regarding politics.  It is of no avail.  For the moment Roumania will retain the policy of the late King, and God alone knows what the future will bring forth.

We are all like dust in this terrible hurricane sweeping through the world.  We are tossed helplessly hither and thither and know not whether we are to face disaster or success.  The point is not whether we live or die, but how it is done.  In that respect King Carol set an example to us all.

I hope King Ferdinand may never forget that, together with the throne, his uncle bequeathed to him a political creed, a creed of honour and loyalty, and I am persuaded that Your Majesty is the best guardian of the bequest.

  Your Majesty’s grateful and devoted

  CZERNIN.

When I said that King Carol fought the fight to the best of his ability, I intended to convey that no one could expect him to be different from what he always was.  The King never possessed in any special degree either energy, strength of action, or adventurous courage, and at the time I knew him, as an old man, he had none of those attributes.  He was a clever diplomat, a conciliatory power, a safe mediator, and one who avoided trouble, but not of a nature to risk all and weather the storm.  That was known to all, and no one, therefore, could think that the King would try to put himself on our side against the clearly expressed views of all Roumania.  My idea is that if he had been differently constituted he could successfully have risked the experiment.  The King possessed in Carp a man of quite unusual, even reckless, activity and energy, and from the first moment he placed himself and his activities at the King’s disposal.  If the King, without asking, had ordered mobilisation, Carp’s great energy would have certainly carried it through.  But, in the military situation as it was then, the Roumanian army would have been forced to the rear of the Russian, and in all probability the first result of the battlefields would have changed the situation entirely, and the blood that was shed mutually in victorious battles would have brought forth the unity that the spirit of our alliance never succeeded in evolving.  But the King was not a man of such calibre.  He could not change his nature, and what he did do entirely concurred with his methods from the time he ascended the throne.

As long as the King lived there was the positive assurance that Roumania would not side against us, for he would have prevented any mobilisation against us with the same firm wisdom which had always enabled him to avert any agitation in the land.  He would then have seen that the Roumanians are not a warlike people like the Bulgarians, and that Roumania had not the slightest intention of risking anything in the campaign.  A policy of procrastination in the wise hands of the King would have delayed hostilities against us indefinitely.

Immediately after the outbreak of war Bratianu began his game, which consisted of entrenching the Roumanian Government firmly and willingly in a position between the two groups of Powers, and bandying favours about from one to the other, reaping equal profits from each, until the moment when the stronger of the two should be recognised as such and the weaker then attacked.