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442 EVIL OMENS IN PETROGRAD [chap. xxii.
to these liberties ? And in spite of all the honeyed
assurances of the latter, the Poles who were the most
favourably inclined towards Russia and towards
Nicolas II. realised that for the time being nothing good
was to be expected for their country. All this confirmed
me still more in my belief that there was in reality but
one way only of solving the Polish question definitely,
and of freeing Russia from a lot of internal worries : i.e.
to grant to Poland, within the confines of really
Polish territory, absolute independence and complete
sovereignty.
I said above that the public spirit of the capital,
with regard to the war, was not at all what I should
have wished. Quite at the end of my short stay in
Petrograd, there was a semblance of movement and of
enthusiasm roused by Rumania’s entry into the war;
but this movement was hardly perceptible.
M.Ordyn-Nastchokin—alias Sturmer—having become
Minister for Foreign Affairs, naturally wished to prove
his worth from the outset. With this object in view,
he took care to dispatch to Bukharest a kind of
ultimatum, in which our Cabinet warned the Rumanian
Government that if Rumania did not come into the war
at once Russia would withdraw all the promises she had
made and all the concessions she had agreed to. As for
several,months already Rumania had worked on the lines
of "virile decisions" through a French special mission,
and as our advance in Galicia and in the Bukowina
was awaking the aspirations of Rumanian patriotism,
the step taken by M. Sturmer was not long in
reaping the desired result, and on the 28th August,
1916, the Rumanian troops entered Hungary. On this
occasion there were some "popular" demonstrations
in Petrograd, but they were meagre and half-hearted.
Our Minister to Bukharest, M. Poklewski-Kozell,1 a
wise and clever diplomat, had never been enthusiastic
about Rumanian intervention, although he cultivated
1 I mentioned him in Chapter XVIII.
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