I caught up what might be called the rearguard of this lamentable procession two miles to the south of a little Wallachian town, which lay close to the frontier of Moldavia and General Alexieff’s shortest line. Motor cars, country carts and wagons stood four abreast across the road in a long column stretching northwards, whose immobility impeded further progress, however slow; the gathering darkness and exhaustion had set a period to this tragic flight.
On foot, I reached the Headquarters of Count Keller, the commander of a Russian Cavalry Corps; the General had just finished dinner when I entered, and, perhaps for this reason, his outlook on the situation was less gloomy than otherwise it might have been. Count Keller was not devoid of human feeling, the welter of suffering outside his lodging would have touched a heart of stone; but, as a soldier, he was filled with indignation against the Rumanian Government, for having permitted thousands of civilians to use the only highway in this region, and thereby to block, for two whole days, the forward movement of his corps. The obvious retort was that his presence there was useless: he had arrived two months too late.
On the following day, the refugees from Wallachia crossed the Sereth into Moldavia, and found security behind a screen composed of Russian troops. About half a million Russian soldiers had arrived in the Northern Principality and more were yet to come. Wild, uncouth Cossacks swarmed in every village, their first thoughts plunder and the satisfaction of gross appetites; some tried to sell their splendid horses for alcohol in any form.
The first act of the Rumanian tragedy was drawing to its close. A little Latin country had yielded to bribes and threats and had entered, under Russian auspices, into a European war. Now it lay crushed and broken, the victim of two invasions: one, by the enemy in the south; the other, by Russians in the north.
The Western Powers were lavish in their sympathy; they had little else to give and were the helpless witnesses of the evil they had done. In France, a restless, ignorant optimism had conceived a selfish plan; Great Britain had endorsed it, and Russia, in the name of Allied interests, had pursued a traditional Russian policy, which had been both sinister and obscure.
“He that builds a fair house upon an ill seat, committeth himself to prison.” In 1912, the Great Powers, of those days, had laid the foundations of their policy in the Balkans. Ignorance, inertia, selfishness and greed had characterized their statecraft: an ill seat this on which to build, but one well fitted for a pyramid of errors. That pyramid was rising fast and one more block had just been added, an error as tragic as the rest. Though no fair house, it was to hold its master builders like a prison; for one among them,—Tsarist Russia, it was destined to fulfil its proper function—the function of a tomb.
CHAPTER XII
The Russian Revolution and the Russo-Rumanian Offensive—1917
By the middle of January, 1917, the front in Rumania had become stabilized on what was, in point of fact, General Alexieff’s shortest line. This line had its right near Dorna Vatra[33] (the Russian left before Rumania intervened) and traversed the Carpathian foothills until it reached the Sereth Valley, north-east of the town of Focsani; thence it followed the left bank of the river to its junction with the Danube close to Galatz. East of this latter place the front was vague and variable, the swampy region round the Danube’s mouth being a veritable “No Man’s Land.”