Shameful as this surrender was, the Bolsheviks found some compensation in the domestic triumphs of their party and their creed. Cossack resistance succumbed to their arms and propaganda. Alexeiev, who had succeeded Kaledin in the command of the Cossack forces, was defeated on 13 February; Kaledin committed suicide; and Bolshevik authority spread to the Black Sea, the Caucasus, and all across Siberia. Germany hastened to make a German peace with Finland and the Ukraine, which attempted to sow as many seeds of discord as was possible; but the bourgeois parties with whom they treated had but a slender hold on the countries they professed to represent, and Finland and the Ukraine were soon involved in civil wars in which their Governments were only able to make headway against the Bolshevik Red Guards by the help of German troops. The anarchy suited the Germans except in so far as it detained German forces from the West and impeded those supplies they sought from the Ukraine and farther afield; and by the middle of March they were in Odessa and pushing their outposts and their intrigues towards the Caucasus, the Caspian, and Central Asia. The most pitiable situation was that of Rumania, threatened as she was by the Bolsheviks on account of her monarchy and social order, and by the Central Empires on account of her alliance with the Entente. Completely cut off from those allies, she was compelled in March to sign the humiliating Treaty of Bukarest, which surrendered the Dobrudja, the Carpathian passes, and her supplies of corn and oil to the enemy, while leaving Mackensen in control of her capital and the greater part of the kingdom. There have been few disasters in modern history comparable with the fall of Russia, and none which shows more vividly that the strength of a State depends not upon the vastness of its territory, the size of its armies, or the skill of its diplomacy, but upon the moral, the education, and contentment of its people. Of all the causes of German success in the war and of suffering to the world at large and little nations in particular, none was more potent than the blindness of Russian governments which had refused in the past to set their house in order, and by reform in time to prepare their people for the storm. Russia herself suffered most, but all her allies felt in different degrees the effects of her collapse, and in the spring of 1918 it was to put the general cause of civilization to its severest test upon the Western front. The perilous situation in which the Entente stood in March was due to other reasons than the conduct of the British War Cabinet, but there was a grim irony in its somewhat novel publication of an official advertisement and report of its preparations for victory on the eve of the greatest defeat encountered by British arms during the war. CHAPTER XVIII THE LAST GERMAN OFFENSIVE