I soon became involved in the affair when Hungary and Roumania began mutually to blame one another as originators of the outrage.  This led to numerous interventions and adjustments, and my task was intensified because a presumed accomplice of the murderer Catarau was arrested in Bucharest, and his extradition to Hungary had to be effected by me.  This man, of the name of Mandazescu, was accused of having obtained a false passport for Catarau.

Catarau, who was a Roumanian Russian from Bessarabia, vanished completely after the murder and left no trace.  News came, now from Serbia, then from Albania, that he had been found, but the rumours were always false.  I chanced to hear something about the matter in this way.  I was on board a Roumanian vessel bound from Constanza to Constantinople, when I accidentally overheard two Roumanian naval officers talking together.  One of them said:  “That was on the day when the police brought Catarau on board to help him to get away secretly.”

Catarau was heard of later at Cairo, which he appears to have reached with the aid of Roumanian friends.

It cannot be asserted that the Roumanian Government was implicated in the plot—­but the Roumanian authorities certainly were, for in the Balkans, as in Russia, there are many bands like the Cerna Ruka, the Narodna Odbrena, etc., etc., who carry on their activities alongside the Government.

It was a crime committed by some Russian or Roumanian secret society, and the Governments of both countries showed surprisingly little interest in investigating the matter and delivering the culprits up to justice.

On June 15 I heard from a reliable source that Catarau had been seen in Bucharest.  He walked about the streets quite openly in broad daylight, and no one interfered with him; then he disappeared.

To return, however, to my interview with the old King.  Filled with alarm, he dispatched that same evening two telegrams, one to Belgrade and one to Petersburg, urging that the ultimatum be accepted without fail.

The terrible distress of mind felt by the King when, like a sudden flash of lightning from the clouds, he saw before him a picture of the world war may be accounted for because he felt certain that the conflict between his personal convictions and his people’s attitude would suddenly be known to all.  The poor old King fought the fight to the best of his ability, but it killed him.  King Carol’s death was caused by the war.  The last weeks of his life were a torture to him; each message that I had to deliver he felt as the lash of a whip.  I was enjoined to do all I could to secure Roumania’s prompt co-operation, according to the terms of the Alliance, and I was even obliged to go so far as to remind him that “a promise given allows of no prevarication:  that a treaty is a treaty, and his honour obliged him to unsheathe his sword.”  I recollect one particularly painful scene, where the King, weeping bitterly, flung himself across his writing-table and with trembling hands tried to wrench from his neck his order Pour le Merite.  I can affirm without any exaggeration that I could see him wasting away under the ceaseless moral blows dealt to him, and that the mental torment he went through undoubtedly shortened his life.