guarded. The farther Mackensen advanced northward the more men he would require to guard his rear along the river. For the time being, at least, the river created a deadlock, with the advantage to whichever side should be on the defensive. The Rumanians might very well now have left a minimum force guarding the river bank while they turned their main forces northward to stem the tide of Teuton invasion through the passes.

For over a week this seemed exactly what the Rumanians were doing. On November 4, 1916, the situation along the Rumanian front in the mountains looked extremely well for King Ferdinand's armies. At no point had the Teutons made any appreciable headway, while in two regions, in the Jiul Valley and southeast of Kronstadt, Bucharest reported substantial gains. Berlin and Vienna both admitted that the Rumanians had re captured Rosca, a frontier height east of the Predeal Pass.

ON

N November 6, 1916, came the news from Bucharest that the Rumanian and Russian forces in northern Dobrudja had again assumed the offensive and that Mackensen's line was giving way; and that in retiring his troops had burned the villages of Daeni, Gariot, Rosman, and Gaidar. Full details of these operations were never issued, but as day after day passed it became obvious that the Russo-Rumanian armies were indeed making a determined effort to regain the ground lost in Dobrudja.

On November 9, 1916, it was announced through London that the Russian General Sakharov had been transferred from Galicia and was now in command of the allied forces in Dobrudja; that he had succeeded in pushing Mackensen's lines back from Hirsova on the Danube, where a gunboat flotilla was cooperating H-War St. 6

with him, and that Mackensen was now retreating through Topal, twelve miles farther south, and was only thirteen miles north of the Cernavoda-Constanza railroad. On November 10, 1916, an official announcement from Petrograd stated that "on the Danube front our cavalry and infantry detachments occupied the station of Dunareav, three versts from Cernavoda. We are fighting for possession of the Cernavoda Bridge. More than two hundred corpses have been counted on the captured ground. A number of prisoners and machine guns have also been captured. We have occupied the town of Hirsova and the village of Musluj and the heights three versts south of Delgeruiv and five versts southwest of Fasmidja." On the following day the Russian ships began bombarding Constanza and set fire to the town which, according to the Petrograd reports, was burned to the ground. At the same time a Russian force advancing southward along the right bank of the Danube occupied the villages of Ghisdarechti and Topal. On that same date Sofia also reported heavy fighting and an enemy advance near the Cernavoda Bridge. Two days later, on the 13th, an indirect report through London stated that the Russians had crossed the Danube south of the bridge, behind Mackensen's front. This was not officially confirmed, but apparently another attempt was made to strike Mackensen's rear from across the river.

Meanwhile the Russo-Rumanian line was pressing Mackensen's front back, hammering especially on his left wing up against the river, until he was a bare few miles north of the railroad and thirty miles south of the point farthest north he had been able to reach. Here he seems to have held fast, for further reports of fighting on the Danube front become vague and contradictory. At any rate, the Russo-Rumanian advance stopped short of victory, as the recapture of the Cernavoda-Constanza railroad would have been. That Mackensen's retreat may have been voluntary, to encourage the enemy to advance and thereby weaken his front on the Transylvanian front, seems possible in the light of later events. Also, it was possible that his forces had been weakened by Bulgarian regiments being withdrawn and sent down to the Macedonian front, where Monastir was in grave

danger and was presently to fall to the French-Russian-Serbian forces. From this moment a silence settles over this front; when Mackensen again emerges into the light shed by official dispatches, it is to execute some of the most brilliant moves that have yet been made during the entire war.

CHAPTER XXX

THE RUMANIANS PRESSED BACK

MEANWHILE hard fighting had been going on on the Tran

sylvanian front, one day favoring one side and on the next day favoring the other. On November 5, 1916, the Germans regained Rosca heights, which the Rumanians had taken on the 3d. On the 7th the Russians were pressing the Germans hard below Dorna Vatra, while southeast of Red Tower Pass and near the Vulkan Pass the Rumanians suffered reverses, losing a thousand men as prisoners, according to the Vienna and Berlin dispatches. But before another week had passed it became evident that the Teutons were gaining, whether because of superior artillery, or because the Rumanians had weakened this front for the sake of the Dobrudja offensive. For each step the Teutons fell back they advanced two. Not unlike a skillful boxer Falkenhayn feinted at one point, then struck hard at another unexpectedly. Without doubt skill and superior knowledge, as well as superior organization, were on the side of the invaders. By the middle of the month the Rumanians were being forced back, both in the Alt and the Jiul valleys, facts which could not be hidden by the dispatches from Bucharest announcing the capture of a machine gun at one point or a few dozen prisoners at another. A few days later the London papers were commenting on the extremely dangerous situation in Rumania.

The Teutons had been pushing especially hard against the extreme left of the Rumanian line in western Wallachia. On the 15th, after a week of continuous hammering, the Austro-Germans

forced their way down from the summits after battering down the permanent frontier fortifications with their heavy mortars. Pushed down into the foothills, the Rumanians, who were now being reenforced by Russian forces, decided to make a stand on the range of hills running east and west and lying south of Turgujiulij, the first important town south of the mountains. Foggy weather favored the Russo-Rumanians and enabled them to take up a strong position at this point before being observed by the Germans. The latter began launching a series of assaults. For three days these frontal attacks were continued. Finally numbers told; the Rumanian center was broken. Then the German cavalry, which had been held in reserve, hurled itself through the breach and raced down through the valley toward the railroad, thirty miles distant, preventing the fleeing Russians and Rumanians from making any further stands. On the following day, the 19th, the cavalry had reached the Orsova-Craiova railroad and occupied it from Filliash, an important junction, to Strehaia station, a distance of twelve miles.

Two days later came the announcement that Craiova itself had been taken by the Teuton forces. This town is the center of an important grain district on the edge of the Wallachian Plain. From a military point of view the importance of its capture was in that it was a railroad junction and that the Germans now held the line of communication between the Orsova region, constituting the extreme western portion of Wallachia, and the rest of Rumania. As a matter of fact, as was to develop a few days later, the Teutons had broken through the main Rumanian lines, and in doing so had clipped off the tip of the Rumanian left wing. Some days later the capture of this force was announced, though it numbered much less than had at first been supposed-some seven thousand men.

But now a new danger suggested itself. The Teutonic invasion was heading toward the Danube. Should it reach the banks of that river there would be nothing to prevent a juncture between the forces of Falkenhayn and those under Mackensen, thereby forming a net which would be stretched clear across Rumania and swept eastward toward Bucharest. Falkenhayn