When the First World War began, Hlohovec had only just been rebuilt as a factory town: the power station was six years old and the wagon works barely finished. Men from the town and its villages were conscripted into the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the fronts in Galicia, Serbia and Italy, and the factories worked for the war. Four years later the state that had drafted them no longer existed. Hlohovec, which had spent nine hundred years in the Kingdom of Hungary and in its Nitra county, woke up in a republic whose creation it had had no say in.Keď sa začala prvá svetová vojna, Hlohovec bol práve prestavaný na továrenské mesto: elektráreň mala šesť rokov a vagónka bola sotva dokončená. Mužov z mesta i z okolitých dedín odviedli do rakúsko-uhorskej armády a poslali na fronty do Haliče, Srbska a Talianska, a továrne pracovali pre vojnu. O štyri roky štát, ktorý ich odviedol, prestal jestvovať. Hlohovec, ktorý strávil deväťsto rokov v Uhorsku a v Nitrianskej stolici, sa zobudil v republike, o vzniku ktorej nerozhodoval.
