România în vecinătatea războiului: chestiunea înarmărilor între 1914 şi 1916

Claudiu-Lucian TOPOR

DOI: 10.47743/asui-2025-0016

Abstract: Although it had ended up on the winning side at the end of the Great War, Romania had to find answers to a host of difficult questions. Probably the most pressing of these was the issue of armaments. Thrown by nationalist politicians into the midst of an industrial war, Romania, a medium-sized agricultural country, found few resources to adequately equip its army in wartime. Detached from its German alliances and anchored in a neutrality that actually meant military expectant, Romania could no longer procure supplies from its usual (traditional) suppliers in Germany and Austria-Hungary. Old orders were blocked and no longer sent to Bucharest. The Entente forces remained the only option for supplying weapons, but the needs of France and Russia were so great that it was difficult to help Romania on time. Transport difficulties after the collapse of Serbia added to the problem, so that much of Romania’s ammunition remained in storage or arrived with long delays after transiting Russian ports on the North Sea. The issue of armaments and its political responsibilities is the subject of this research. It also brings back into focus the debate on the responsibility of the Romanians for the war, which has remained open since the interwar years. While government statistics sought (and partially succeeded) to justify the government’s armament policy with all its shortcomings, the testimonies of combatants brought to light dramatic sequences from the sad epic of this war. Two distinct models of discourse emerged, coexisting under a hidden tension in the postwar period: the institutional narrative and the private narrative of the war. By examining the two versions, this study differentiates between two antagonistic dimensions of the narrative of armament, revealing a dichotomy that dismantles the myth of the unity of meaning in perceptions during the war years.

Keywords: World War I; Romania; ammunition; army; defeat; responsibility.