Allies of World War I

Nevertheless, there were competing political institutions and a constitutional structure.

Then came World War I. Romania initially remained neutral, but entered the war in 1966 on the side of the Entente, the alliance that included Britain, France, and Russia.

The war was devastating, but when it ended, Romania emerged substantially larger.

Transylvania, Basarabia, Bucovina became part of what became known as Greater Romania, Romania Mare.

To keep these two views disconnected, as if they had no concern with each other, is extremely profitable to our enemies.

They might choose whatever view they liked while addressing themselves to different members of the Entente in order to dissociate them and to sow the seed of suspicion and discontent.

They would come to you, for instance, and they would tell you that you are taking a parochial view of Armageddon if you allow yourselves to imagine that this is primarily a struggle for the independence of Belgium or the future of France.

We Germans, they would say, are nearer the truth when we regard it as a Russo-German war.

Macedonia was the sphere of the Austrian push, and as late as eighteen ninety-seven Russia agreed with Austria to preserve the status quo in Macedonia, and continued obstinately to defend it down to nineteen oh four, in spite of British demands for a serious reform in that wretched country.

We can state exactly when the traditional policy of Russia gave place to a new and an opposite line.

It was at the time when Russia had finally altered her international course and had drifted into the channel of the Entente with England.

It was in the years nineteen oh seven to nineteen oh eight.

1914, that is much more difficult, doesn't really exist.

So this is one of the underlying principles or issues that you find when the Allies then attack the Entente forces because they can't really break through the German barbed wire.

So it's still very much at infancy, but you can see a lot of thinking is going into the whole thing.

They're also beginning to think about the rear areas.

All the accounts that you see, just the one that you've just given, mention exactly that.

So there's a lot of that going on.

And as you said, Spencer, the German hand grenades at that particular stage are actually superior to the ones on the Entente side.

And not least because they've got this longer handle, which makes it easier to throw them at longer distances.

And if a war were to break out, we need to be part of the same side.

They were in the Alliance called the Entente.

Yeah.

1906, Vanuatu was part of that deal, which is crazy.

He was awarded for his service, ending the war in November 1918 with the second and first class of the Iron Cross, while also being promoted to the rank of captain.

The First World War did not so much end in a complete military victory for the Entente powers of Britain, France, and their new ally, the United States, but instead saw Central Europe descend into a haze of revolution and anarchy as old empires collapsed and political radicals in Germany, Hungary, and other places tried to establish communist governments in emulation of what had happened in Russia in late 1917.

Paulus was involved in efforts to stabilize the situation.

The new Weimar Republic had been forced to demilitarize by the victorious powers, and so they relied on large numbers of Freikorps, army veterans who were employed as paramilitaries, to try and establish law and order across what remained of the German Empire.

So when news of Stillmark's discovery broke, governments were all like, wait, these super common plants we've got lying around could be used to make a weapon and none of our enemies had done it first? The first major push to turn ricin into a bioweapon came during World War I.

With both the Entente and Central Powers already lobbing poison gas at one another, scientists at the American University Experimental Station began figuring out how to take things to the next level.

One major focus of their research was ricin.

The American plans for the toxin took two distinct forms.