Armistice of Focșani

On 9 December 1917 (26 November in the Julian calendar, then in force in Romania), late in the evening, at 11.30 p.m. Petrograd time according to the text of the agreement and 10.30 p.m. by the clocks of the Central Powers, in Focșani, a German-occupied town on the Milcov, delegates of the Russian and Romanian armies of the Romanian Front and of the forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey signed an agreement on a suspension of hostilities. The document, drawn up in French, went down in history as the Armistice of Focșani (Polish: Fokszany). It came into force on signature, and 10 December was the first full day without fighting on the front from the Dniester to the mouth of the Danube. The British chronology of the war records under 6 December a suspension of hostilities between Romania and the Central Powers, and under 10 December their cessation. The first date corresponds to the local suspensions of hostilities concluded by Romanian divisions from 5 December, the second to the day on which the signed armistice was already in force. Romania, which in the summer had defended Moldavia at Mărășești, withdrew from the fight not because it had lost but because its ally’s army had fallen apart.

An ally that ceased to exist

From the winter of 1916/1917 the remnants of the kingdom, with King Ferdinand I, the government of Ion I. C. Brătianu and parliament in Iași, held on thanks to the Russian troops. The front from Bukovina to the Black Sea was called the Romanian Front. Formally the king commanded it, in practice his Russian deputy, General Dmitry Shcherbachev. Rebuilt with the help of the French military mission, the Romanian army in the summer of 1917 repulsed at Mărășești and Oituz the last great offensive of Field Marshal August von Mackensen. The front froze on a line that was to last until the end of the war.

The Bolshevik coup changed everything. Shcherbachev did not recognise Lenin’s government and, far from Petrograd and at the side of the Romanian king, could afford more independence than the commanders of other fronts. But when the Council of People’s Commissars called for an armistice and negotiations began at Brest-Litovsk, discipline in the Russian Fourth, Sixth and Ninth Armies, stationed in Moldavia, began to crumble. According to the Austrian official history there was panic in Iași on 2 December. Entente representatives urged Shcherbachev to stand firm and promised help, but on 3 December (20 November Old Style) the general told the king and the government that he no longer controlled the army. Unwilling to carry out the orders of an authority he did not recognise, he decided to propose a suspension of hostilities to the enemy himself.

The decision at Iași

For the Romanians it was a choice with no way out. Their armies were wedged between Russian units that were ceasing to fight. On their own they could neither defend the whole front nor withdraw into a Russia engulfed by revolution. On 4 December a council of ministers met at Iași under the king’s chairmanship, with politicians and army commanders taking part. It agreed to take part in the negotiations, but only on a purely military armistice that would not prejudge the policy of the state. Queen Marie, British by birth and an ardent supporter of the Entente, accepted the decision with bitterness. The head of the French military mission, General Henri Berthelot, who had been rebuilding the Romanian army for a year, opposed the armistice. According to notes quoted by Romanian historians, he wrote that in Iași “a wind of abandonment and betrayal was blowing”. In the end both he and the Entente envoys had to accept that there was no other way. In Paris, Prime Minister Clemenceau received the news with evident displeasure, for Romania was breaking its undertaking in the treaty of August 1916 not to conclude a separate peace.

The same day, 4 December at 1.55 p.m., parlementaires of the Russian XXIV Corps handed over in the Trotuș valley to the staff of the Austro-Hungarian 7th Infantry Division a letter from Shcherbachev, written in French, to Archduke Joseph August, commanding the Austro-Hungarian front in the Carpathians, and to Mackensen. The Russian general proposed negotiations for the whole Romanian Front and offered to send delegates to Focșani. On 5 December parlementaires of the Romanian 1st, 6th and 8th Divisions informed the Austrians that their commander was following the Russians’ example and halting operations. The Romanians also proposed preventing fraternisation between the soldiers. On the Romanian sectors local suspensions of hostilities were concluded until the end of the talks at Focșani. The king entrusted command of the Romanian army to the chief of the general staff, General Constantin Prezan.

