Antwerp to Gallipoli Part 10

One seemed to see the soul of Germany, at least of this "great time," in these men's eyes. The Belgian soul we did not see much of, but there came glimpses of it now and then.

In Antwerp we stopped in a little cafe for a cup of chocolate. It was a raw, cheerless morning, with occasional snowflakes whipping by on the damp north wind, the streets were all but deserted, and in the room that used to be full of smoke and talk there were only empty tables, and you could see your breath.

A man was scrubbing behind the bar, and a pale girl in black came out from behind the cashier's counter to make our chocolate. It was good chocolate, as Antwerp chocolate is likely to be, and as we were getting ready to go out again I asked her how things were. She glanced around the room and answered that they used to have a good business here, but the good times were gone--"les beaux jours sont partis." Two others drifted over and asked questions about the bombardment. She answered politely enough, with the air of one to whom it was an old story now-- she had left on the second day, when the building across the way was smashed, and walking, catching rides, stumbling along with the other thousands, had got into Holland. As to why the city fell so quickly-- she pulled her shawl about her shoulders and murmured that there were things people did not know, if they did they did not talk about them.

And the Germans--how were they? They had no complaints to make, the girl said; the Germans were well behaved--"tres correct." Possibly, then--it was our young Italian who put the question--the Belgians would just as soon... I did not catch the whole sentence, but all at once something flashed behind that non-committal cafe proprietress's mask. "Moi, je suis fiere d'etre Belge!" said the girl, and as she spoke you could see the color slowly burning through her pale face and neck--she was proud to be a Belgian--they hoped, that one could keep, and there would come a day, we could be sure of that--"un jour de revanche!"

But business is business, and people who run cafes must, as every one knows, not long indulge in the luxury of personal feelings. The officers turned up their fur collars, and we b.u.t.toned up our coats, and she was sitting behind the counter, the usual little woman in black at the cafe desk, as we filed out. Our captain paused as we pa.s.sed, gave a stiff little bow from the waist, touched his cap gallantly, and said: "Bon jour, mademoiselle!" And the girl nodded politely, as cafe proprietresses should, and murmured, blank as the walls in the Antwerp streets: "Bon jour, monsieur!"

Chapter IX

The Road To Constantinople

Rumania and Bulgaria

The express left Budapest in the evening, all night and all next day rolled eastward across the Hungarian plain, and toward dusk climbed up through the cool Carpathian pines and over the pa.s.s into Rumania.

Vienna and the waltzes they still were playing there, Berlin and its iron exaltation, slow-rumbling London--all the West and the war as we had thought of it for months was, so to speak, on the other side of the earth. We were on the edge of the East now, rolling down into the Balkans, into that tangle of races and revenges out of which the first spark of the war was flung.

Since coffee that morning the lonely train had offered nothing more nourishing than the endless Hungarian wheat-fields, with their rows of peasants, men and women, working comfortably together, and rows of ploughs creeping with almost incredible leisure behind black water-buffalo cattle; but as we rolled down into Predeal through the rain, there, at last, in the dim station lamps, glittered the bra.s.s letters and brown paint of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits--and something to eat.

The cars of this beneficent inst.i.tution--survivors of a Europe that once seemed divided between tourists and hotel-keepers--outdash the most dashing war correspondents, insinuate themselves wherever civilians are found at all, and once aboard you carry your oasis with you as you do in a Pullman through our own alkali and sage-brush. The steward (his culture is intensive, though it may not extend beyond the telegraph- poles, and includes the words for food in every dialect between Ostend and the Golden Horn) had just brought soup and a bottle of thin Hungarian claret, when the other three chairs at my table were taken by a Rumanian family returning from a holiday in Budapest--an urbane gentleman of middle age, a shy little daughter, and a dark-eyed wife, glittering with diamonds, who looked a little like n.a.z.imova.

"Monsieur is a stranger?" said the Rumanian presently, speaking in French as Rumanians are likely to do, and we began to talk war. I asked--a question the papers had been asking for weeks--if Rumania would be drawn into it.

"Within ten days we shall be in," he said.

"And on which side?"

"Oh!" he smiled, "against Austria, of course!"

