Part 7 (1/2)
Prince Nicholas, the future king of Rumania, who is being educated at Eton, looks and acts like any normal American ”prep” school boy.
”Do the boys still wear top hats at Eton?” I asked him.
”Yes, they do,” he answered, ”but it's a silly custom. And they cost two guineas apiece. I leave it to you, Major, if two guineas isn't too much for any hat.”
When I told him that in democratic America certain Fifth Avenue hatters charge the equivalent of five guineas for a bowler he looked at me in frank unbelief. ”But then,” he remarked, ”all Americans are rich.”
Shortly before luncheon we were joined by King Ferdinand, a slenderly built man, somewhat under medium height, with a grizzled beard, a genial smile and merry, twinkling eyes. He wore the gray-green field uniform and gold-laced kepi of a Rumanian general, the only thing about his dress which suggested his exalted rank being the insignia of the Order of Michael the Brave, which hung from his neck by a gold-and-purple ribbon. Were you to see him in other clothes and other circ.u.mstances you might well mistake him for an active and successful professional man.
King Ferdinand is the sort of man one enjoys chatting with in front of an open fire over the cigars, for, in addition to being a shrewd judge of men and events and having a remarkably exact knowledge of world affairs, he possesses in an altogether exceptional degree the qualities of tact, kindliness and humor.
The King did not hesitate to express his indignation that the re-making of the map of Europe should have been entrusted to men who possessed so little first-hand knowledge of the nations whose boundaries they were re-shaping.
”A few days before the signing of the Treaty of St. Germain,” he told me, ”Lloyd George sent for one of the experts attached to the Peace Conference.
”'Where is this Banat that Rumania and Serbia are quarreling over?' he inquired.
”'I will show you, sir,' the attache answered, unrolling a map of southeastern Europe. For several minutes he explained in detail to the British Premier the boundaries of the Banat and the conflicting territorial claims to which its division had given rise. But when he paused Lloyd George made no response. He was sound asleep!
”Yet a little group of men,” the King continued, ”who know no more about the nations whose destinies they are deciding than Lloyd George knew about the Banat, have abrogated to themselves the right to cut up and apportion territories as casually as though they were dividing apple-tarts.”
[Ill.u.s.tration: KING FERDINAND TELLS MRS. POWELL HIS OPINION OF THE FAs.h.i.+ON IN WHICH THE PEACE CONFERENCE TREATED RUMANIA, WHILE QUEEN MARIE LISTENS APPROVINGLY]
The impression prevails in other countries that it is Queen Marie who is really the head of the Rumanian royal family and that the King is little more than a figurehead. With this estimate I do not agree. Rumania could have no better spokesman than Queen Marie, whose talents, beauty, and exceptional tact peculiarly fit her for the difficult role she has been called upon to play. But the King, though he is by nature quiet and retiring, is by no means lacking in political sagacity or the courage of his convictions, being, I am convinced, as important a factor in the government of his country as the limitations of its const.i.tution permit.
Though none too well liked, I imagine, by the professional politicians, who in Rumania, as in other countries, resent any attempt at interference by the sovereign with their plans, the royal couple are immensely popular with the ma.s.ses of the people, Ferdinand frequently being referred to as ”the peasants' King.” In the darkest days of the war, when Rumania was overrun by the enemy and it seemed as though Moldavia and the northern Dobrudja were all that could be saved to the nation, King Ferdinand and Queen Marie, instead of escaping from their country or asking the enemy for terms, retreated with the army to Ja.s.sy, on the easternmost limits of the kingdom, where they underwent the horrors of that terrible winter with their soldiers, the King serving with the troops in the field and the Queen working in the hospitals as a Red Cross nurse. Less than three years later, however, on November twentieth, 1919, there a.s.sembled in Bucharest the first parliament of Greater Rumania, attended by deputies from all those Rumanian regions--Bessarabia, Transylvania, the Banat, the Bucovina and the Dobrudja--which had been restored to the Rumanian motherland. At the head of the chamber, in the great gilt chair of state, sat Ferdinand I, who, from the fugitive ruler, s.h.i.+vering with his ragged soldiers in the frozen marshes beside the Pruth, has become the sovereign of a country having the sixth largest population in Europe and has taken his place in Rumanian history beside Stephen the Great and Michael the Brave as Ferdinand the Liberator.
