While in Czernowitz (later "Cernăuți"), Pușcariu refused the chance to teach at Vienna, as he would not have been able to lecture in Romanian, at the same time declaring his adherence to Pan-Germanism. The outbreak of World War I caught Pușcariu in Techirghiol, Romania. A reserve officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army, and overall an Austrian patriot, he rushed back to be mobilized in Brașov, and was later ordered to Cisnădie. In September 1914, after a liturgical music concert in the Sibiu Lutheran Cathedral, he met Onisifor Ghibu, whom he had known since 1905, and who records the deep concern the ongoing conflict was causing Pușcariu. Subsequently, Pușcariu was stationed on the Italian Front. There, his sentiments of loyalty toward the Empire conflicted with the Italophilia he felt toward a country whose inhabitants he saw as the natural allies of the Romanians, a fellow Latin people. Czernowitz, the site of his residence, manuscripts and materials, fell to the Imperial Russian Army in the first half of the war. From February to June 1916, he was intermittently hospitalized for eye problems, first at Trieste, where he met Iuliu Maniu, and later at Innsbruck, followed by Brașov. When the Romanian Kingdom entered the war in August, on the side of the Triple Entente, he was either at home on leave or at the front, but in either case continued his research. Nevertheless, the situation interrupted his work on the 1906 dictionary. The following January, he began keeping a diary, writing fairly regular entries until his wife's death in 1944. While on the front in early 1918 dealing with military accounting and supplies, he worked on a glossary of the Istro-Romanian language. His older brother, engineer Anton Pușcariu, escaped Austria-Hungary and joined the Romanian Army, dying of typhus at the garrison of Bacău in 1917. By October 1918, Pușcariu had regained Bukovina, joining the Romanian nationalist caucus forming in that region. As reported by eyewitness Teodor Bălan, his presence there was a "great fortune" for Romanian groups, since Pușcariu indicated the "straight path ahead" for his conationals. On 12 October, he founded the newspaper "Glasul Bucovinei", which had as its limited initial goal the protection of rights for the province's Romanians, who formed an overall minority of the local population.