That was in April. When I came through Rumania three months later soldiers were training everywhere in the hot fields; Bucarest was full of officers, the papers and cafes still buzzing with war talk. Rumania was still going in, but since the recapture of Lemberg and the Russian retreat the time was not so sure--not, it seemed, "until after the harvest" at any rate.

I asked the Rumanian what he thought about Italy. "Italy began as a coquette. She will end"--he made the gesture of counting money into his hand--"she will end as a cocotte." He waved a forefinger in front of his face.

"Elle n'est plus vierge!" he said.

The wife demurred. Italy was poor and little, she must needs coquette.

After all, il faut vivre--one must live.

Something was said of America and the feeling there, and the wife announced that she would like of all things to see America, but--she did not wish to go there with her husband. I suggested that she come with me--an endeavor to rise to the Rumanian mood which was received with tolerant urbanity by her husband, and by the lady who looked like n.a.z.imova with very cheering expressions of a.s.sent.

"When you return from Constantinople," she flashed back as they left the table, "don't forget!"

These were the first Rumanians I had met. They were amiable, they spoke French--it almost seemed as if they had heard the tales that are usually told of their little capital, and were trying to play the appropriate introduction to Bucarest.

Here it is, this little nation, only a trifle larger than the State of Pennsylvania, a half-Latin island in an ocean of Magyars and Slavs. On the north is Russia, on the south the grave and stubborn Bulgars (Slav at any rate in speech), on the west Hungary, and here, between the Carpathians and the Black Sea, this Frenchified remnant of the empire of ancient Rome. Their speech when it is not French is full of Latin echoes, and a Rumanian, however mixed his blood, is as fond of thinking himself a lineal and literal descendant of the Roman colonists as a New Englander is of ancestors in the Mayflower. At the Alhambra in Bucarest next evening, after the cosmopolite artistes had done then-perfunctory turns and returned to their street clothes and the audience, to begin the more serious business of the evening, the movie man in the gallery threw on the screen--no, not some military hero nor the beautiful Queen whose photograph you will remember, but the head of the Roman Emperor Trajan! And the listless crowd, drowsing cynically in its tobacco smoke, broke into obedient applause, just as they would at home at the sight of the flag or a picture of the President.

Bucarest, like all the capitals of Spanish America, is another "little Paris," but the Rumanians, possibly because unhampered by sombre Spanish tradition or perhaps any traditions at all, succeed more completely in borrowing the vices and escaping the virtues of the great capital they are supposed to imitate. It would be more to the point to call Bucarest a little Buenos Aires. There is much the same showiness; a similar curious mixture of crudeness and luxury. But Buenos Aires is one of the world's great cities, and always just beyond the asphalt you can somehow feel the pampa and its endless cattle and wheat. The Rumanian capital is a town of some three hundred thousand people in a country you could lose in the Argentine, and there is nothing, comparatively speaking, to offset its light-mindedness, to suggest realities behind all this life of patisserie.

You should see the Calea Vittorei on one of these warm summer evenings between five and eight. It is a narrow strip of asphalt winding through the centre of the town, with a tree-shaded drive at one end, and the hotels, sidewalk cafes, and fashionable shops at the other, and up and down this narrow street, in motors, in open victorias driven by Russian coachmen in dark-blue velvet gowns reaching to their heels, all Bucarest crowds to gossip, flirt, and see.

Down the centre in the open carriages flows a stream of women--and many look like n.a.z.imova--social distinctions so ironed out with enamel, paint, and powder that almost all might be cafe chantant singers or dressmakers' marionettes. Some cities have eagles on their crests, and some volcanoes. If you were going to design a postage-stamp for Bucarest, it struck me that the natural thing would be a woman in the corner of an open victoria--after seeing scores of them all alike, you feel as though you could do it in a minute: one slashing line for the hat, two coal-black holes, and a dash of carmine in a patch of marble white, and a pair of silk-covered ankles crossed and pointed in a way that seems Parisian enough after one has become used to the curious boxes in which women enclose their feet in Berlin. Coming up from Bulgaria, which is not unlike coming from Idaho or Montana; or from Turkey, where women as something to be seen of men in public do not exist; or even across from the simple plains of Hungary, these enamelled orchids flowing forever down the asphalt seem at the moment to sum up the place--they are Bucarest.

