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."

[Illustration: KING FERDINAND TELLS MRS. POWELL HIS OPINION OF THE
FASHION 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 constitution 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 masses 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 Jassy,
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 assembled 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, shivering with his ragged soldiers in the
frozen marshes beside the Pruth, has become the sovereign o