As hard as it may be to believe, not everything is yet known about World War One. Even some major events have remained hidden for more than a century. Here, Graeme Sheppard, author of a new book, tells us about the extraordinary Bulgarian Contract.
Over a hundred years on, and after the production of so many detailed studies, anyone might reasonably assume that there can be nothing new, surely, to discover about the events of World War I. That is, nothing surely of major consequence. A new aspect or angle to a campaign or battle maybe, or perhaps a fresh insight into some familiar ground. But the discovery of new and previously unseen evidence of how and why the war ended when it did in 1918, rather than continue in to 1919? Surely not? And yet a few years ago that was precisely what a visit to the UK National Archives in Kew presented me with.
Why the war ended?
I hadn’t been looking for it or anything like it. In fact, I was searching for unrelated material pertaining to British diplomats in China. But while doing so, I came across a very slim Foreign Office file from 1931. It came in a box with the unpromising title of “Miscellaneous”. It contained a mere few pages: an internal letter from a junior diplomat, one D.J. Cowan, explaining how, while a prisoner-of-war in Bulgaria in 1918, he had encountered among its peasant population word of an extraordinary act of political propaganda and misinformation, one so effective that it had succeeded in propelling Bulgaria out of the war. It was this act, he believed, rather than the Allied offensive of that September, that had been the true cause of the collapse of Macedonian front - a collapse that foreshadowed the November armistice six weeks later. Cowan was clearly making an important claim, and yet, by the look of the file, at the time the letter had elicited little interest.
I was still trying to make sense of this find when a few weeks later I came into possession of the unpublished memoirs of another Foreign Office diplomat and fellow Balkan prisoner, Robert Howe. Howe wrote in the 1970s in his retirement. Quite independently, and with greater detail, he described being a witness to the same Balkan deception. But Howe went further: a few years after the war, in Belgrade, he had actually met the political architect behind the plot. He had discussed the matter with him in the royal palace.
An extraordinary tale
Quite apart from the startling information the pair provided, junior officers Cowan and Howe had an extraordinary story of their own to relate.
In late September 1918, Cowan and Howe, prisoners since 1915 and twice before failed escapees, walked out of their Bulgarian prison camp deep behind enemy lines. Having heard rumors that the Macedonian front had collapsed, on this third occasion they simply announced to their resigned captors that they were leaving. No one stopped them. They then spent several days travelling a hundred miles over chaotic roads and rail lines jammed with an enemy army in a rebellious retreat. Largely ignored on their way, they headed not toward the advancing Allied forces to the south, but instead west toward Sofia, the enemy’s capital, and a city now engulfed in political turmoil. Arriving at the main rail station, which they found in a state of frenzy, they caught a horse-drawn cab to the nearly deserted Ministry of War building. There, despite their less than orderly attire, they brazenly announced to staff there that they were British officers and were taking control of the city in the name of His Majesty the King. No one raised an objection. With their authority established, a ministry car and driver were summoned to take the pair to the city’s Grand Hotel, where they demanded and were provided with the best rooms the establishment had to offer. An hour later, having washed and shaved, they entered the hotel restaurant, only to find it full of senior German officers gloomily eating their dinner. The hotel, it transpired, happened to serve as the German regional headquarters. Undeterred, they informed the maître d' that they required the head table and would the two gentlemen seated there kindly vacate it, at which point the German officers concerned rose wordlessly from their seats. Rubbing salt into the remaining diners’ wounds, one of the chums then raised a toast to the victorious Allies.
“It was a great moment,” remembered Howe. “One of the greatest moments of my life - perhaps never again one like it. One of those moments when you know there is nothing you cannot do, when no obstacles exist, when no one can touch you.”
Contract
A great moment, indeed. And yet, though they did not realize it fully at the time, the two men had so much more to relate. They had experienced a very peculiar captivity in Bulgaria, one of extremes, ranging from internment in the worst of punishment death-camps to that of living in virtual freedom among its peasant folk. Their survival tale, however, provides only the backdrop to their unique eye-witness accounts of a secret act of Balkan propaganda, known as the Contract, one that triggered not only rebellion in Bulgaria and the collapse of the Macedonian front, but also acted as the catalyst for German defeat and the road to the armistice of November 11.
A new book, The Bulgarian Contract, provides readers with two new strands of evidence that together change our understanding of how and why the Great War reached its conclusion. Firstly, recently discovered eye-witness accounts of a clandestine deception that was crucial in bringing about the dramatic collapse of the Macedonian front. Secondly, the direct influence this fraud had on Germany’s High Command (Oberste Heeresleitung) in occupied Belgium, and on de facto dictator, Erich Ludendorff, and his crucial meeting with the Kaiser of September 29, resulting in the road to German surrender six weeks later. Describing politics, revolution, treason, assassination, and deceit, the book explains how without the hitherto unknown Contract, the Great War was destined to continue through the coming winter and into 1919, resulting in many thousands of further deaths.
You can order The Bulgarian Contract here: http://thebulgariancontract.com/
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