass politics around the turn of the twentieth century gave nationalism across the continent an aggressive hue. Indeed, Robert Donia and John V.A. Fine argue that the spread of exclusionary nationalism from western to southeastern Europe marked a ‘betrayal’ of the region’s cosmopolitan history.¹⁴⁰

Despite recent assessments that foreign journalists highlighted ‘the systematic maltreatment of civilians’ by the Balkan League in their reporting, British correspondents provided a remarkably one-sided account of violence against non-combatants during the First Balkan War.¹⁴¹ Whereas atrocities perpetrated by Ottomans were repeatedly highlighted to justify the war in moral terms, those committed by the allied armies were ‘treated with extreme leniency, and even with understanding’.¹⁴² The conflict, from this perspective, was a defensive war waged by the Balkan League to end the Ottoman ‘reign of atrocity’.¹⁴³ This defensive slant on the war’s rationale was explained by the peace campaigner Norman Angell who declared that ‘peace’ under Ottoman rule amounted to ‘butchering women and disembowelling children’ and only expelling ‘the Turk’ from Europe could bring stability to the Balkans. ‘That is why even those of us who do not believe in military force rejoice’, he concluded.¹⁴⁴

British journalists provided a steady stream of reports of Ottoman atrocities to justify the offensive war of the Balkan allies that Çetinkaya accurately characterises as ‘atrocity propaganda’.¹⁴⁵ Most historians date the emergence of contemporary notions of atrocity propaganda to the First World War.¹⁴⁶ Emily Robertson, for instance, explains that atrocity propaganda developed following the German invasion of Belgium in 1914 and alleged that German soldiers committed acts of violence against non-combatant Belgians to ‘exaggerate the pure and moral qualities of the British and the Allies’.¹⁴⁷ Atrocity propaganda, therefore, aims to mobilise hatred for an enemy, convince the population of the justness of one’s own cause, and ensure the support of neutral countries and their publics.¹⁴⁸ British correspondence from the First Balkan War can be classed as a precursor to the atrocity propaganda of the First World War, as it sought to mobilise British public support for the Balkan League. Reports described numerous incidents of what Buxton termed ‘Turkish barbarities’, such as the abduction and rape of women and girls, which he claimed was occurring at an ‘unprecedented scale’, the mutilation of captured soldiers, and the destruction of villages, to construct a relation of sympathy between the British public and the Balkan nationalities.¹⁴⁹ Correspondents were confident that ‘There is not the slightest doubt that the [Ottoman] troops massacred any Christian they came across’ and declared their strategy to be ‘murder and rapine, until the streets should run with the blood of Christians’.¹⁵⁰

Correspondents often admitted that they did not directly witness evidence of atrocities perpetrated by Ottoman forces. Despite his pro-Balkan reporting, Ashmead-Bartlett noted that he failed to come across ‘massacres’ or ‘ill-treatment of Christians or mutilation of their women-folk’.¹⁵¹ Likewise, Baldwin ‘saw no single instance of that ferocity and cruelty with which the Turks have been charged’.¹⁵² Commentators who did not find direct evidence of atrocities were still liable to conclude that the Ottomans were guilty due to prejudicial orientalist stereotypes about the nature of Islam. As Stobart noted, ‘It is not unreasonable to assume the possibility that cruelties will be committed by a people whose religion enjoins not only scorn and contempt, but wholesale slaughter … of the unbeliever’.¹⁵³

Evidence of Ottoman atrocities was given greater credence by the illustrated press. A ‘caravan’ of well-equipped photographers followed the warring armies but could only photograph what the relevant military authorities permitted and captions were strictly censored.¹⁵⁴ Indeed, Grant recalled a conversation with Bulgaria’s Tsar Ferdinand in which he declared, ‘Photography is not a profession … it is a disease’.¹⁵⁵ Although the veracity of pictures from the battlefields was dubious, the view among the British public was ‘that the camera cannot lie’, as a photographer in Thrace noted.¹⁵⁶ Photographs therefore played an important role in framing the conflict for British audiences, allowing them to see what Susan Sontag terms ‘the pain of others’ by foregrounding the suffering of Christian populations.¹⁵⁷ For instance, The Bystander, a newspaper that early in the war declared its ‘best wishes for the success of the Balkan States’, published atrocity photographs of burned out villages, public executions, and massacres in Macedonia in an effort to authenticate ‘the vicious hatred’ of the Ottoman armies.¹⁵⁸

British travellers downplayed violence against Muslim civilians perpetrated by the Balkan allies to portray them as respecting the ‘civilised’ codes of conduct in war, which had been outlined in the Geneva Conventions of 1864 and 1904 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907.¹⁵⁹ As Robert Nye explains, these conventions integrated ideas of ‘restraint, civilisation, and public order’, claimed as the societal standards of Europe, into the arbitration, prevention, and regulation of warfare.¹⁶⁰ Gibbs suggested that the prolonged nature of the siege of Edirne, which lasted from October 1912 to March 1913, was because of the humanitarianism of the Bulgarians who ‘were reluctant to throw shells into the city’ as ‘they desired to restrain themselves from the work of needless destruction and to avoid the sacrifice of human life’.¹⁶¹ The siege was in reality ‘a slow agony for the city’: the Bulgarians cut food and water supplies, fires broke out because of artillery bombardments, and the Turkish district of the city was sacked, including the Selimiye Mosque.¹⁶² This targeted destruction of Islamic culture was in contrast to Buxton’s claim that the Bulgarians did not destroy mosques because they had ‘respect for religious feeling and desire to avoid the charge of desecration’.¹⁶³ MacDonald went so far as to claim that Muslim populations in southeastern Europe were ‘astonished at their conqueror’s humanity’.¹⁶⁴

