said... and later events proved that I was right.

He is always sure of himself, like this--no doubts, no half-truths,
everything clear and irresistible. I went to see Mr. Ionesco one
evening in Bucarest--a porte-cochere opening into a big stone city
house, an anteroom with a political secretary and several lieutenants,
and presently a quiet, richly furnished library, and Mr. Ionesco
himself, a polished gentleman of continental type, full of animation and
sophisticated charm, bowing from behind a heavy library table.

The room, the man, the facile, syllogistic sentences in which it was
established that Austria-Hungary was already moribund, that Germany
could never win, that Rumania must go in with the Entente--it was like
the first scene from some play of European society and politics: one of
those smooth, hard, swiftly moving things the Parisian Bernstein might
have written.

Across it I couldn't help seeing the Berlin I had just left, and people
standing in line with their sandwiches at six o'clock to get into the
opera or theatre--the live human beings behind that abstraction
"Germany." And I said that it seemed unfortunate that two peoples with
so many apparent grounds of contact as the Germans and French must so
misunderstand each other. Their temperament and culture were different,
to be sure, but they were both idealistic, sentimental people, to whom
things of the mind and spirit were important. It seemed particularly
unfortunate that everything should be done to force them apart instead
of bringing them together.

Mr. Ionesco listened with some impatience. Unfortunate, no doubt, but
what do you wish? War itself is unfortunate--we must take the world as