Antwerp to Gallipoli A Year of the War on Many Fronts-and Behind Them

To Cons

a and

rolled eastward across the Hungarian plain, and toward dusk climbed

the war as we had thought of it for months was, so to speak, on the other side of the earth. We were on the edge of the East

orking comfortably together, and rows of ploughs creeping with almost incredible leisure behind black water-buffalo cattle; but as we rolled down into Predeal throug

you do in a Pullman through our own alkali and sage-brush. The steward (his culture is intensive, though it may not extend beyond the telegraph- poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend and the Golden Horn) had just brought soup and a bottle

as Rumanians are likely to do, and we began to talk war. I asked-a quest

ys we shall be

n whic

, "against Aust

arest was full of officers, the papers and cafes still buzzing with war talk. Rumania was still going in, but since the re

ette. She will end"-he made the gesture of counting money into his hand-

plus vierg

y was poor and little,

faut vivre-o

she did not wish to go there with her husband. I suggested that she come with me-an endeavor to rise to the Rumanian mood which wa

nople," she flashed back as the

it almost seemed as if they had heard the tales that are usually told of their

not French is full of Latin echoes, and a Rumanian, however mixed his blood, is as fond of thinking himself a lineal and literal descendant of the Roman colonists as a New Englander is of ancestors in the Mayflower. At the Alhambra in Bucarest next evening, after the cosmopolite artistes had done then-perfunctory turns and returned to their street clothes and the audience, to begin the mo

supposed to imitate. It would be more to the point to call Bucarest a little Buenos Aires. There is much the same showiness; a similar curious mixture of crudeness and luxury. But Buenos Aires is one of the world's great cities, and always just beyond the asphalt you can somehow feel the

of the town, with a tree-shaded drive at one end, and the hotels, sidewalk cafes, and fashionable shops at the other, and up and down this narrow street

al thing would be a woman in the corner of an open victoria-after seeing scores of them all alike, you feel as though you could do it in a minute: one slashing line for the hat, two coal-black holes, and a dash of carmine in a patch of marble white, and a pair of silk-covered ankles crossed and pointed in a way that seems Parisian enough after one has become used to the curi

gle them from the sidewalk. Along with them are many young bloods out of uniform, barbered and powdered like chorus men made up for their wor

ks. Waiters scurry about; the café tables, crowded in these days with politicians, amateur diplomats, spies, ammunition agents, Heaven knows what, push out on the sidewalk. The people on the sidewa

o- will tell you all about it at one of the open-air theatres in the

(to see one of the gilded youths of Bucarest enter Capsa's at five-thirty, solemnly devour a large chocolate eclair, and as solemnly stalk out again, is an experience itself), and all about the politicians and the men who are running things. Everything is in miniature, you see, in a little nation like this, which, although only as large as one of our

country in Wisconsin or Illinois: hour after hour of corn and wheat, orchards, hops, and vineyards, cultivated by peasants who, though most of them have no land and little education, at least look care-free, and dress themselves in exceedingly pleasing homespun linen, hand-embroidered clothes. Then high

hould love it, and, set apart from their Slav and Magyar neighbors by speech and temperament

an nations, which have been bullied and flattered in turn by the powers

on the west, but most of all the pine forests and the people of Transylvania, just over the divide-you cross it coming from Budapest-largely Rumanian in speech and sympathy, though a

e lacking in other nations in this quarter of the globe. In our modern epoch we have assimilated French culture with indisputable success, and have given in every field proof of a great faculty of adaptability and progress. We can become the most important second-class power in Europe the day after the war stops; in fif

bit, though a younger man, of Clemenceau and his L'Homme Enchainé. Rich, well-informed, daring, and clever, with a really fascinating gift of expression, he will talk to you in French, English (his wife is English), Rumanian-I don't know how many other languages-about anything you wish, always with the air of one who knows. We have no such adventu

like this, he says, those of his way of thinking can't say too much; they must be "like the French Academicians, who never stop writing." Now and then, in t

absurd hour in Paris. But I had to go to London in the afternoon, and M. Poincaré to the Elysee at ten o'clock for the felicitations of the New Year.

rte-cochere opening into a big stone city house, an anteroom with a political secretary and several lieutenants, and presently a quiet, richly furnished lib

d, that Germany could never win, that Rumania must go in with the Entente-it was like the first scene from some play of E

d I said that it seemed unfortunate that two peoples with so many apparent grounds of contact as the Germans and French must so misunderstand each other. Their temperament and culture were different, to be sure, but th

unfortunate-we must take the world as it is. No, they were with France and down with the Germans. Fran

t 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 w

nly 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 fr

-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 soldie

s 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

ught 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

a 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 Tu

r would seem strange and far-away. But until that day one could fancy the romanticists and realists lambasting each other in the papers, the soldi

remier Ministre

e Prime Minister

Has he made a convention

y kno

to Cons

The train leaves Bucarest after breakfast; you are ferried over the river at Rustchuk at noon, and, after trailing over the shoulders of

