The Rumanians presented a stiff ultimatum to the new Hungarian Cabinet.  They were determined to safeguard their country and its neighbors from a repetition of the danger and of the sacrifices it entailed; in other words, to dictate the terms of a new armistice.  The Powers demurred and ordered them to content themselves with the old one concluded by the Serbian Voyevod Mishitch and General Henrys in November of the preceding year and violated subsequently by the Magyars.  But the objections to this course were many and unanswerable.  In fact they were largely identical with the objections which the Supreme Council itself had offered to the Polish-Ukrainian armistice.  And besides these there were others.  For example, the Rumanians had had no hand or part in drafting the old armistice.  Moreover it was clearly inapplicable to the fresh campaign which was waged and terminated nine months after it had been drawn up.  Experience had shown that it was inadequate to guarantee public tranquillity, for it had not hindered Magyar attacks on the Rumanians and Czechoslovaks.  The Rumanians, therefore, now that they had worsted their adversaries, were resolved to disarm them and secure a real peace.  They decided to leave fifteen thousand troops for the maintenance of internal order.[160] Rumania’s insistence on the delivery of live-stock, corn, agricultural machinery, and rolling-stock for railways was, it was argued, necessitated by want and justified by equity.  For it was no more than partial reparation for the immense losses wantonly inflicted on the nation by the Magyars and their allies.  Until then no other amends had been made or even offered.  The Austrians, Hungarians, and Germans, during their two years’ occupation of Rumania, had seized and carried off from the latter country two million five hundred thousand tons of wheat and hundreds of thousands of head of cattle, besides vast quantities of clothing, wool, skins, and raw material, while thousands of Rumanian homes were gutted and their contents taken away and sold in the Central Empires.  Factories were stripped of their machinery and the railways of their engines and wagons.  When Mackensen left there remained in Rumania only fifty locomotives out of the twelve hundred which she possessed before the war.  The material, therefore, that Rumania removed from Hungary during the first weeks of the occupation represented but a small part of the quantities of which she had been despoiled during the war.

It was further urged that at the beginning the Rumanian delegates would have contented themselves with reparation for losses wantonly inflicted and for the restitution of the property wrongfully taken from them by their enemies, on the lines on which France had obtained this offset.  They had asked for this, but were informed that their request could not be complied with.  They were not even permitted to send a representative to Germany to point out to the Inter-Allied authorities the objects of which their nation had been robbed,