But even if things are really as bad in Rumania
as they look at the moment, it is absurd to talk as if the intervention of our latest Ally had been a blow rather than a benefit to the common cause. Unquestionably it has been a benefit. The six hundred thousand or so men out of whom their German leaders have been getting every ounce of effort during the past month have been taken from other parts of the line and have been spent with appalling prodigality. The surrenders of territory and men on the Somme and the Ancre, and still more the victory at Monastir, are due not less surely because indirectly to German preoccupations elsewhere. It may well turn out in the end that though the Germans have secured a victory in Rumania, they have secured it at too big a price. Mean- while the overrunning of a part of Rumania has not involved the destruction of the State or of its chief armies. We have seen how the Serbians have " come again "—why not the Rumanians ? To speak as if all were lost because Bucharest is threatened would be a capital error in military and political diagnosis.
