From Today I Found Out.

Thanks to Aviron for sponsoring today’s video! They have their best prices of the year on right now and you can get an additional $50 off all of their products when you use code TODAY50. Visit https://avironactive.yt.link/AXOmcCe

For those of us born relatively deep into the before times of the 20th century, it may come as a rather shocking realization that WWI occurred now over a century ago, playing as the backdrop on the positive side of astonishingly rapid progress in the fields of medicine, science, technology, literature, and the arts, along with on the downside the past, as ever being the worst, such as the Spanish Flu pandemic which while WWI was raging killing about 20 million, that Spanish flu was outdoing the humans in a much shorter span killing between 50-100 million people and infected around a half a billion around the globe between 1918 and 1920.

That’s not even to mention just after the Encephalitis Lethargica which swept across the world killing over a million people while affecting numerous others, before suddenly disappearing, leaving the finest scientific minds of the age absolutely stumped, though today it’s thought to have been caused by a rare type of strep throat, which concerningly enough is still around today, and a subsequent immune response gone awry. That one was particularly horrifying as if it didn’t kill you, this illness could instead potentially trap you inside your body, stopping you from having the will to move or speak, though you’d otherwise seem perfectly healthy. A few decades after the outbreak, a treatment was found that would, for lack of a better phrase, “wake up” the patients, though within weeks they’d slip back into their trance. If that all sounds like a familiar plotline, it’s perhaps because it was the inspiration for the Robin Williams’ fronted film Awakenings.

But, we’re not here to talk about all the ways the past was the worst, else this video would end up being the longest ever posted on YouTube, even if we restricted ourselves to just the first 25 years of the 20th century. But rather, we’re going to zero in on a specific piece of that era, which will always be remembered as the century in which many of the most prominent nations on this planet decided to plunge our species into the most lethal, devastating, traumatic conflict since our ancestors had first pierced someone’s guts with the sharpened end of a stick. Not happy with just one such conflict, we went and did it twice, in the first place in The Great War, also known as ‘the war to end all of war’, and later simply as World War I when everyone realized that humans will seemingly never end warring until we have one so devastating that there are no humans left to war with.

During that tragedy, millions of mostly young people were expected to serve and to die for their motherland. And until relatively recently in history, the political and military leaders of these soldiers would have been expected to do the same. Especially in the medieval period, it was common for aristocrats, even monarchs, to grab one of those sharpened sticks and take part in the battle against a wall of people, in many cases mostly just guilty of being the other side.

But going back to relatively more modern times, at the time of the Great War, it would have been rather weird to see the likes of a President or a Prime Minister waving a pistol atop a trench before running into no-man’s land. The same reasoning would be applied to non-elected political leaders: Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses, Dukes and Duchesses, plus other assorted royal family members on both sides of the conflicts.

Which all brings us around to arguably the most famous of monarchies in the modern world- the British Royal Family.

What did they do amidst the industrialised carnage, the trenches, and the overall misery of the Great War? Which future King had a close encounter with ‘land submarines’? Which of his successors ‘longed to deal death’ against his enemies? And did King George really refuse to save his cousin, the Russian Tsar, from certain execution?

Author: Arnaldo Teodorani and Daven Hiskey
Editor: Daven Hiskey
Producer: Samuel Avila

0:00 The Past was the Worst
7:45 The Truth About What Really Started WWI
14:05 King George V and Queen Mary
19:01 The Romanovs and The Windsors
22:40 Princess Mary
25:21 ‘David’, the Prince of Wales
29:01 Prince Albert
32:43 From WWI to WWII
35:38 How Everyone Gets "The Road Not Taken" Wrong and How It Helped End the Life it was Written About