Negotiations at Focșani

Mackensen appointed the commander of I Reserve Corps, Lieutenant General Curt von Morgen, to chair the delegation of the Central Powers. Austria-Hungary was represented by Major General Oskar Hranilović, the former head of intelligence, Bulgaria by Lieutenant Colonel Popov and Turkey by Major Nasim Bey. According to Romanian historians, preliminary meetings of the Russian and Romanian delegates took place on 5 December at Tecuci and on 7 December at Mărășești. At noon on 7 December the delegation crossed the German lines near Mărășești. The Russians, officers and representatives of soldiers’ committees, including two representing Ukraine, were led by the commander of the Ninth Army, General Anatoly Kelchevsky. Romanian headquarters was represented by the deputy chief of the general staff, General Alexandru Lupescu, with several officers. The talks were held in the Apostoleanu house, which still stands in Focșani today.

The talks went badly. The armistice agreed at Brest on 5 December and in force from 7 December covered, according to its text, the whole front as far as the Black Sea. At Focșani, however, the delegates of both armies of the Romanian Front declared that they did not know it. The Romanians did not regard Lenin’s government as an authority entitled to conclude agreements at all. The Russians, among whom according to the Austrians there were many socialists but very few Bolsheviks, thought similarly. The sharpest dispute was over how many troops could be removed from the front during the armistice. Shcherbachev’s delegates, anxious not to make it easier for the Germans to reinforce the Western Front, wanted to agree to two divisions at most. The Central Powers insisted on the Brest formula, which allowed all transfers ordered by 5 December to be carried out. The negotiations were broken off and the delegates returned to Mărășești. On 9 December agreement was finally reached, and late in the evening all the plenipotentiaries signed the agreement.

Terms

The parties concluded a “provisional armistice” until the Russian Constituent Assembly decided the question of war and peace. It covered the Russian troops of the Romanian Front from the Dniester to the mouth of the Danube and the armies of the Central Powers facing them. General Prezan’s Romanian armies acceded to it for as long as the armistice was binding on the Russians. Either side could resume operations after giving the enemy 72 hours’ notice. Fighting ceased on land, in the air and on the river, since the agreement also covered the Danube flotillas. Aircraft were not allowed to fly over a ten-kilometre strip from the enemy’s line, and observation balloons were to disappear from the sky. Patrols, the extension of fortifications and work preparing an offensive were forbidden. Regroupings ordered after 5 December were deemed inadmissible, as was weakening the front to reinforce others.

A neutral zone was marked out between the two sides’ wire, and in the Danube delta the dividing line was the St George branch. Anyone who crossed the neutral zone was to be treated as a prisoner, and trade in alcohol was banned in the zone itself. These strict rules, aimed at fraternisation between the soldiers, were won by the Romanians. The Russians openly admitted that their commanders no longer had the authority to make the soldiers obey them. The armistice was to lapse if the supreme commands concluded an armistice expressly covering the whole front from the Baltic to the Black Sea. The question of neutralising the coast and of navigation on the Danube and the Black Sea was referred to a separate mixed commission.

Significance

The armistice took the last active sector of the Eastern Front out of the war. The Romanians stopped fighting but did not lay down their arms. A dozen or more Romanian divisions, trained by the French and hardened in the summer battles, stood in the field. In December the Romanian command began moving them to sectors abandoned by the Russians, who were heading home en masse, looting along the way. Some of the troops were to keep order in the country against their former comrades-in-arms. Shcherbachev later held that he was bound only by the Focșani agreement, and not by the full Brest armistice of 15 December, concluded without the participation of the Romanian command.

For Romania it was the beginning of the hardest period of the war. In January 1918 Lenin’s government broke off relations with it, and soon afterwards the Central Powers demanded peace negotiations. The armistice was denounced on 2 March and expired at noon on 5 March 1918, the day the preliminary peace was signed at Buftea. The separate Treaty of Bucharest of 7 May 1918 took Dobruja and the Carpathian passes from Romania and placed its oil and grain under German control, but King Ferdinand never ratified it. On 10 November 1918, the day before the Armistice of Compiègne, Romania re-entered the war on the side of the Entente.