was a time, when the Russians were taking Przemysl, when Rumania's
tide seemed to be at the flood--if ever it was going to be. That chance
was lost, and Rumania found herself standing squarely in the track of
the stream of ammunition which used to flow down from Duesseldorf to the
Turks--when I was at the front with the Turks, practically all the
ammunition boxes I saw, and there were hundreds of them, were marked
"Gut uber Rumanien"--and, later, in Russia's path to Bulgaria and
Servia.

One of these days a hot thrill might run down the Calea Vittorei, and
all at once Capsa's and the other little booths in this miniature Vanity
Fair would seem strange and far-away. But until that day one could
fancy the romanticists and realists lambasting each other in the papers,
the soldiers grinding away in their dusty camps, the pretty ladies
rolling gayly down the sprinkled asphalt, and the chanteuse singing over
the footlights:

"Que pense le Premier Ministre? On n'sait pas--"

("What thinks the Prime Minister? Nobody knows--")

"Is he for the Germans? Has he made a convention With perfidious Albion?
Nobody knows..."

The Gate to Constantinople

Only the Danube separates Rumania from Bulgaria, yet the people--of the
two capitals, at least--are as different as the French and Scotch. The
train leaves Bucarest after breakfast; you are ferried over the river at
Rustchuk at noon, and, after trailing over the shoulders of long,
rolling plateaus, are up in the mountains in Sofia that evening. The
change is almost as sharp as that between Ostend and Folkestone.

You leave French, or the half-Latin Rumanian language, for a Slavic
speech, and the Cyrillic, or Russian, alphabet; names ending in "sco" or
"ano" (Ionesco, Filipesco, Bratiano) for names ending in "off"
(Radoslavoff, Malinoff, Ghenadieff, Antinoff, and the like), and all the
show and vivacity, the cafes and cocottes of Bucarest, for a clean
little mountain capital as determined and serious as some new town out
West.

It seemed, though of course such impressions are mostly chance, that the
difference began at the border. In Rumania, at the Hungarian border,
they took away my passport, which in times like these is like taking
away one's clothes, and, though I assured the customs inspector that I
was on my way to Constantinople, and in a hurry, it required four days'
wait in Bucarest, and innumerable visits to the police before the paper
was returned. Every o