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The total German casualties for the month of October, 1916, reached 199,675 officers and men, of whom 34,231 were killed. For some time after Roumania entered the war her fighting forces were divided between two campaigns in the Dobrudja and in Transylvania, the Austrian territory invaded by Roumania as soon as she declared war.
The mightiest efforts of Russia had been unable to save the kingdom from the hands of the invaders. Thereby she had been forced to confess a certain degree of weakness. Nor had Sarrail in Macedonia been able to divert the activities of the Bulgarians from Dobrudja to any serious extent. This too constituted a second confession of weakness.
Berlin and Vienna both admitted that the Rumanians had recaptured Rosca, a frontier height east of the Predeal Pass. On November 6, 1916, came the news from Bucharest that the Rumanian and Russian forces in northern Dobrudja had again assumed the offensive and that Mackensen's line was giving way; and that in retiring his troops had burned the villages of Daeni, Gariot, Rosman, and Gaidar.
In the Dobrudja, after the capture of Cernavoda by Von Mackensen, there were strenuous efforts by the Roumanians, aided by Russians, to regain their lost territory. In their early retreat they destroyed the great eleven-mile bridge over the Danube at Cernavoda and so cut off for the time being Von Mackesen's threatened drive to Bucharest from the south.
He did, however, detain the three Bulgarian armies on the Salonika front, and Mackensen only had the help of the fourth, which had all along watched the Rumanian frontier. On 1 September his forces invaded the Dobrudja and seized Dobritch, Balchik, and Kavarna on the coast. On the 5th they captured Turtukai on the Danube with an infantry division and a hundred guns.
General von Falkenhayn, co-operating with von Mackensen, smashed his way through Vulkan Pass, and cut the main line running to Bucharest at Craiova. The Dobrudja region was over-run and the central Roumanian plain was swept clear of all Roumanian opposition to the German advance.
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 say the least there is no denying that the treaty of Bucarest did not give her a square deal.
Thus, with the first of the new month the Rumanians were on the defensive in this region. On the following day general attention was again attracted toward the Dobrudja by a feat on the part of the Rumanians which for the moment gave the impression that she was about to strike the enemy an unexpected and decisive blow.
Sakharov had been forced to withdraw from the Dobrudja, and all that was left of Rumania was its Moldavian province, less than one-third of the kingdom, with its capital near the Russian frontier at Jassy. Sarrail's campaign in the south provided inadequate compensation.
Aug. 27 Italy declares war on Germany; Roumania enters war on side of allies. Aug. 29 Field Marshal von Hindenburg made chief of staff of German armies, succeeding Gen. von Falkenhayn. August 30 Russian armies seize all five passes in Carpathians into Hungary. September 3 Allies renew offensive north of Somme; Bulgarian and German troops invade Dobrudja, in Roumania.
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