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 brass letters and brown paint of the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons Lits—­and something to eat.

The cars of this beneficent institution—­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 Nazimova.

“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 Nazimova with very cheering expressions of assent.