Although correspondents rarely touched on the plight of Muslim non-combatants, British consuls in Macedonia were certainly aware of the atrocities committed by the Balkan League. Charles Grieg and Harry Lamb, the consuls in Bitola, informed London that ‘the extermination of the Mussulman element in Macedonia is systematic and forms part of a deliberate and approved policy’. The methods of the Balkan states, they continued, were ‘no less callous barbarity than those traditional with the hopeless and unspeakable” Turk’.¹⁶⁵ H.E.W. Young, the vice-consul in Phillipi, explained that in Serres, Xanthi, and Kavala ‘innumerable’ murders were committed by the Bulgarians, despite the fact that the local population had surrendered without a fight. Young further highlighted the prevalence of religious conversions carried out under the ‘threats and blows’ of Bulgarian irregulars. The British naval attaché in Athens likewise reported on violence against Muslim women committed by Bulgarian and Greek forces in recently ‘liberated’ territory.¹⁶⁶

Arguably the most prominent critic of the Balkan League in the British public sphere was Mary Edith Durham, a Balkan Committee member who increasingly eschewed Buxton’s simplistic ‘cross versus crescent’ perspective on southeastern Europe. As early as 1905, she highlighted the committee’s pro-Christian bias when delivering medical aid in southeastern Europe for Brailsford’s Macedonian Relief Fund: ‘When a Moslem kills a Moslem it does not count; when a Christian kills a Moslem it is a righteous act; when a Christian kills a Christian it is an error of judgment better not talked about; it is only when a Moslem kills a Christian that we arrive at a full-blown atrocity’.¹⁶⁷ Despite continuing her involvement with the committee, its core members, notably Brailsford, criticised her views as ‘partisan’ and ‘capricious’ because of her growing political support for Albanian populations.¹⁶⁸ During the Balkan Wars she was one of the few correspondents to report on the Montenegrin and Serbian siege of Shkodër and argued that the ‘destruction of the Albanian race was the avowed intention of both Serb and Montenegrin’. Durham wrote at length about what she called the Montenegrin ‘national custom’ of facially mutilating captured opponents. Despite Durham’s status as one of Britain’s leading ‘experts’ on southeastern Europe, pro-Balkan voices, such as the novelist Joyce Cary who distributed medical aid to the Montenegrin army, dismissed her account of these atrocities as ‘misleading’ and attributed the lack of noses on the corpses of Ottoman soldiers to hungry birds as ‘the nose is soft, and offers itself kindly to a beak’.¹⁶⁹

Criticism of the Balkan League also coalesced around the Conservative parliamentarian Aubrey Herbert, who regularly collaborated with Durham on issues relating to Albania. Herbert renounced his membership of the Balkan Committee, which he dismissed as ‘a bunch of cursed old women’ and suspected was getting reports of atrocities perpetrated by the allied armies held back from the British press.¹⁷⁰ Coming from an ‘impeccably aristocratic’ background, Herbert identified with what he described as ‘the genial, polished Turk’ through a sense of class-based kinship that bridged cultural divides.¹⁷¹ During the course of the Balkan Wars, he established the Ottoman Association, which he intended to function as a counterweight to the Balkan Committee’s pro-Slav advocacy in the British public sphere by defending the integrity of the Ottoman Empire.¹⁷² Herbert did not report on the Balkan Wars as a journalist but his association published pro-Ottoman accounts of the conflict. The most notable of these was Turkey in Agony (1913), a series of letters written from Thessaloniki by ‘Pierre Loti’, the pseudonym for the journalist Louis Marie-Julien Viaud. Loti argued that for the Serbians and Bulgarians ‘violence and murder constitute the foundation for every action’ and Muslim civilians in Macedonia were being ‘hunted like wild beasts’. None of these atrocities had been reported, he claimed, because of a ‘conspiracy of silence’ in the British and French press.¹⁷³ As if to prove his point, Loti’s narrative received limited attention in British newspapers. As a critic commented, ‘the gravest accusations’ he levelled at the Balkan League had ‘already been denied and proved to be fabrications; or, if true, have been proven to be tales of ignorant soldiery acting without authority’.¹⁷⁴ Other reviews simply overlooked the content of Loti’s work and focused on sensational reports that he had ‘been challenged to mortal combat by a Bulgarian officer because of aspersions cast upon the Bulgars’.¹⁷⁵ Pickthall, a close friend of Herbert, was active in the Ottoman Association and recognised that it was ‘defending an unpopular cause’ and its members ‘had to fear, and have encountered, public ridicule and private abuse’.¹⁷⁶