Officers in light blue, in mauve and maroon--mincing b.u.t.terflies, who look as if an hour's march in the sun would send them to the hospital, ogle them from the sidewalk. Along with them are many young bloods out of uniform, barbered and powdered like chorus men made up for their work. You will see few young men in Europe with whom the notion of general conscription and the horrors of war can be a.s.sociated with less regret.

Streams of more frugal nymphs, without victorias but with the same rakish air, push along with the sidewalk crowd, hats pinned like a wafer over one ear, coiffures drawn trimly up from powdered necks. Waiters scurry about; the cafe tables, crowded in these days with politicians, amateur diplomats, spies, ammunition agents, Heaven knows what, push out on the sidewalk. The people on the sidewalk are crowded into the street, motors honk, hoofs clatter, the air is filled with automobile smoke, the smoke carries the smell of cigarettes and coffee and women's perfumes--it is "Bucarest joyeux!"

Some French music-hall singer--when I came through it was Miss Nita-Jo-- will tell you all about it at one of the open-air theatres in the evening. All about the people you b.u.mp into in this sunset promenade--

"Des gens d'la haute, des pet.i.ts creves, Des sn.o.bs, des sportsmans, des coquets, Les noctambules, les vieux noceurs, Les grandes cocottes--oui!

tous en choeur..."--all about Capsa's, which, though but a little pastry shop and tea-room, is as seriously regarded in Bucarest as Delmonico's or the Blackstone, which is, of course, with dreadful seriousness (to see one of the gilded youths of Bucarest enter Capsa's at five-thirty, solemnly devour a large chocolate eclair, and as solemnly stalk out again, is an experience itself), and all about the politicians and the men who are running things. Everything is in miniature, you see, in a little nation like this, which, although only as large as one of our smaller States, has a King and court, diplomats, and army, and foreign policy. All in the family, so to speak, and the chanteuse will sing amusing verses about the prime minister as if she really knew what he was going to do, and, curiously enough--for things are sometimes very much in the family, indeed, in these little capitals--maybe she does know!

Of course the Calea Vittorei is not Rumania, though a good deal more so than Fifth Avenue is America; nor are the officers posing there those who would have much to do with directing the army if Rumania went to war. Ten minutes away from the city limits and you might be riding through the richest farming country in Wisconsin or Illinois: hour after hour of corn and wheat, orchards, hops, and vineyards, cultivated by peasants who, though most of them have no land and little education, at least look care-free, and dress themselves in exceedingly pleasing homespun linen, hand-embroidered clothes. Then higher land, and hills as thick with the towers of oil-wells as western Pennsylvania, and, just before you cross into Hungary, the cool pines of the Carpathians and the villas of Sinaia, the summer home of the court, the diplomats, and the people one does not see very often, perhaps, in the afternoon parade.

It is a pleasant and a rich little country. You can easily understand why its ruling cla.s.s should love it, and, set apart from their Slav and Magyar neighbors by speech and temperament, want to gather all Rumanians under one flag and push that, too, into its place in the sun.

And this, of course, is Rumania's time--the time of all these little Balkan nations, which have been bullied and flattered in turn by the powers that need them now, and cut up and traded about like so much small change.

Rumania wants the province of Bessarabia on her eastern border, a strip of which Russia once took away; she wants the Austrian province of Bukowina and the Hungarian banat of Temesvar on the west, but most of all the pine forests and the people of Transylvania, just over the divide--you cross it coming from Budapest--largely Rumanian in speech and sympathy, though a province of Hungary. As the Rumanians figure it out, they once stood astride the Carpathians--"a cheval" ("on horseback"), as they say--and so, they feel, they must and should stand now.

We are a nation of fourteen million souls--six less than Hungary, but a h.o.m.ogeneous state, solidly based. Our soil gives us minerals and fuel and almost suffices for our needs. Our people are one of the most prolific in the world and certainly not the least intelligent. We have behind us a continuity of national existence lacking in other nations in this quarter of the globe. In our modern epoch we have a.s.similated French culture with indisputable success, and have given in every field proof of a great faculty of adaptability and progress. We can become the most important second-cla.s.s power in Europe the day after the war stops; in fifty years, when our population will have pa.s.sed twenty-five millions, a great power. We shall be a nation content with our lot, and for that reason a factor for peace. A greater Rumania responds not only to our ideas but to the interests of Europe. The Magyars have had every chance, and they have lost. It is now our turn.

