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 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!”