Despite liberal champions of southeastern Europe’s nationalities urging the British public ‘not to turn away in discouragement or disgust’, critics of the Balkan League were given greater hearing in the public sphere following the outbreak of the ‘fratricidal’ Second Balkan War in June 1913.¹⁷⁷ Reflecting the sense of disillusionment brought on by Bulgaria’s declaration of war against her erstwhile allies, Price noted that Gladstone’s term ‘“Bulgarian Atrocities” … now stands for the butchery of Turks and Greeks by Bulgars’.¹⁷⁸ The Anglo-Greek correspondent J.G. Cassavetti of The Times questioned why Bulgarian atrocities had hitherto ‘not been published far and wide’ and recounted the Bulgarian army’s ‘barbarous’ conduct towards Turkish and Greek civilians, including massacres in Serres, Doxato, and Nigrita.¹⁷⁹ Trapman likewise asserted that of the Bulgarians ‘all that has been written falls infinitely short of the truth’ and that their ‘disgusting sensuality’ and ‘cold-bloodedness’ during the Balkan Wars could only be compared to the ‘excesses’ of the Indian Mutiny or French Revolution.¹⁸⁰

Beyond a general sense of disenchantment with the Balkan states, in particular Bulgaria, newfound focus on violence against Muslim non-combatants reflected conservative wariness over the imperial repercussions of support for the allies. For policymakers in London, Balkan national movements provided a worrying template for Irish nationalists, as they demonstrated how ‘small and allegedly weak countries could free themselves from foreign occupation’.¹⁸¹ Against this backdrop, Henry Charles Sepping Wright, a correspondent for Illustrated London News, challenged public support for the Balkan states by framing them as ‘half a dozen Irelands clamouring for Home Rule or separation’.¹⁸² The Indian Office also issued warnings that incendiary anti-Ottoman commentary was fuelling unrest among India’s Muslim population.¹⁸³ Articles in the press reported that India’s Muslims were showing ‘a manifest tendency to develop strong anti-British feeling’ because of British championing of the Balkan allies during the First Balkan War.¹⁸⁴ It was partly in response to this growing anti-British sentiment that Herbert founded the Ottoman Association, which sought to ‘avert a lamentable upheaval in our Indian Empire’ by elevating pro-Ottoman voices in Britain’s public sphere.¹⁸⁵ Indeed, the conflict ‘produced an intense reaction’ among India’s Muslim community and a medical mission of the Indian Red Crescent was even dispatched to Istanbul.¹⁸⁶

For liberal supporters of the Balkan states, the conflict between erstwhile allies shook their belief that once Ottoman rule had been terminated the region would ‘automatically be set on a path to progress and civilisation’.¹⁸⁷ Nevertheless, staunch supporters of the Balkan nationalities continued to defend the region. For instance, Young noted that ‘the brutalities and treacheries of the Wars of Partition [the First and Second Balkan War] are, it must be repeated, merely a relapse into those conditions of social warfare which had been preserved by Europe in Macedonia’ through the reimposition of Ottoman rule in 1878.¹⁸⁸ Even during this period of ‘enhanced negative representation’, as Perkins notes, the ‘groundswell’ of support for the Balkan nationalities was not entirely exhausted.¹⁸⁹

Conclusion

The discursive emphasis on atrocities that accompanied commentary on the Second Balkan War certainly had less of an impact on British perceptions of the southeastern Europe than the positive coverage of the First Balkan War. Tellingly, major newspapers had already recalled their correspondents from the Balkans when hostilities broke out between the former allies and the short duration of the conflict meant that few newspapers sent their correspondents back into the field.¹⁹⁰ To borrow Young’s phrasing, the second conflict marked less of a British turn away from the Balkans in ‘disgust’, than a reshuffling of allegiances in the region with Bulgaria clearly deposed from its hitherto dominant position as the liberal darling.¹⁹¹

While not disputing the persistence of highly denigrating representations of southeastern Europe, this article has sought to historicise British images of the region by granting greater consideration to how Britain’s domestic political culture, most importantly the publicity work of the Balkan Committee, shaped perceptions of the region during the Balkan Wars. Widely represented as a morally justified crusade of ‘cross versus crescent’, British correspondents who travelled to the theatre of war were supportive of the military campaigns of Balkan League and regularly turned a blind eye to the accompanying violence against non-combatants that aimed to erase Muslim populations from the southern Balkans. Although dissenting voices grew in prominence during the Second Balkan War, it remains clear that the conflicts of 1912 and 1913 cannot be characterised as ‘developing the timeless image of the Southeast European propensity for war and extreme violence’ as indicated in previous historical studies.¹⁹² Indeed, as the often cited Carnegie Endowment for International Peace report into the causes and conduct of the Balkan Wars made clear, the ‘extreme barbarity’ of the conflict was simply an expression of ‘the essence of war’ rather than a characteristic specific to southeastern Europe’s nationalities.¹⁹³

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Dr Mirna Šolić and Professor Churnjeet Mahn for their continued support and to the participants at the 2022 Borders and Crossings Interdisciplinary Conference on Travel Writing at the University of Tartu for their encouraging comments on an earlier version of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership Studentship.

Notes on contributors

Ross Cameron

Ross Cameron is an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) PhD researcher based at the University of Glasgow examining British travel writing and political commentary on southeastern Europe before 1914. He was the co-organiser of the 2023 Borders and Crossings Interdisciplinary Conference on Travel Writing at the University of Łódź and has undertaken a visiting doctoral researcher position at the Juraj Dobrila University of Pula, sponsored by the AHRC.

