The Balkans became a very important part of Buxton's career. In 1912, as Buxton had been warning, war broke out between the newly independent Balkan countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia and the Ottoman Empire. Buxton was Chairman of the Balkan War Relief Committee. Shortly after the war had broken out, he visited Bulgaria with Mabel St Clair Stobart, founder of the Women's Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps. He helped her convince the government to agree to send an all-female medical unit to the war.