e
could pass before his eyes the eighteen hundred years of Rumanian
history from the arrival of Trajan at Severin to the entry of Ferdinand
at Budapest, and cry: "Now, Lord, let thy servant go in peace, for mine
eyes have seen the saving of my race!"

The Rumanian tricolor was no nearer Buda palace when I returned several
months later, but Mr. Ionesco was no less hot for war. Even if Germany
won, he said, they still should go in, because they would at least keep
their own and Germany's respect. "Go to war?"--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 soldiers of the Allies. The Allies will win, but if
any one thinks that, having won without us, they will have won for us,
he must be mad. Their victory without us may preserve our material
life, but it will never save our moral life nor that of future
generations."

Mr. Ionesco and those who agree with him belong, it will be observed,
with the romanticists--they are for the bright face of danger, great
stakes, and, win or lose, putting all to the touch. Those who did not
agree with them were men without souls, hagglers and traders, as 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 cafe tables, with the crowd flowing by and the five-o'clock papers
coming fresh from the press. The other side--and it included the King
and most of the government, inasmuch as Rumania had not yet gone to war
--had the more difficult task of making caution interesting. In their
editorials and speeches Ionesco and his followers were jingoes trying to
drive the nation to a Rumanian Sedan.

"A people is great, not only for its numbers of soldiers, but for its
civilization, its artists, and intellectuals. A nation militarized is
marked for eternal death, for a people lives by its thought 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 born only to die bravely,
and knowing nothing of Rumania's rule as the "defender of Latinism" in
the Balkans, "tooting the funereal flute and showing us the mountains--
there is to be your tomb!"

There