Notes

1 Andrew Hammond, ‘Imagined Colonialism: Victorian Travellers in South-East Europe’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 28:2 (2006), 87-8. For a discussion of Western media commentary from the 1990s see, Cynthia Simmons, ‘Baedeker Barbarism: Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon and Robert Kaplan’s Balkan Ghosts’, Human Rights Review, 1:1 (2000), 109-24.

2 Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 121-2. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1978). The extent to which balkanism and orientalism are consanguineous remains an issue of historiographical debate. See, Katherine Fleming, ‘Orientalism, the Balkans, and Balkan Historiography’, The American Historical Review, 105:4 (2000), 1218-33; Andrew Hammond, ‘Typologies of the East: On Distinguishing Balkanism and Orientalism’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 29:2-3 (2007), 201-18; Otto Dix, ‘On Balkanism and Orientalism: undifferentiated patterns of perception in literary and critical representations of Eastern Europe’, Textual Practice, 29:5 (2015), 973-91; Catherine Baker, ‘Postcoloniality Without Race? Racial Exceptionalism and Southeast European Cultural Studies’, Interventions, 20:6 (2018), 759-84.

3 Mika Suonpää, ‘Balkan Conflicts and Evolving Conceptions of Militarism, 1875-1913’, History, 99:4 (2014), 646.

4 Mark Mazower, The Balkans: From the End of Byzantium to the Present Day (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000), 4; Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804-1999 (London: Penguin, 2001), 5.

5 Thomas Emmert, ‘A Crisis of Identity: Serbia at the End of the Century’, in Norman M. Naimark and Holly Case (eds), Yugoslavia and its Historians: Understanding the Balkan Wars of the 1990s (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 165.

6 Maria Todorova, ‘The Balkans: From Discovery to Invention’, Slavic Review, 53:2 (1994), 464. For a recent exception see, Florian Keisinger, ‘The Irish Question and the Balkan Wars’, in Katrin Boeckh and Sabine Rutger (eds), The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory, The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 161-78.

7 Samuel Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination: Peace, War and Peasants before Tito (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 67.

8 Andrew Hammond, The Debated Lands: British and American Representations of the Balkans (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2007), 66.

9 Patrick Finney, ‘Raising Frankenstein: Great Britain, ‘Balkanism’ and the Search for a Balkan Locarno in the 1920s’, European History Quarterly, 33:3 (2003), 318.

10 For an overview of the course of the Balkan Wars see, Richard Hall, The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913: Prelude to the First World War (London: Routledge, 2000).

11 Iakovos Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline: War Correspondents in the Balkan Wars (1912-1913)’, Media History, 26:2 (2020), 128.

12 Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination, 4.

13 Eugene Michail, Britain and the Balkans: Forming Images of Foreign Lands, 1900-1950 (London: Continuum, 2011); James Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe: The Balkans and Empire in Early Twentieth Century Political Culture’, The Historical Journal, 58:2 (2015), 565-87.

14 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 11; Peter Kardjilov, The Cinematographic Activities of Charles Rider Noble and John Mackenzie in the Balkans (Volume 1) (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020), 28

15 Said, Orientalism, 1-2.

16 Vesna Drapač, Constructing Yugoslavia: A Transnational History (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 26.

17 Eugene Michail, ‘Western attitudes to war in the Balkans and the shifting meanings of violence, 1912-91’, Journal of Contemporary History, 47:2 (2012), 221.

18 Mark Biondich, ‘The Balkan Wars: Violence and Nation Building in the Balkans, 1912-13’, Journal of Genocide Research, 18:4 (2016), 394.

19 Michael Bailey, Narrating Media History (London: Routledge, 2004), xxi.

20 For literary approaches to Balkan imagology see, Hammond, The Debated Lands; Vesna Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998); Omer Hadžiselimović, At the Gates of the East: British Travel Writers on Bosnia-Herzegovina from the Sixteenth to Twentieth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Božidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers (London: Saqi Books, 2004). For revisionist scholarship that places less emphasis on literary approaches see, Mika Suonpää, ‘British Perceptions of the Balkan Slavs: Professional and Popular Categorisations before 1914’ (PhD dissertation, University of Hull, 2008); Michail, Britain and the Balkans; Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe’; Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination.

21 Kevin Williams, ‘War Correspondents as Sources for History: Problems and Possibilities in Journalism Historiography’, Media History, 18:3-4 (2012), 341-60.

22 Hans Fredrik Dahl, ‘The Pursuit of Media History’, Media, Culture & Society, 16:4 (1994), 552.

23 Tom O’Malley, ‘Media History and Media Studies: Aspects of the Development of the Study of Media History in the UK, 1945-2000’, Media History, 8:2 (2002), 155-73.

24 Williams, ‘War Correspondents’, 344.

25 Mitchel Roth (ed), The Encyclopaedia of War Journalism, 1807-2010 (Amenia: Grey House Publishing, 2010), ix.

26 Joseph J. Matthews, ‘The Genesis of Newspaper War Correspondence’, Journalism Quarterly, 29:1 (1952), 4.

27 Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero and Mythmaker from Crimea to Kosovo (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2002), 4-5.

28 Rupert Furneaux, The First War Correspondent: William Howard Russell of The Times (London: Cassell and Company, 1944), 7.