"ano" (Ionesco, Filipesco, Bratiano) for names ending in "off" (Radoslavoff, Malinoff, Ghenadieff, Antinoff, and the like), and all the sho

red the customs inspector that I was on my way to Constantinople, and in a hurry, it required four days' wait in Bucarest, and innumerable visits to the police before the paper was returned. Every one, apparently, on the train had the same experienc

ynist, who prefers a room to himself, is received with sympathy, and the wish politely expressed that monsieur will soon be himself again. My own experience was less

would "listen to reason"; the porters, coachmen, waiters, and the like, crude rather

e world has been invaded and reinvaded and fought over since the beginning of thing

rs, of shepherds, peasants, each with his little piece of land. The men who now direct its fortunes are the sons and grandsons of very simple people. Possibly it is because we Americans are also a new people,

before-I met him on the steamer-had gone from a little village near Sofia to Harvard. His married sister had learned English at the American School for Girls; her husband, a Macedonian Bulgar, had worked his way through Yale. The amiable old general, who

down from Rumania, are speckled with sheep. Sometimes even in Sofia you will meet a shepherd patiently urging his little flock up a modern concrete sidewalk and

the over-barbered young snipes in the streets of Bucarest. On market days the main down-town street is filled with them- long-limbed, slow-moving old fellows, with eyes and foreheads wrinkled from years of squinting in the bright plateau sun, faces bronzed and weathered like an old farmhouse, shuffli

at Bulgaria was going to do, amiably permitted me to trail about with them, and thus to see and talk a little with some of those who ar

ere decidedly "smooth" in a grave, slightly heavy way, and all suggest

handsome, two-horse public carriages at a time when there are not enough horses and carriages to go round. One-horse carriages are impracticable, because the Ru

ho were everywhere, as fine and soldier-like young men as I had seen anywhere in Europe. They and the common soldiers, with thei

feather in his cap. It is such an entrance as you might expect to find at any comfortable country place at home, and one day, when some student volunteers went by on a practise

g pictures, but it was interesting, in contrast with Bucarest to find the crowd going to the National Theatre to see Tolstoi's "Living Corpse." The stock company, moderately

ic-opera kingdoms invented by some of our novelists. It was in Bulgaria, as I recall it, that Mr. Shaw put "Arms and the Man," and the fun lay, as you wil

n which she was accustomed to live, and his unimpressed response that his father had so and so many table-cloths, so many horses, so many hundreds of plates, etc. Who was he,

erritory about as big as Ohio, is set squarely in front of the main gate to Constantinople, an

y's on the other; but Bulgaria does both, and, in addition, blocks the whole weste

m Georgia, compelled to go away down to Key West, and fight their way up through the Everglades. They had in front of them hills behind hills and an intrenched enemy whom they could not see generally and who could alway

nsula were so heart-breaking a maze to fling good men into that you can well imagine the Allies used what pressure they could. But if it was important to them that the gate be opened-let alone that Bulgaria come in herself- it was just as important to the Germans and Austrians that it be closed. And who was to say that if Bulga

g supply of ammunition lightly to go into a world war like this. And then the B

for a time. Then came the quarrel between the Balkan allies, and presently Bulgaria was fighting for her life-Serbia on the west, Greece on

d the turning over to them of the Bulgarian part of the province of Dobrudja greatly

. "We put our money on the wrong horse! No, they'll keep on talking-they're the chaps who want to get something for nothing. Think of the treaty of Bucarest and the way we patted Rumani

d gained. The Turks, "driven from Europe," calmly moved back to Adrianople; Rumania took the whole of Dobrudja; Bulgarian Macedonia went to Serbia and Greece. However much Bulgaria may have been to blame for the break-up of the Balkan League-and she was stubborn and headstrong to

y the treaty of Bucarest and the fixed idea that Bulgarian Macedonia must come under the flag again. But though this was true, and the army mobilized, and on a fine day every other man on the streets of Sofia an officer, the

own to Dedeagatch and reach the Aegean without being obliged to go into Turkey and out again. It even seemed that Bulgaria might be able to keep her neutrality to the end. Her compromise with Turkey was not so odd as it seemed to many at first. She

ar with little patience, to think of all these "aspirations" as merely somebody else's land. Fear or envy of our neighbors, international hatred, is almost unknown with us. All that was left behind, three thousand miles away, and the green water in between permits us to indulge in the rare luxury of altruism. Yet these hatreds, these fears, and ambitions, inherited and carefully nourished, are just as real- partic

h it comes from a small minority educated in France, and the Rumanian people may be no more "Latin" than we are. And it is an interesting notion-though perha

life as an independent nation are those which deserve to be encouraged and preserved. And if it were true that this war were being fought to establish the rig