CHAPTER VII
MAKING A NATION TO ORDER
From the young officers who wore on their shoulders the silver greyhound of the American Courier Service we heard many discouraging tales of the annoyances and discomforts for which we must be prepared in traveling through Hungary, the Banat and Jugoslavia. But, to tell the truth, I did not take these warnings very seriously, for I had observed that a profoundly pessimistic att.i.tude of mind characterized all of the Americans or English whose duties had kept them in the Balkans for any length of time. In Salonika this mental condition was referred to as ”the Balkan tap”--derived, no doubt, from the verb ”to knock,” as with a hammer--and it usually implied that those suffering from the ailment had outstayed their period of usefulness and should be sent home.
Thrice weekly a train composed of an a.s.sortment of ramshackle and dilapidated coaches, called by courtesy the Orient Express, which maintained an average speed of fifteen miles an hour, left Bucharest for Vincovce, a small junction town in the Banat, where it was supposed to make connections with the south-bound Simplon Express from Paris to Belgrade and with the north-bound express from Belgrade to Paris. The Simplon Express likewise ran thrice weekly, so, if the connections were missed at Vincovce, the pa.s.sengers were compelled to spend at least two days in a small Hungarian town which was notorious, even in that region, for its discomforts and its dirt. All went well with us, however, the train at one time attaining the dizzy speed of thirty miles an hour, until, in a particularly desolate portion of the great Hungarian plain, we came to an abrupt halt. When, after a half hour's wait, I descended to ascertain the cause of the delay, I found the train crew surrounded by a group of indignant and protesting pa.s.sengers.
”What's the trouble?” I inquired.
”The engineer claims that he has run out of coal,” some one answered.
”But he says that there is a coal depot three or four kilometers ahead and that, if each first-cla.s.s pa.s.senger will contribute fifty francs, and each second-cla.s.s pa.s.senger twenty francs, he figures that it will enable him to buy just enough coal to reach Vincovce. Otherwise, he says, we will probably miss both connections, which means that we must stay in Vincovce for forty-eight hours. And if you had ever seen Vincovce you would understand that such a prospect is anything but alluring.”
While my fellow-pa.s.sengers were noisily debating the question I strolled ahead to take a look at the engine. As I had been led to expect from the stories I had heard from the courier officers, the tender contained an ample supply of coal--enough, it seemed to me, to haul the train to Trieste.
”This is nothing but a hold-up,” I told the a.s.sembled pa.s.sengers. ”There is plenty of coal in the tender. I am as anxious to make the connection as any of you, but I will settle here and raise bananas, or whatever they do raise in the Banat, before I will submit to this highwayman's demands.”
Seeing that his bluff had been called, the engineer, favoring me with a murderous glance, sullenly climbed into his cab and the train started, only to stop again, however, a few miles further on, this time, the engineer explained, because the engine had broken down. There being no way of disputing this statement, it became a question of pay or stay--and we stayed. The engineer did not get his tribute and we did not get our train at Vincovce, where we spent twenty hot, hungry and extremely disagreeable hours before the arrival of a local train bound for Semlin, across the Danube from Belgrade. We completed our journey to the Jugoslav capital in a fourth-cla.s.s compartment into which were already squeezed two Serbian soldiers, eight peasants, a crate of live poultry and a dog, to say nothing of a mult.i.tude of small and undesired occupants whose presence caused considerable annoyance to every one, including the dog. We were glad when the train arrived at Semlin.
Late in the summer of 1919, as a result of the reconstruction of the railway bridges which had been blown up by the Bulgarians early in the war, through service between Salonika and Belgrade was restored. As the journey consumed from three to five days, however, the train stopping for the night at stations where the hotel accommodation was of the most impossible description, the American and British officials and relief-workers who were compelled to make the journey (I never heard of any one making it for pleasure) usually hired a freight car, which they fitted up with army cots and a small cook-stove, thus traveling in comparative comfort.