He gave me a copy of a speech in which he gladly admitted that he was a "responsible factor." People talked of going slow and sparing blood. Well, they might get something by sitting still, even become a great country, but they could never become a great nation. It was not territory and population they wanted, but the sword of Rumania to join in remaking the map of Europe. When the delegates gathered around the green table, they did not want the one from Rumania, as he was at the Congress of Berlin, only able to make visits to chancelleries. He must go in the same door with them, and say: "In proportion to my population, I have shed as much blood as you."
He had always regretted not having children, never so much as to-day; but if he had a dozen sons, and knew that all of them would fall in the war, he would not be cast down. Even if the territory they wished could be occupied by a simple act of gendarmerie—he would say no—they must enter Budapest itself (it is only twenty-four hours' railway journey from Bucarest!)—not till then would Austria admit Rumania's superiority. People accused him of working for himself. Who was Take Ionesco in comparison with the fate of a race? As for ambition, well, he had one, and only one—he wanted to see the Rumanian tricolor floating from Buda palace, and before he died to know the moment in which he could pass before his eyes the eighteen hundred years of Rumanian history from the arrival of Trajan at Severin to the entry of Ferdinand at Budapest, and cry: "Now, Lord, let thy servant go in peace, for mine eyes have seen the saving of my race!"
The Rumanian tricolor was no nearer Buda palace when I returned several months later, but Mr. Ionesco was no less hot for war. Even if Germany won, he said, they still should go in, because they would at least keep their own and Germany's respect. "Go to war?"—the phrase was inexact. "We have been at war for eleven months, only others are firing at us, but we are not firing at them. We are in a war that will decide our existence, but the soldiers dying to defend our rights, instead of being our soldiers, are soldiers of the Allies. The Allies will win, but if any one thinks that, having won without us, they will have won for us, he must be mad. Their victory without us may preserve our material life, but it will never save our moral life nor that of future generations."
Mr. Ionesco and those who agree with him belong, it will be observed, with the romanticists—they are for the bright face of danger, great stakes, and, win or lose, putting all to the touch. Those who did not agree with them were men without souls, hagglers and traders, as if a nation could figure out the number of cannon-shots and prisoners, and go where the going's good! It made interesting reading as you sat at one of the café tables, with the crowd flowing by and the five-o'clock papers coming fresh from the press. The other side—and it included the King and most of the government, inasmuch as Rumania had not yet gone to war —had the more difficult task of making caution interesting. In their editorials and speeches Ionesco and his followers were jingoes trying to drive the nation to a Rumanian Sedan.
"A people is great, not only for its numbers of soldiers, but for its civilization, its artists, and intellectuals. A nation militarized is marked for eternal death, for a people lives by its thought and not by force." There was an amusing retort, the afternoon I returned to Bucarest, to one of the fire-eating retired generals, picturing the quaint old fellow as thinking that people were born only to die bravely, and knowing nothing of Rumania's rule as the "defender of Latinism" in the Balkans, "tooting the funereal flute and showing us the mountains— there is to be your tomb!"
There was a time, when the Russians were taking Przemysl, when Rumania's tide seemed to be at the flood—if ever it was going to be. That chance was lost, and Rumania found herself standing squarely in the track of the stream of ammunition which used to flow down from Duesseldorf to the Turks—when I was at the front with the Turks, practically all the ammunition boxes I saw, and there were hundreds of them, were marked "Gut uber Rumanien"—and, later, in Russia's path to Bulgaria and Servia.
One of these days a hot thrill might run down the Calea Vittorei, and all at once Capsa's and the other little booths in this miniature Vanity Fair would seem strange and far-away. But until that day one could fancy the romanticists and realists lambasting each other in the papers, the soldiers grinding away in their dusty camps, the pretty ladies rolling gayly down the sprinkled asphalt, and the chanteuse singing over the footlights:
"Que pense le Premier Ministre? On n'sait pas—"
("What thinks the Prime Minister? Nobody knows—")
"Is he for the Germans? Has he made a convention With perfidious Albion?
Nobody knows…"