29 Catherine Waters, Special Correspondence and the Newspaper Press in Victorian Print Culture, 1850-1886 (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 92-4.

30 W.H. Russell, The British Expedition to Crimea (London: G. Routledge, 1858).

31 David Welch, ‘Winning Hearts and Minds: The Changing Context of Reportage and Propaganda, 1900-2003’, in Mark Connelly and David Welch (eds), War and Media: Reportage and Propaganda (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007), xiv.

32 Angela Smith and Michael Higgins, ‘Introduction: Reporting War – History, Professionalism, and Technology’, Journal of War and Culture Studies, 5:2 (2012), 132.

33 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 122; Adrian Bingham and Martin Conboy, Tabloid Century: The Popular Press in Britain, 1896 to Present (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2015), 2-11.

34 Kenneth O. Morgan, ‘The Boer War and the Media (1899-1902)’, Twentieth Century British History, 13:1 (2002), 1-16.

35 Smith and Higgins, ‘Introduction’, 133.

36 Although this present discussion is limited to British correspondence, the caravan of war correspondents following the Balkan armies included French, German, Czech, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian, Scandinavian, and Russian reporters. See, Nicolas Pitsos, ‘Marianne Staring at the Balkans on Fire: French Views and Perceptions of the 1912-13 Conflicts’, in Katrin Boeckh and Sabine Rutger (eds), The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory (Cham: Palgrave MacMillan, 2016), 145.

37 Philip Gibbs and Bernard Grant, The Balkan War: Adventures of War with Cross and Crescent (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1913), 18. Gibbs gained fame for being one of the few accredited British war correspondents on the Western Front during the First World War. His output between 1914 and 1918 was prolific and included: The Soul of the War (London: William Heinemann, 1915); The Battles of the Somme (London: William Heinemann, 1917); From Bapaume to Passchendaele (Toronto: William Briggs, 1918).

38 Hall, The Balkan Wars, 22.

39 Lionel James, With the Conquered Turk: The Story of a Latter-Day Adventurer (London: Small, Maynard and Company, 1913), 29.

40 Reginald Rankin, The Inner History of the Balkan War (London: Constable and Company, 1914), 44-5.

41 Leon Trotsky (eds. George Weissman and Duncan Williams), The War Correspondence of Leon Trotsky: The Balkan Wars, 1912-1913 (New York: Pathfinder, 1981), 261.

42 For British reporting on these earlier conflicts see, Jacqueline Beaumont, ‘The British Press and Censorship during the South African War, 1899-1902’, South African Historical Journal, 41:1 (1999), 267-89; Alexander M. Nordlund, ‘A War of Others: British War Correspondence, Orientalist Discourse and the Russo-Japanese War, 1904-1905’, War in History, 22:1 (2015), 28-46; Craig Carey, ‘Breaking the News: Telegraphy and Yellow Journalism in the Spanish-American War’, American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism, 26:2 (2016), 130-48.

43 For Bartlett’s previous accounts of his wartime experiences see, Port Arthur: The Siege and Capitulation (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1906); The Passing of the Shereefian Empire (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1911).

44 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, The Battlefields of Thessaly: with personal experiences in Turkey and Greece (London: John Murray, 1897).

45 Maurice Baring, With the Russians in Manchuria (London: Methuen and Co., 1905); O [Lionel James], The Yellow War (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1905); H.W. Nevinson, Scenes in the Thirty Days War Between Greece and Turkey, 1897 (London: J.M. Dent and Co., 1898); H.W. Nevinson, Ladysmith: The Diary of a Siege (London: Methuen and Co., 1900); H.W. Nevinson, The Dawn in Russia (London: Harper and Brothers, 1906); H.W. Nevinson, A Modern Slavery (London: Harper and Brothers, 1906).

46 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 123.

47 Wolfgang Höpken, ‘‘Modern Wars’ and ‘Backwards Societies’: The Balkan Wars in the History of Twentieth Century European Warfare’, in Katrin Boeckh and Sabine Rutar (eds), The Wars of Yesterday: The Balkan Wars and the Emergence of Modern Military Conflict, 1912-13 (New York: Berghahn, 2018), 23.

48 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 16.

49 For accounts of the Bulgarian agitation and subsequent Midlothian Campaign in the 1880 General Election see, David Brooks, ‘Gladstone and Midlothian: The Background to the First Campaign’, The Scottish Historical Review, 64:177 (1985), 42-67; Anthony S. Wohl, ‘“Dizzi-Ben-Dizzi”: Disraeli as Alien’, Journal of British Studies, 34:3 (1995), 375-411.

50 William Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (New York: Lovell, Adam, Wesson and Company, 1876), 11.

51 Peter Stansky, Gladstone: A Progress in Politics (New York: W.W. Norton, 1981), 123.

52 MacGahan’s reports for The Daily News were published as The Turkish Atrocities in Bulgaria: Letters of the Special Commissioner of the Daily News J.A. MacGahan (London: Bradbury Agnew, 1876).

