Batakovic -Serbia 1914-1918 War Imposed Martyrdom

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Serbia in the Great War

Dušan T. Bataković

Serbia 1914–1918:War impoSed, Маrtyrdom, reSurrection

In the early twentieth century, Serbia was a landlocked kingdom in the central Balkans, located between the Danube, Sava and Morava rivers. For several decades Serbia had been a client state of Austria-Hungary (1881–1903) under the last two rulers of the Obrenović dynasty. After the change of dynasty in 1903, during the reign of King Peter I Karadjordjević (1903–1914, formally until his death in 1921), Serbia gradually emerged as an independent constitu-tional monarchy renowned for her democratic system and almost unrestrict-ed political liberties. Democratic Serbia soon became a point of attraction for nearly two million Serbs living in Austria-Hungary and another million Serbs living in Turkey-in-Europe. A predominantly agrarian state (with 87 percent of rural population), post-1903 Serbia, with its mostly French-educated elite, became a cultural and political centre in the region and, as such, was gradually appealing not just to Serbs, but also to other South Slavs from the Dual Mon-archy settled in the provinces of Croatia-Slavonia, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Herze-govina, Vojvodina, Slovenia and, to some extent, to liberal Bulgarians.1

1 D. T. Bataković, “The Balkan Piedmont. Serbia and the Yugoslav Question”, Dialogue, Pa-ris, № 10 (1994), 25–73; idem, Yougoslavie. Nations, religions, idéologies (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 1994), 91–99. Completely biased and often misleading assessment of Serbia’s role prior to 1914 is offered by Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers. How Europe Went to War in 1914 (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Books, 2012). Viewing Serbia’s political ambi-tions as extremely nationalistic, Clark entirely neglects Serbia’s role as an attractive role-model of democratic development, the offspring of liberal ideas, the main cultural hub and a meeting point of all liberal-minded intellectuals among the South Slavs from Austria-Hungary.

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In foreign policy, Serbia relied on Franco-Russian alliance and thus came into permanent conflict with Austria-Hungary whose domination in the Balkans was threatened. On all occasions when Serbian interests were at stake (the 1905 customs treaty with Bulgaria, the 1906–1911 Tariff War with Dual Monarchy, the 1908-1909 Annexation crisis, the 1912–1913 Balkan Wars, the creation of Albania in 1912 and the issue of Serbia’s outlet to the Adriatic sea, plans for real union with Montenegro in 1914), Vienna strove to reduce, if not crush, Serbia’s political and economic independence and to re-impose her complete dependence on the Dual Monarchy. Despite occasional setbacks, Serbia managed to survive all the major threats to her independence by employing cautious diplomacy and abandoning her demands in the face of Austria-Hungary’s brutal military threats.2

In early 1914, Serbia’s prestige in the Balkans was at its height, but she was still recovering from the victorious, but rather exhausting, Balkan Wars (1912–1913). The spectacular victories against the Ottoman troops at Ku-manovo in Old Serbia (Vilayet of Kosovo) and in Prilep and Bitolj in the Slav--inhabited Macedonia (Vilayet of Monastir) in late 1912, made Serbia some-thing of a regional power: she almost doubled her territory – from 48.500 sq. km to 87.500 sq. km – and added 1,290,000 new inhabitants to her pre-war population of roughly three million. The war operations of 1912 cost Serbia 21,000 lives. The mobilisation of nearly 550,000 men placed an enormous strain on her agrarian economy. The annual costs of armament, ammunition and troops maintenance were as high as 360 million francs. The gross national income of Serbia amounting to one billion French francs before the Balkan Wars dropped to 600 million during two years of military operations. The total cost of the Balkan Wars rose to around one billion francs.3

For all these reasons, Serbia needed a longer period of peace and sta-bility in order to recover her agricultural production that suffered much as a result of the war. Peace was also indispensable to fully integrate the backward New Territories in the south (Old Serbia and Slavic Macedonia) marked by feudal-type Ottoman economy and without democratic culture, rule of law and modern political freedoms. The demographic structure of the extended country was considerably different in comparison with the ethnically homo-genous pre-Balkan-Wars Serbia: the population was a mixture of Serbs and other South Slavs with some 700,000-strong national minorities, often hostile

2 D. Djordjević, “The Serbs as an integrating and disintegrating Factor”, Austrian History Yearbook, vol. 3, Pt. 2 (1967), 72–82.

