The first act of the Rumanian tragedy was drawing to its close. A little Latin country had yielded to bribes and threats and had entered, under Russian auspices, into a European war. Now it lay crushed and broken, the victim of two invasions: one, by the enemy in the south; the other, by Russians in the north. The Western Powers were lavish in their sympathy; they had little else to give and were the helpless witnesses of the evil they had done. In France, a restless, ignorant optimism had conceived a selfish plan; Great Britain had endorsed it, and Russia, in the name of Allied interests, had pursued a traditional Russian policy, which had been both sinister and obscure. “He that builds a fair house upon an ill seat, committeth himself to prison.” In 1912, the Great Powers, of those days, had laid the foundations of their policy in the Balkans. Ignorance, inertia, selfishness and greed had characterized their statecraft: an ill seat this on which to build, but one well fitted for a pyramid of errors. That pyramid was rising fast and one more block had just been added, an error as tragic as the rest. Though no fair house, it was to hold its master builders like a prison; for one among them,--Tsarist Russia, it was destined to fulfil its proper function--the function of a tomb. CHAPTER XII THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION AND THE RUSSO-RUMANIAN OFFENSIVE--1917 By the middle of January, 1917, the front in Rumania had become stabilized on what was, in point of fact, General Alexieff’s shortest line. This line had its right near Dorna Vatra[33] (the Russian left before Rumania intervened) and traversed the Carpathian foothills until it reached the Sereth Valley, north-east of the town of Focsani; thence it followed the left bank of the river to its junction with the Danube close to Galatz. East of this latter place the front was vague and variable, the swampy region round the Danube’s mouth being a veritable “No Man’s Land.” Nearly a million Russian soldiers had, by this time, been sent into Moldavia; they were organized in thirteen cavalry divisions and a dozen army corps. The Rumanian Army had been reduced by losses and disorganization to six weak divisions; these held a sector of the front about twenty miles in length. Winter weather and mutual exhaustion precluded the immediate continuation of hostilities, and the opposing armies faced each other under conditions of discomfort which could hardly have been worse. During this period of comparative calm, it was possible to appreciate the situation both from an Allied and an enemy point of view.