53 Knightley, The First Casualty, 50-1.

54 Dorothy Anderson, The Balkan Volunteers (London: Hutchinson, 1968), 8-9. For some of the more notable British accounts from the Eastern Crisis see, Arthur J. Evans, Through Bosnia and the Herzegóvina on Foot during the Insurrection (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1876); G.M Mackenzie and A.P. Irby, Travels in the Slavonic Provinces of Turkey in Europe, 2 vol. (London: Daldy, Ibister and Co., 1877); Robert Jasper More, Under the Balkans: Notes of a Visit to the District of Philippopolis in 1876 (London: Henry S. King, 1877).

55 R.W. Seton-Watson, Disraeli, Gladstone and the Eastern Question: A Study in Diplomacy and Party Politics (London: MacMillan and Co., 1935), 2.

56 Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815-1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 235.

57 Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe’, 568-9.

58 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 14.

59 Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination, 48.

60 For an overview of this significant aspect of the Balkan Committee’s work see, Report of the Proceedings at the National Conference on the Macedonian Question (London: Balkan Committee, 1904).

61 ‘The Balkan Committee: Objects’, in Macedonia 1903 (London: The Balkan Committee, 1903), rear cover.

62 Noel Buxton and Charles Buxton, ‘Public Opinion and Macedonia’, The Monthly Review, 13 (December 1903), 95; Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 14.

63 Douglas Dakin, The Greek Struggle in Macedonia, 1897-1913 (Thessaloniki: Institute for Balkan Studies, 1966), 150-1; T.P. Conwell-Evans, Foreign Policy from a Back Bench, 1904-1918: A Study Based on the Papers of Lord Noel Buxton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1932), 4.

64 James Perkins, ‘British Liberalism and the Balkans, c. 1875-1925’ (PhD dissertation, University of London, 2014), 144-5.

65 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 15.

66 A Diplomatist [George Young], Nationalism and War in the Near East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915), 103; Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe’, 579.

67 Dakin, The Greek Struggle, 150-1.

68 Noel Buxton, Europe and the Turk (London: John Murray, 1907), 19, 180.

69 Perkins, ‘The Congo of Europe’, 584.

70 Noel Buxton and Victoria de Bunsen, Macedonian Massacres: Photos from Macedonia (London: The Balkan Committee, 1907), 5-6.

71 Dakin, The Greek Struggle, 151.

72 Michail, ‘Western attitudes’, 223.

73 Arthur J. Evans, ‘The Drama of the Balkans and its Closing Scenes’, The Contemporary Review, 102 (1912), 766.

74 Kardjilov, The Cinematographic Activities, 28.

75 Marmaduke Pickthall, With the Turk in Wartime (London: J.M. Dent and Sons, 1913), ix. Pickthall’s steadfast support for the Ottoman Empire led to his conversion to Islam. See, Geoffrey Nash, From Empire to Orient: Travellers to the Middle East,1830-1926 (London: I.B. Tauris, London, 2005), 6, 21.

76 Ernest Bennett, ‘The Turkish Point of View’, The Edinburgh Review, 217:444 (1913), 278-9. Bennett had been a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian during the Italo-Turkish War (1911). See, With the Turks in Tripoli: Being Some Experiences in the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 (London: Methuen and Co., 1912).

77 Drapač, Constructing Yugoslavia, 44; Florian Keisinger, ‘Uncivilised wars in civilised Europe? The perception of the Balkan Wars 1912-13 in English, German and Irish newspapers and journals’, in Dominik Geppert, William Mulligan and Andreas Rose (eds), The Wars Before the Great War: Conflict and International Politics before the Outbreak of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 352-5.

78 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 125.

79 Knightly, The First Casualty, 15-6.

80 Michael MacDonagh, ‘Can We Rely On Our War News?’, Fortnightly Review, 63:375 (Apr., 1898), 614.

81 A Journalist, ‘The Press in Wartime’, Fortnightly Review, 93:556 (Apr., 1913), 741.

82 ‘The Rise and Fall of the War Correspondent’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 90:538 (Aug., 1904), 301-10; Michael S. Sweeney, ‘“Delays and Vexation”: Jack London and the Russo-Japanese War’, Journalism and Mass Communications, 75:3 (1998), 445.

83 Without official support from their respective embassies, journalists were not permitted to travel beyond Istanbul. It was for this reason that Henry Farnsworth, ‘a would-be war correspondent’, was rebuffed by Ottoman authorities. See, Henry Farnsworth, The Log of a Would-Be War Correspondent (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1913), 31.

84 Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks in Thrace (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1913), 72.

85 Herbert F. Baldwin, A War Photographer in Thrace: An Account of Personal Experiences During the Turco-Balkan War, 1912 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1913), 214-5.

86 James, With the Conquered Turk, 58.

87 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 18.

88 Rankin, The Inner History, 72-3.

89 Albert H. Trapman, The Greeks Triumphant (London: Foster Groom and Co., 1915), 11.

90 Noel Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff (London: MacMillan Company, 1913).

91 Rankin, The Inner History, 45.

92 Bernard Grant, To the Four Corners: The Memoirs of a News Photographer (London: Hutchinson and Co., n.d.), 272-3.

93 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 126; Melissa Bokovoy, ‘Remembering Serbia’s Balkan Wars in Pictures and Words’, Balkanologie, 17:1 (2022), 1.

94 Lancelot Lawton, ‘The Modern Camp-Follower’, The Academy and Literature, 2112 (Oct., 1912), 553.

95 M. Edith Durham, Through the Lands of the Serb (London: Edward Arnold, 1904), 147.

96 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 127.