3 F. Le Moal, La Serbie du martyre à la victoire, 1914–1918 (Saint Cloud: 14–18 Editions, 2008), 23–31.

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to new Serbian administration – that was the case with ethnic Albanians in Kosovo and western Macedonia, and ethnic Bulgarians in certain areas of cen-tral and eastern Macedonia.4

The prestige of Serbia after the surprising victories in the Balkan Wars echoed in the Yugoslav provinces of the Dual Monarchy, notably among the Serbs in Bosnia, Herzegovina, Dalmatia and Croatia-Slavonia, and the li-beral and pro-Yugoslav Croat youth. Due to the increasing importance of the Yugoslav movement in Habsburg-held South Slav provinces after 1903, with Serbia as its potential Piedmont, the Vienna government started planning a future war against Serbia as soon as 1907. In mid-1908, a military plan was drawn up envisaging complete dismemberment of Serbia and the partition of her territories between the Dual Monarchy and Bulgaria. The abolishment of Serbia’s independence was to serve as a kind of internal “cleansing” for Aus-tria-Hungary; it was believed to be a prerequisite for the Monarchy’s future consolidation. In Vienna, military operation against Serbia was referred to as “sweeping” with “a steel brush”. Conrad von Hötzendorf, the Chief of General Staff of the Austro-Hungarian Army, was obsessed with the idea of a preven-tive war against Serbia: “Conrad first advocated preventive war against Serbia in 1906, and did so again in 1908–1909, in 1912–13, in October 1913, and May 1914: between January 1913 and 1 January 1914 he proposed Serbian war twenty-five times.”5 Later plans of Austria-Hungary for the partition of Serbia envisaged the division of her territory between Bulgaria and Romania, and after the 1912 Balkan War it was intended to cede some regions of Serbia to the newly-created Albania, another Austro-Hungarian client state.6

In October 1908, Austria-Hungary proclaimed the annexation of the occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina as a gift to Emperor Francis Joseph I for his sixty-year-long rule. This move was designed to eliminate what had long been condemned in Vienna as “a Greater Serbian danger”. In the strategic planning of Austria-Hungary, the annexation was but a transitional measure until the final abolishment of Serbia’s independence and the permanent liquidation of the Yugoslav question.7 As so many other Viennese policy-makers, Count

4 M. B. Petrovich, History of Modern Serbia 1804–1918, vol. II (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 534–604, D. T. Bataković (ed.), Histoire du peuple serbe (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2005), 185–200.

5 H. Strachan, The Outbreak of the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86–87.

6 A. Mitrović, Prodor na Balkan: Srbija u planovima Austro-Ugarske i Nemačke 1908–1918 (Belgrade: Nolit, 1981), 72–88.

7 O. Hoijer, Le comte d’Aehrenthal et la politique de violence (Paris: Plon, 1922), 161–164.

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Aehrenthal, the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, considered Serbia a ma-jor obstacle to further expansion of the Dual Monarchy towards the bay of Salonica at the expense of the Ottoman Empire. Once conquered and divided, Serbia might become another obedient province under the Habsburg rule, a colonial entity as Bosnia-Herzegovina had been since 1878.8

The Austro-Hungarian occupation and, in particular, the policy of Benjamin von Kállay, the governor of the occupied provinces (1882–1903), gradually provoked a strong dissent among Bosnian Serbs, Orthodox Chris-tian by faith and mostly peasants, who were still in the status of serfs on the feudal estates of Muslim beys. Kállay proclaimed the formation of a single Bosnian nation and adopted the Croat dialect of Serbo-Croat language as the Bosnian “state language’. This anti-Serb policy was eventually abandoned af-ter Kallay’s death in 1903, but the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, with the relative majority of Serb population, shattered all expectations that this province would eventually unite with Serbia.9 Under the combined pressure of Vienna and Berlin, without Russia’s support and the backing of France and Great Britain, Serbia was compelled to recognise the annexation in March 1909 and thus officially renounce any political aspirations towards Bosnia- -Herzegovina. Austria-Hungary’s Balkan policy – encouraging Albanians to confront Serbian troops in Kosovo, promoting Albanian maximalist territo-rial demands at the London Conference (1912–1913) and, finally, threaten-ing to intervene militarily if Serbian army did not withdraw from the Alba-nian littoral in October 1913 – was obviously utterly hostile to Serbia and her political and national aspirations. In the opinion of Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Count Berchtold in August 1913, antagonism between the

