Roland Chambers’ 2009 biography The Last Englishman: The Double Life ofArthur Ransome contains a reference to Romania in the First World War, albeit
one so brief it does not merit an entry in the index. It is on pp. 121-22.
Ransome, working as a journalist
in Russia, was sent by the editor of the Daily
News to cover the Romanian situation after its entry into the war in August
1916. Not long back from Belorussia and
looking forward to a holiday, he left Petrograd at the beginning of September
on an assignment he was not happy about.
He knew Russian but not Romanian, and thought the language ‘one of the
most difficult on earth’ as he undertook a crash course on the journey.
In the event he rather enjoyed
the trip. The weather was cooling in
Petrograd as autumn had set in early, but the south was very warm. ‘Romania was full of new faces, fresh
perspectives, and on the train down to Bucharest, a tribe of attentive,
energetic children and friendly soldiers who fed him sweets, melons, cheese,
cold chicken, hard-boiled eggs and yellow wine.’
He stayed in Romania for six
weeks and ‘treated the entire excursion as an Indian summer holiday,’ leaving
just ahead of the invading German army ‘in hot gorgeous weather…as happy as a
bird and as burnt as a brick,’ with a Turkish coffee mill he had bought for 12
lei in a street market on the Black Sea coast.
He briefly returned to Petrograd ‘full of the usual filth and snow of winter’
before leaving on that deferred trip to England.