97 Y. Dogan Çetinkaya, ‘Atrocity Propaganda and the Nationalisation of the Masses in the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan Wars’, International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 46:4 (2014), 763.

98 S.A.B., ‘The Aftermath of War’, The Academy, 2139 (May 1913), 551.

99 Bokovoy, ‘Remembering Serbia’s Balkan Wars’, 2-3.

100 Eyal Ginio, ‘Mobilising the Ottoman Nation during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913): Awakening from the Ottoman Dream’, War in History, 12:2 (2005), 160.

101 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 22.

102 Theo Aronson, Crowns in Conflict: The Triumph and the Tragedy of European Monarchy, 1910-1918 (London: John Murray, 1986), 87.

103 Bernard Granville Baker, The Passing of the Turkish Empire in Europe (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1913), 78

104 Pitsos, ‘Marianne Staring at the Balkans’, 145.

105 Trotsky, The War Correspondence, 222.

106 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 126.

107 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 11.

108 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 158.

109 James, With the Conquered Turk, 44, 30.

110 Richard C. Hall, ‘The Role of Thessaloniki in Bulgarian Policy During the Balkan Wars’, Balkan Studies, 33:2 (1992), 231-41.

111 ‘A Christian Europe and Afterwards’, The English Review (Dec., 1912), 144.

112 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 180-1.

113 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 56, 63.

114 John MacDonald, Turkey and the Eastern Question (London: T.C. & E.C. Jack, 1912), 73. MacDonald, a Balkan Committee member, was a prominent advocate for Bulgaria in Britain and authored a popular history of the country. See, Czar Ferdinand and His People (London: T.C. and E.C. Jack, 1913).

115 Cyril Campbell, The Balkan War Drama (London: Andrew Melrose, 1913), 152.

116 Goldsworthy, Inventing Ruritania, 12.

117 Young, Nationalism and War, xv.

118 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 181.

119 Maurice Baring, Letters from the Near East, 1900-1912 (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1913), 113-114.

120 MacDonald, Turkey and the Eastern Question, 83.

121 Mabel St Clair Stobart, War and Women from Experience in the Balkans and Elsewhere (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1913), 31.

122 David Norris, In the Wake of the Balkan Myth: Questions of Identity and Modernity (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 1999), 24-5.

123 MacDonald, Turkey and the Eastern Question, 75.

124 Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff, 26-8.

125 Walter Harrington Crawfurd Price, The Balkan Cockpit: The Political and Military Story of the Balkan Wars in Macedonia (London: T. Werner Laurie, 1914), 55.

126 Baring, Letters from the Near East, 159.

127 Baker, The Passing of the Turkish Empire, 230.

128 Eric Jan Zürcher, ‘The Ottoman Conscription System, 1844-1914’, International Review of Social History, 43 (1998), 447.

129 Baker, The Passing of the Turkish Empire, 230.

130 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 9.

131 Stobart, War and Women, 172.

132 Ernest Ialongo, ‘Futurism from foundation to world war: the art and politics of an avant-garde movement’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 21:2 (2016), 315.

133 F.T. Marinetti, ‘The Futurist Manifesto’, in Adrian Lyttleton (ed), Italian Fascisms: From Pareto to Gentile (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 211-2; F.T. Marinetti, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà and Luigi Russolo, ‘Against Passéist Venice’, in Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi and Laura Wittman (eds), Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 67.

134 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 43.

135 Nevinson’s article was reprinted from the Manchester Guardian as a preface to Nevinson’s son, Christopher, and Marinetti’s manifesto for ‘Vital English Art’ and is available to view on Yale University (Beinecke) Library’s collection of Digital Images Online: <https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10649148> [accessed 03.11.22].

136 C.R.W. Nevinson, Paint and Prejudice (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938), 77.

137 Hall, The Balkan Wars, 136-7.

138 Biondich, ‘The Balkan Wars’, 389.

139 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 35.

140 Robert J. Donia and John V.A. Fine, Bosnia and Hercegovina: A Tradition Betrayed (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 1-5.

141 Ugur Ümit Üngör, ‘Mass violence against civilians during the Balkan Wars’, in The Wars Before the Great War, 78.

142 Michail, Britain and the Balkans, 83.

143 ‘Souvenirs of Misrule’, The Bystander, 6 Nov., 1912, 293.

144 Norman Angell, Peace Theories and the Balkan War (London: Horace, Marshall and Son, 1912), 13-5, 58.

145 Çetinkaya, ‘Atrocity’, 763.

146 David Welch, ‘Atrocity Propaganda’, in Nicholas J. Cull, David Culbert, and David Welch (eds), Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopaedia, 1500 to the Present (Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio, 2003), 24.

147 Emily Robertson, ‘Propaganda and “Manufactured Hatred”: A Reappraisal of the Ethics of First World War British and Australian Atrocity Propaganda’, Public Relations Inquiry, 3:2 (2014), 246.

148 Welch, ‘Atrocity’, 24.

149 Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff, 102, 17-8, 8-9.

150 Baring, Letters from the Near East, 135-6; Baker, The Passing of the Turkish Empire, 154.

151 Ashmead-Bartlett, With the Turks, 248-9.

152 Baldwin, A War Photographer, 149.

153 Stobart, War and Women, 53.

154 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 129.