8 La Bosnie-Herzégovine à la Skоupchtina nationale du Royaume de Serbie. Discours des dépu-tés prononcés aux séances du 2 octobre et 2 et 3 janvier 1909 (Belgrade: Imprimerie de l’État, 1909) ; J. Cvijić, L’Annexion de la Bosnie et la question serbe, avec une préface d’Albert Malet (Paris: Hachette et Cie, 1909).

9 In 1910, according to the official Austro-Hungarian census, the Orthodox Christian Serbs were the largest national group in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Out of 1,898,044 inhabitants, 825,918 of them, or 43.49 percent, were Christian Orthodox Serbs, in spite of the fact that around 40,000 Serbs emigrated from 1908 to 1914. There were 612,137 (32.25%) Bosnian Muslims and 434,061 (22.87%) Roman Catholics, mostly Croats. However, due to the high birth rate, and with the large agrarian population which amounted to 87.92 percent, the Serbs had the highest population growth. The Bosnian Muslim population was diminished due to the growing emigration (140,000 from 1908 to 1914) while the Roman Catholic Croats as well as other Roman Catholics (Czechs, Poles, Germans) from various areas of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were systematically settled in Bosnia-Herzegovina – roughly 230,000 by 1914. (D. T. Bataković, “Prelude to Sarajevo. The Serbian Question in Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1878–1914”, Balcanica, vol. XXVII (1996), 117–155 (in particular, 121).

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Dual Monarchy and Serbia was irremediable (unüberbruckbar) and it would, he predicted, soon lead to a war.10 Viennese policy aroused the Serbian officer corps’ profound dislike for Austria-Hungary, perceived as the main threat to Serbia’s independence and survival as a sovereign state in the Balkans. As the military attaché of Austria-Hungary in Belgrade observed, this stance of the Serbian military was, in turn, perceived as a most serious threat to the Dual Monarchy’s interests in the Balkans.11

After the Balkan Wars, Serbia wanted to solidify her new possessions in the face of external threats (Albanian armed incursions into Kosovo) and Bulgarian revisionism, combined with guerrilla incursions by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation bent on detaching the Vardar Ma-cedonia from Serbia. Apart from delimitation with newly created Albania, the only tangible political action that was underway in early 1914 concerned the tacit preparation for the merging of two Serb kingdoms, Serbia and Montene-gro – they had a common frontier in the former Sanjak of Novi Bazar (Rascia area) after the Balkan Wars – into real union with common customs, military and foreign policy.

A considerable contribution to the great victories in the Balkans Wars had been made by army officers who were members of the clandestine organi-zation “Unification or Death” (Black Hand), founded in 1911, which advo-cated a more energetic policy in order to accomplish national unification. A large number of officers, however, were of the opinion that the national goal had been achieved by the Balkan Wars, and only a small group of them – those who had conspired in 1903 to overthrow the Obrenović dynasty – maintained political ambitions. Although Black Hand practically ceased to exist after the death of a number of its most prominent members after the Balkan wars, the leader of the remaining group, Lieutenant-Colonel Dragutin T. Dimitrijević Apis, who had been the head of the General Staff Counter-Intelligence depart-ment since 1913, conducted undercover operations in Bosnia on his own.12 He was inimical to the Nikola Pašić government whose officials in the newly-incorporated territories were denounced as corrupt. Apis had just failed to

10 F. R. Bridge, The Habsburg Monarchy among the Great Powers, 1815–1918 (New York, Ox-ford & Munich: Berg, 1990), 326.

11 A. Mitrović, Prodor na Balkan: Srbija u planovima Austro-Ugarske i Nemačke 1908–1918, 97.

12 More in: D. MacKenzie, Apis. The Congenial Conspirator. The Life of Colonel Dragutin T. Dimitrijević Apis (Boulder: Columbia University Press, 1989); D. T. Bataković, “La Main noire (1911–1917): l’armée serbe entre démocratie et autoritarisme”, Revue d’histoire diplo-matique, n° 2, Paris 1998, 94–144.