This is a characteristic editorial paragraph from La Roumanie, which is the voice of Mr. Take Ionesco, who, more than anybody else, is the voice of those who want war. Once in the government, but at the moment out of it, Mr. Ionesco keeps up a continuous bombardment of editorials and speeches, and with his-vigor, verve, and facility reminds one a bit, though a younger man, of Clemenceau and his L'Homme Enchaine. Rich, well-informed, daring, and clever, with a really fascinating gift of expression, he will talk to you in French, English (his wife is English), Rumanian--I don't know how many other languages--about anything you wish, always with the air of one who knows. We have no such adventurous statesmen, or statesmen-adventurers, at home--men who have all the wires of European diplomacy at their finger ends; look at people, including their own, in the aggregate, without any worry over the "folks at home"; know what they want much better than they do, and to get it for them are quite ready to send a few hundred thousand to their death.

Mr. Ionesco writes a long, double-leaded editorial every day, and very often he prints with it the speech, or speeches, he made the night before. In a time like this, he says, those of his way of thinking can't say too much; they must be "like the French Academicians, who never stop writing." Now and then, in the intervals of fanning the sparks of war, he takes his readers behind the scenes of European politics, of which he knows about as much, perhaps, as any one.

I arrived in Paris the 31st of December, 1912, in the evening. M.

Poincare received me the 1st of January, at half past eight o'clock in the morning--an absurd hour in Paris. But I had to go to London in the afternoon, and M. Poincare to the Elysee at ten o'clock for the felicitations of the New Year. I asked M. Poincare for the support of France in our difficulties with Bulgaria. M. Poincare said... I said... and later events proved that I was right.

He is always sure of himself, like this--no doubts, no half-truths, everything clear and irresistible. I went to see Mr. Ionesco one evening in Bucarest--a porte-cochere opening into a big stone city house, an anteroom with a political secretary and several lieutenants, and presently a quiet, richly furnished library, and Mr. Ionesco himself, a polished gentleman of continental type, full of animation and sophisticated charm, bowing from behind a heavy library table.

The room, the man, the facile, syllogistic sentences in which it was established that Austria-Hungary was already moribund, that Germany could never win, that Rumania must go in with the Entente--it was like the first scene from some play of European society and politics: one of those smooth, hard, swiftly moving things the Parisian Bernstein might have written.

Across it I couldn't help seeing the Berlin I had just left, and people standing in line with their sandwiches at six o'clock to get into the opera or theatre--the live human beings behind that abstraction "Germany." And I said that it seemed unfortunate that two peoples with so many apparent grounds of contact as the Germans and French must so misunderstand each other. Their temperament and culture were different, to be sure, but they were both idealistic, sentimental people, to whom things of the mind and spirit were important. It seemed particularly unfortunate that everything should be done to force them apart instead of bringing them together.

Mr. Ionesco listened with some impatience. Unfortunate, no doubt, but what do you wish? War itself is unfortunate--we must take the world as it is. No, they were with France and down with the Germans. France conquered meant the end of Rumania, subservience to Austria; France victorious, freedom, fresh air.

He gave me a copy of a speech in which he gladly admitted that he was a "responsible factor." People talked of going slow and sparing blood.

Well, they might get something by sitting still, even become a great country, but they could never become a great nation. It was not territory and population they wanted, but the sword of Rumania to join in remaking the map of Europe. When the delegates gathered around the green table, they did not want the one from Rumania, as he was at the Congress of Berlin, only able to make visits to chancelleries. He must go in the same door with them, and say: "In proportion to my population, I have shed as much blood as you."

He had always regretted not having children, never so much as to-day; but if he had a dozen sons, and knew that all of them would fall in the war, he would not be cast down. Even if the territory they wished could be occupied by a simple act of gendarmerie--he would say no--they must enter Budapest itself (it is only twenty-four hours' railway journey from Bucarest!)--not till then would Austria admit Rumania's superiority. People accused him of working for himself. Who was Take Ionesco in comparison with the fate of a race? As for ambition, well, he had one, and only one--he wanted to see the Rumanian tricolor floating from Buda palace, and before he died to know the moment in which he could pa.s.s 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.