155 Grant, To the Four Corners, xi.

156 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 169. For the perceived realism of war photography see, John Taylor, War Photography: Realism in the British Press (London: Routledge, 1991).

157 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Picador, 2003).

158 ‘Best wishes for the success of the Balkan States’, The Bystander, 9 Oct., 1912, 77; ‘Souvenirs of Misrule’.

159 Campbell, The Balkan War Drama, 183.

160 Robert Nye, ‘The duel of honour and the origins of the rules for arms, warfare and arbitration in the Hague conferences’, in Maartje Abbenhuis, Christopher Ernst Barber, and Annalise R. Higgens (eds), War, Peace and International Order? The Legacies of the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 (London: Routledge, 2017), 121-37.

161 Gibbs and Grant, The Balkan War, 104.

162 Darko Majstorovic, ‘The 1913 Ottoman Military Campaign in Eastern Thrace: A Prelude to Genocide?’, Journal of Genocide Research, 21:1 (2019), 29-30; Syed Tanvir Wasti, ‘The 1912-13 Balkan Wars and the Siege of Edirne’, Middle Eastern Studies, 40:4 (2004), 64-5.

163 Buxton, With the Bulgarian Staff, 77.

164 MacDonald, Czar Ferdinand, 338.

165 Bejtullah Destani and Robert Elsie (eds.), The Balkan Wars: British Consular Reports from Macedonia in the Final Years of the Ottoman Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 4-5.

166 André Gerolymatos, The Balkan Wars: Conquest, Revolution, and Retribution from the Ottoman Era to the Twentieth Century and Beyond (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 241-2.

167 M. Edith Durham, The Burden of the Balkans (London: Edward Arnold, 1905), 81.

168 Henry Noel Brailsford, ‘Two Views on the Balkans’, The Speaker (1905), 618.

169 M. Edith Durham, The Struggle for Scutari (Turk, Slav and Albanian) (London: Edward Arnold, 1914), 239, 269, 185; Joyce Cary, Memoir of the Bobotes (London: Michael Joseph, 1964), 68.

170 Letter to General George Fraser Phillip, 23 January 1913 [Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/DRU 33]; Letter to M. Edith Durham, 26 May 1914 [Somerset Heritage Centre, DD/DRU 47].

171 Bejtullah Destani and Jason Tomes (eds), Albania’s Greatest Friend: Aubrey Herbert and the Making of Modern Albania: Diaries and Papers, 1904-1923 (London, I.B. Tauris, 2011), xvi; Margaret Fitzherbert, The Man Who Was Greenmantle: A Biography of Aubrey Herbert (London: John Murray, 1983), 12.

172 Larry Wolff, ‘The Western Representation of Eastern Europe on the Eve of World War I: Mediated Encounters and Intellectual Expertise in Dalmatia, Albania, and Macedonia’, The Journal of Modern History, 86:2 (2014), 394-7.

173 Pierre Loti, Turkey in Agony (London: The Ottoman Committee, 1913), 45.

174 ‘A Vindication of Turkey’, Nottingham and Midland News, 22 Nov., 1913, 7.

175 ‘Fact Outdoes Fiction’, Leeds Mercury, 20 Nov., 1913, 4.

176 Pickthall quoted in Jamie Gilham, ‘Marmaduke Pickthall and the British Muslim Convert Community’, in Geoffrey P. Nash (ed), Marmaduke Pickthall: Islam and the Modern World (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 53.

177 Young, Nationalism and War, xvi; ‘Fratricidal War in Balkania’, The Sphere, 19 Jul., 1913, 61.

178 Price, The Balkan Cockpit, 345.

179 J.G. Cassavetti, Hellas and the Balkan Wars (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1914), 336-51.

180 Trapman, The Greeks Triumphant, 277.

181 Florian Keisinger, ‘The Irish Question and the Balkan Wars’, in, The Balkan Wars from Contemporary Perception to Historic Memory, 164.

182 H.C. Seppings Wright, Two Years Under the Crescent (London: J. Nisbet and Co., 1913), 173.

183 Foster, Yugoslavia in the British Imagination, 70.

184 ‘Indian Moslems and the Balkan War’, The Scotsman, 14 Feb., 1913, 5.

185 Loti, Turkey in Agony, 9.

186 R.L. Shukla, ‘Some Aspects of the Indian Muslim Response to the Balkan Wars’, Proceedings of the Indian History Congress, 35 (1975), 417. See also, Syed Tanvir Wasti, ‘The Indian Red Crescent Mission to the Balkan Wars’, Middle Eastern Studies, 45:3 (2009), 393-406.

187 Perkins, ‘British liberalism’, 169.

188 Young, Nationalism and War, 379.

189 Perkins, ‘British liberalism’, 170.

190 Michailidis, ‘Reporting from the Frontline’, 128.

191 Trampan, The Greeks Triumphant, 143. See also, Walter Harrington Crawfurd Price, Light on the Balkan Darkness (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent and Co., 1915).

192 Enika Abazi and Albert Doja, ‘International representations of Balkan wars: a socio-anthropological approach in international relations perspective’, Cambridge Review of International Affairs, 29:2 (2016), 586.

193 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Report of the International Commission to Inquire into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars (Washington D.C.: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1914), 108.