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Updated: May 31, 2025
Everything that human foresight could think of was carefully studied, everything that human ingenuity could provide for was thoroughly effected and systematized. Royal dynasties were founded abroad by German princes. German colonies settled in Russia, Poland, Palestine and Brazil. German schools were opened in Roumania, Spain, Asia Minor, the Ottoman Empire, the Tsardom.
East Prussia, Poland, Lithuania, Galicia, part of Hungary, Alsace, Serbia, Bosnia, northern France, south-western Austria-Hungary, and all of Belgium and Roumania, a territory amounting to one-fifth of the whole of Europe, were scarred and burned and devastated. It will be years and years before these countries recover from the effects of war's invasion.
That peace, as well as Trotski's attitude, left no doubt in Bucharest that Roumania could no longer reckon on further co-operation on the part of Russia and gave rise to the idea in some circles that she would turn back. I say in some circles, for there was one group which, to the very last moment, was all for war.
In an article written at the time I pointed out that one of the mistakes made by the Entente Powers consisted in the circuitous and clumsy way in which they negotiated with Roumania. The spokesman and guardian of Italy during the decisive conversations with the Entente was the Foreign Minister, Baron Sonnino, the silent member of the Cabinet.
In the first place, as Roumania was larger and more populous than any of the Balkan states, the Roumanian nation could not sit still with folded arms while Bulgaria wrested this preeminence from her.
Serbia has been overrun, but never were the convergent forces of adjacent interests so clearly in favour of her recuperation. The possibility of Italy and that strange Latin outlier, Roumania, joining hands through an allied and friendly Serbia must be very present in Italian thought.
On Feb. 4 the Roumanian Chamber of Deputies declared that Roumania would defend its territory to the last, by armed force if necessary; but it soon appeared that none of the Powers took any interest in the matter, and, thanks to the prudence of Prince Charles, the proud little nation gradually schooled itself to accept the inevitable .
He wanted to be the most powerful ruler in the Balkan states, and it made no difference to him which side helped him to gain his object. About this time, the Russians had been forced to retreat to a line running south from Riga, on the Baltic Sea, to the northern boundary of Roumania.
In Roumania, and among the Slav, Bohemian, and Hungarian peoples, French attacks German in the flank, and has as clear a prospect of predominance. These two tongues must inevitably come into keen conflict; they will perhaps fight their battle for the linguistic conquest of Europe, and perhaps of the world, in a great urban region that will arise about the Rhine.
I discovered, however, that Bulgaria's hands were tied; that her mourning for lost Macedonia would not last long; that the aims she pursued were the policy of the outlet on four seas, and the territorial separation of Greece and Serbia; that her rôle in the Peninsula was to be predominant; that she had been chosen to supplant Serbia as the leading Balkan State, and would pay tribute to the Central Empires in the shape of docility to and ready co-operation with them; and that Roumania would, if she continued to find favour in the eyes of the statesmen of Vienna and Berlin, be associated with Bulgaria, but without attaining her rank or acquiring her power.
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