My idea is that if he had been differently constituted he could successfully have risked the experiment.

The King possessed in Carp a man of quite unusual, even reckless, activity and energy, and from the first moment he placed himself and his activities at the King's disposal.

If the King, without asking, had ordered mobilisation, Carp's great energy would have certainly carried it through.

But, in the military situation as it was then, the Roumanian army would have been forced to the rear of the Russian, and in all probability the first result of the battlefields would have changed the situation entirely, and the blood that was shed mutually in victorious battles would have brought forth the unity that the spirit of our alliance never succeeded in evolving.

But the King was not a man of such calibre.