Admiral Dante-Christophe was now staring worriedly at the vast Danube Plain. The homeland's intentions were obvious: drive a nail into this place and keep the Kingdom of Hungary in check.
But putting that into practice was far from easy. Just thinking about the workload involved in allocating land to several million Romanians was terrifying.
And he did not have much time left. It had to be completed before the World War ended, at the very least; otherwise, it would be hard to account for things afterward.
Of course, Dante-Christophe was not even sure whether this stretch of plain would still belong to the Kingdom of Hungary after the war!
After all, the Russian Empire had always had a healthy appetite. Having pushed Bulgaria to the forefront before and effectively abandoned Romania, it was entirely possible that they would take Hungary as compensation in the future.
But none of that mattered. Either way, the once-prosperous central Danube Plain would become a cluster of impoverished mountain villages.
Too many people and too little land would constrain the local economy, unless the local government could develop industry there and absorb the surplus labor force.
But that was a matter for the future. Having obtained the land they had dreamed of, the Romanians happily began the spring planting. Though there was a little less land than they had hoped for, hadn't the Bulgarian government promised permanent tax exemption?
As long as they paid no taxes, the yield from these lands would be enough to support them—and they might even live better than they had back home!
They had not been deceived in that regard. The Bulgarian government truly would not collect taxes from them, though other governments were another matter entirely.
Gendarmerie Commander Laurenwell said with a bitter smile, "Commander, this month alone, we