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foment a rebellion among army commanders in Serbian Macedonia and get rid of Pašić. A few members of the revolutionary Young Bosnia organisation, which had been fighting against Vienna’s colonial oppression of their native land, approached Apis’ trusted men (V. Tankosić, M. Ciganović) and asked for assistance in organizing the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. They were given hand grenades and pistols, and they were then smuggled across the border on the Drina River back to Bosnia, without the knowledge of Serbian civil authorities. The Young Bosnians never met Apis in person and seem to have never been instructed in Belgrade to carry out the assassination. They were given weapons, as Apis later explained confidentially to his closest friends, to frighten the Archduke and send a strong warning against aggres-sive military plans of Austria-Hungary against Serbia, in the situation where most of the Serbian troops were deep in the south in the newly acquired ter-ritories.13

Pašić’s Old Radical cabinet emerged victorious from the conflict with military authorities in Serbian Macedonia, but it entered the election cam-paign in June anxious about the possibility of further complications and Apis’s support for the opposition parties. Having been informed that some offic-ers were smuggling foreign citizens into Bosnia behind the back of civil au-thorities, Pašić suspected that Apis, always prone to forge a plot, was up to something: he requested an investigation to be carried out in the army and instructed the Serbian minister at Vienna, Jovan M. Jovanović, to suggest to L. Bilinski, Austro-Hungarian Minister for Bosnia, that Franz Ferdinand’s visit and military manoeuvres in the vicinity of the Serbian frontier scheduled for the greatest Serbian holiday, St. Vitus Day (when the battle of Kosovo against the Ottoman Turks had taken place in June 1389), should be postponed due to the potential unrest in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In his conversation with Bilinski, Jovanović did not discuss details of what was, after all, only a suspi-cion, and the former did not take his warning seriously and failed to pass it on to his government. The Serbian government thus also failed to avert a disaster of which it was acutely aware – provoking a conflict with the Dual Monarchy in a moment when the country was financially and militarily exhausted would be nothing short of a national suicide.14

While a grand celebration of the anniversary of the 1389 Battle of Ko-sovo was being prepared in Serbia, in the towns of Belgrade, Priština and Sko-plje, the horrible news of the assassination of Archduke and his wife came

13 Cf. more in D. T. Bataković, “Storm over Serbia: The Rivalry between Civilian and Military Authorities (1911–1914)”, Balcanica, vol. XLIV (2013), 307–356.

14 V. Dedijer, Road to Sarajevo (London: The MacGibbon & Kee Ltd., 1967), 238–250.

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from Sarajevo. The Serbian press and government officials condemned the assassination, but also pointed out the decades of colonial oppression of the Serbs in Bosnia. All festivities were cancelled and, as the Russian Minister at Belgrade reported, a “genuine outrage could be felt in all layers of society. All festivities were interrupted, and not only at the order of authorities, but also at the initiative of people themselves; theatres were closed and popular revels cancelled. In the evening, the King and the Regent [Alexander] sent telegrams expressing their profound condolences to the Emperor Franz Joseph. Pašić sent a telegram to Count Berchtold and the president of the [Serbian] Assem-bly to the Reichsrat. Next day all newspapers published moving obituaries...”15 Concerns were somewhat allayed some ten days later when it turned out that there was not much grieving in Vienna and when reprisals against Serbs and their property in Bosnian towns, above all Sarajevo and Mostar, ceased at least for a while. Amidst all the commotion, the Russian Minister Nicholas Hartwig had a heart attack while visiting Austro-Hungarian Legation on 10 July and died.

