Hungarians, and Germans, during their two years' occupation of Rumania,
had seized and carried off from the latter country two million five
hundred thousand tons of wheat and hundreds of thousands of head of
cattle, besides vast quantities of clothing, wool, skins, and raw
material, while thousands of Rumanian homes were gutted and their
contents taken away and sold in the Central Empires. Factories were
stripped of their machinery and the railways of their engines and
wagons. When Mackensen left there remained in Rumania only fifty
locomotives out of the twelve hundred which she possessed before the
war. The material, therefore, that Rumania removed from Hungary during
the first weeks of the occupation represented but a small part of the
quantities of which she had been despoiled during the war.

It was further urged that at the beginning the Rumanian delegates would
have contented themselves with reparation for losses wantonly inflicted
and for the restitution of the property wrongfully taken from them by
their enemies, on the lines on which France had obtained this offset.
They had asked for this, but were informed that their request could not
be complied with. They were not even permitted to send a representative
to Germany to point out to the Inter-Allied authorities the objects of
which their nation had been robbed, as though the plunderers would
voluntarily give up their ill-gotten stores! It was partly because of
these restrictions that the Rumanian authorities resolved to take what
belonged to them without more ado. And they could not, they said, afford
to wait, because they were expecting an attack by the Russian Bolsheviki
and it behooved them to have done with one foe before taking on another.
These explanations irritated in lieu of calming the Supreme Council.

"Possibly," wrote the well-informed _Temps_, "Rumania would have been
better treated if she had closed with certain proposals of loans on
crushing terms or complied with certain demands for oil
concessions."[161] Possibly. But surely problems of justice, equity, and
right ought never to have been mixed up with commercial and industrial
interests, whether with the connivance or by the carelessness of the
holders of a vast trust who needed and should have merited unlimited
confidence. It is neither easy nor edifying to calculate the harm which
transactions of this nature, whether completed or merely inchoate, are
capable of inflicting on the great comm