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Updated: June 27, 2025
General von Falkenhayn continued his advance into Roumania during November and at the beginning of December the battle for Bucharest was ranging on three sides of the capital, with the Roumanians successful at some points, the invaders at others.
The Teutonic invasion was heading toward the Danube. Should it reach the banks of that river there would be nothing to prevent a juncture between the forces of Falkenhayn and those under Mackensen, thereby forming a net which would be stretched clear across Rumania and swept eastward toward Bucharest.
With the aid of so effective a barrier as this broad river it now seemed possible that the Rumanians might decrease their forces very considerably on this front, still succeed in holding Mackensen back, and turn their full attention to Falkenhayn in the north.
President Wilson believed that he could rely upon the Chancellor as a leader of democracy against von Tirpitz and von Falkenhayn, as leaders of German autocracy. The Chancellor knew the President looked upon him as the man to reform Germany.
They've never heard of Foch, much less of Falkenhayn and Mackensen, to say nothing of Rommel, Guderian or Montgomery. They rest idly behind their Washington breastworks when the order of the day should be attack, attack, and again attack; keeping the combat entirely verbal, weakening the spirit of our forces and waiting supinely for the enemy to bring the war to us...."
Not only had the Germans sufficient men to carry on the Verdun offensive, but facing the British their numbers were the largest mile for mile since the first battle of Ypres. Of course, the German hypothesis the one which cost von Falkenhayn his place as Chief of Staff was based on such a state of exhaustion by the French that a British attack would be mandatory.
Neither he nor von Moltke, the Chief of the General Staff, was consulted, but Tirpitz declares that the Emperor saw at Potsdam the Minister of War, von Falkenhayn, and also the Minister of the Military Cabinet, von Lyncker. If so, whether or not the conference was technically a Crown Council, the meeting was a very important one.
We then went to the new palace where in the extraordinary hall studded with curious specimens of minerals from all countries, a long table forming three sides of a square was set for about sixty people. Colonel House and I sat directly across the table from the Emperor, with General Falkenhayn between us.
Before the year is passed the Entente may need American troops as badly as France needed English assistance last year. General von Falkenhayn, former chief of the German General Staff, told me about the same thing last December, in Rumania. "In war," he remarked, "nothing is certain except that everything is uncertain, but one thing I know is certain: We will win the war."
Falkenhayn has told us what a violent strain was imposed upon Germany by the stabilisation of the Western Front early in 1915. The tension between the Great General Headquarters and the Home Government was already in evidence, and would have caused difficulty in attaining suitable home and liaison organisations, in particular with regard to supply.
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