Bulgaria decides to mobilise

On 21 September 1915, or 8 September by the Julian calendar then used in Bulgaria, the government of Vasil Radoslavov decided to mobilise the army. The British chronology of the war records under this date that Bulgaria ordered a partial mobilisation, and a general one the next day. Bulgarian historians, however, know of no separate decree on partial mobilisation. According to them, the government’s decision was taken on 21 September, and the tsar signed the decree on general mobilisation late in the evening of the following day.

The decision followed from the agreements that Bulgaria had concluded in secret with Germany two weeks earlier. The military convention obliged it to attack Serbia together with Germany and Austria-Hungary, and for that the army had to be put on a war footing. Mobilisation was also a condition of the Turkish concessions on the Maritsa. Matters proceeded in the strictest secrecy. Until the last moment not even the Bulgarian general staff knew the purpose of Colonel Petar Ganchev’s mission to Germany, and it now had to prepare the mobilisation in haste.

The opposition still tried to turn the country back from this path. On 17 September Tsar Ferdinand received the leaders of the opposition parties at the palace: Ivan Geshov, Aleksandar Malinov, Stoyan Danev, the Radical Naycho Tsanov and the leader of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union, Aleksandar Stamboliyski. They warned that on the side of the Central Powers Bulgaria would have to fight three Balkan nations and four Entente powers, and that this would end in a second national catastrophe for it, after the defeat of 1913. They demanded that parliament be convened and a coalition government formed. Stamboliyski spoke with exceptional sharpness. According to accounts by those present, he warned the tsar that it might cost him his throne and his head. Ferdinand did not change his mind, and the censors suppressed the report of the audience that the opposition wanted to circulate. Stamboliyski was soon in prison.

News of the Bulgarian preparations quickly reached the Entente capitals. The French ambassador in Petrograd, Maurice Paléologue, noted under 21 September that the Russian foreign minister, Sergey Sazonov, had passed on to him the news that Bulgaria was mobilising its army and concentrating it for an attack on Serbia. Paléologue argued that the Serbs should strike first, before the Bulgarians finished mobilising. Sazonov refused. Bulgaria, he said, was Orthodox and owed its existence to Russia; it could not be treated as an enemy. The Entente still hoped that Sofia could be dissuaded from war and for the following days continued to try diplomacy.