Nearly a million Russian soldiers had, by this time, been sent into Moldavia; they were organized in thirteen cavalry divisions and a dozen army corps. The Rumanian Army had been reduced by losses and disorganization to six weak divisions; these held a sector of the front about twenty miles in length.
Winter weather and mutual exhaustion precluded the immediate continuation of hostilities, and the opposing armies faced each other under conditions of discomfort which could hardly have been worse.
During this period of comparative calm, it was possible to appreciate the situation both from an Allied and an enemy point of view.
The Allies had, undoubtedly, lost prestige. Great Britain had forfeited the confidence which had been our most precious asset in the earlier stages of the war; the British Government was regarded by Rumanians as the tool of French and Russian diplomacy, and our warmest partisans found little comfort in benevolent intentions which were never translated into deeds. The French burked criticism, to some extent, by an immense display of energy. Hundreds of officers and men were incorporated in the Rumanian Army, who by their spirit and example did much to raise the morale of the troops. The Russians, to a greater degree than ever, inspired distrust and fear. The Germanophiles in Rumania had always been Russophobes; during this period they gained many new adherents, both in the army and the business class.
Allied prestige, and more especially that of Great Britain, could have been restored by a decisive success in a direction which would have enabled Rumania to recommence hostilities, in the spring or summer, independently of Russia. That direction was obviously Constantinople, the key of the Near East; no other remedy for Rumania’s plight was either practicable or just.
The loss of Wallachia had deprived Rumania of four-fifths of her food supplies, almost all her petrol and her principal railway centres. Moldavia had to support, in addition to the normal population, thousands of refugees from Wallachia and, to a great extent, the Russian forces. So defective were the road and railway communications, that the supply services functioned only with the greatest difficulty while the troops remained at rest. To attempt to even utilize this region as an advanced base for offensive operations was to invite defeat. Operations on a large scale for the recovery of Wallachia could only have been carried out by using the Danube as a supplementary line of communication; to do so, it was essential for the Allies to be undisputed masters of the Black Sea, and this involved a reinforcement of the Russian Fleet. While the Dardanelles remained in enemy hands, the Black Sea was as much German and Turkish as it was Russian; naval engagements were of rare occurrence and invariably indecisive.
Speculation was busy at Rumanian Headquarters as to the invaders’ future course of action. If further conquests were envisaged, their position on the Danube conferred on them the power of turning the left flank of the Sereth line by the occupation of Galatz, against which place their communications by rail and river would have made possible the rapid concentration of numerically superior forces. Once in possession of Galatz, the invasion of Bessarabia could have been undertaken, since the establishment of an Allied front on the line of the River Pruth[34] would have been forestalled.
The Central Empires, however, made no serious effort to capture Galatz; they appeared to be content with Braila and complete control of the Danube Valley between that port and the Iron Gate. From a strategical point of view their position was good. An immense force of Russians was immobilized in Moldavia and held there by the threat to Odessa; this force could only be freed for offensive operations by a complete reversal of Allied policy in the Near East, a contingency not likely to occur. In the meantime, the stocks of corn in Wallachia were being transferred to Germany and restorative measures were being taken in the oilfields, where the machinery and plant had been destroyed in wholesale fashion during the retreat.
Famine was approaching in Moldavia and typhus was raging in the towns and countryside, when the Allies convened a conference at Petrograd to determine their future plans.
General Gourko had replaced General Alexieff as Chief of the Russian Staff, owing to the illness of the latter. At the outset of the Conference, Russia’s principal military delegate submitted an appreciation of the military situation which, in so far as it concerned Rumania, either displayed an inexcusable ignorance of the facts or was intentionally false. He described new railway lines in Bessarabia as approaching completion, whose construction could not be commenced before the spring was far enough advanced to melt the ice and snow; on such premises as these he based a plan of operations, which even Russian Generals on the spot described as suicide. The other Allied representatives listened with grateful ears; for them, a Russo-Rumanian offensive in the spring had many great advantages—it would relieve the pressure on the Western front and help Cadorna on the Carso. They argued that if the General Staff in Petrograd thought this offensive could be made, it was the best solution of the problem, and all that remained for them to do was to arrange for liberal supplies of war material and guns.