The British Government had, as usual, no policy in the Balkans, and was amenable to French advice. A series of diplomatic rebuffs at Athens had confirmed our Foreign Office in its traditional attitude of disinterestedness, and the general feeling was that Rumania, in common honesty, should intervene, because she had accepted loans. Some people think that British gold can purchase anything, including a little country’s soul. The War Office Staff was absorbed by the operations in France and Flanders, to the exclusion of all other theatres in a world-wide war. To the strategists of Whitehall the military participation of Rumania was just another “side-show,” which they accepted with some reserves and treated as the lighter side of the war; they were prepared to endorse any plan which did not involve the use of British soldiers, and left their own selves free to duplicate the work of Army Staffs and other exponents of “Grand Tactics” already on the Western front. Ignorance and indifference made these officers the echoes of Frenchmen who posed as experts; the protests of Englishmen who pointed out that the Rumanian Army was, figuratively, “in the air,” were brushed aside as technical objections, which would have carried weight in the “main theatre,” but were pretexts, in a “side-show,” for inaction and delay. These military “Panglosses” had chosen to forget their own shortsightedness and mismanagement at Gallipoli, the fate of Servia contained no lesson for them, they urged Rumania to do what they themselves would not have done, and stilled the voice of conscience with the hope that all would be for the best in the best of all possible alliances, if not at once at any rate in the end. What that end would be or when it would occur, the official mind could not foresee. It foresaw nothing except a chance of self-advancement, and that it promptly seized.