Despite the current trend of attributing responsibility for the outbreak of the Great War to Serbia, which is scholarly fail but propagandistically quite influential, especially in what nominally passes for scholarly literature, the Sarajevo assassination was just a convenient pretext for the Austro-Hungarian attack on Serbia, long planned but delayed for political reasons. Immediately after the assassination, state of emergency was declared in Bosnia and Herze-govina, violent anti-Serbian protests were organised and martial law imposed as a result of which hundreds of Serbs lost their lives within weeks. After the Sarajevo assassination Conrad von Hoetzendorf wrote that Serbia had to be attacked and broken not only in order to punish her for the murder of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne but also “in order to prevent the creation of separate independent national states which would attract kindred tribes from the territory of Austro-Hungary and thus cause the disintegration of the Mo narchy”. German militarists also believed that Austria-Hungary would be “lost as a monarchy and a great power unless she seizes this opportunity”.

The carte blanche from Berlin decided the Austro-Hungarian govern-ment for war. On 7 July, minister of foreign affairs, Count Berhtold, brought the issue of war against Serbia before the Ministerial Council, arguing that the demands set to Serbia should be such as to be unacceptable. On the wrong assumption that Great Britain would not side with Russia, the German Reich began diplomatic action to ensure that the Austro-Serbian war would be a

15 V. Štrandman, Balkanske uspomene (Belgrade: Žagor, 2009), 263.

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localised conflict. On 13 July the government in Vienna received the report of von Wiesner, its official sent to Sarajevo to enquire into Serbia’s role in the as-sassination, that there was no evidence that the Serbian government had been involved in the conspiracy. Yet, at the meeting of the Joint Ministerial Council of 19 July, the text of the ultimatum to Serbia was finalised, with the expecta-tion that it would be rejected. Serbia was presented with the ultimatum on 23 July, and not until after the French president Poincaré had ended his visit to Russia, in order to remove the possibility of Franco-Russian consultations.

The ultimatum which the Austro-Hungarian envoy von Giesl handed to deputy prime minister Lazar Paču was thus a mere formality. The ultima-tum demanded that the Serbian government publish in the Official Gazette the declaration condemning all propaganda against Austria-Hungary and the participation of some Serbian officers and public officials in it. The ten points of the ultimatum demanded that the Serbian government supress the publica-tion of all texts against the Dual Monarchy; dissolve all societies engaged in such propaganda (especially National Defence); remove from administration, public instruction and military service all persons engaged in such propa-ganda; accept the collaboration in Serbia of Austro-Hungarian officials “for the suppression of the subversive movement directed against the territorial integrity of Austria-Hungary”; and institute investigation into the accessories to the assassination of 28 June without delay. Having read the ultimatum, the British foreign minister Lord Grey told the Austrian ambassador that accept-ing it would be as good as terminating Serbia’s state sovereignty.

Aware of the possible consequences of the assassination and the danger of war, the Serbian government addressed itself to the great powers on 19 July expressing its readiness to hand over to the court any citizen of Serbia who would be proved to have been involved in the assassination. The ultimatum was delivered in Belgrade amidst the election campaign and in the absence of prime minister Pašić who was touring constituencies in the southeast of the country. Belgrade was given no more than forty-eight hours to reply, and, hav-ing read the ultimatum, one of the ministers said with resignation: “There’s no other way than to go out and die!” Pašić notified the Serbian diplomatic representatives abroad that Serbia would comply with all demands except those encroaching on her sovereignty. Upon Pašić’s return to Belgrade, the government, in constant consultations with the British and French legations, informed St. Petersburg that the reply would be delivered on time and that the “Serbian government will ask friendly nations to protect Serbia’s indepen-dence. If war is inevitable, Serbia will wage war”. The government was faced with a difficult choice: rejecting the ultimatum meant war and accepting it

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meant renouncing Serbia’s sovereignty. Pašić, side by side with Prince-Regent Alexander, presided the cabinet meetings discussing the form the reply should take. Most of the text was put together by Pašić and interior minister Stojan M. Protić, with the active participation of other ministers. None of the Entente powers had officially requested any restraint as to the content of the reply. On 24 July, after much deliberation, Pašić informed the allies about Serbia’s position: he informed the Russian chargé d’affaires that the reply “specifying which points can and which cannot be accepted” would be sent within the time limit and that a renewed appeal to “protect the independence of Serbia” would be addressed to the Entente powers, emphasising that Serbia would not hesitate to go to war should it turn out to be inevitable. To the British chargé d’affaires Pašić stressed that “the Austro-Hungarian demands are such that no government of an independent country would be able to accept them in their entirety” and expressed his hopes, without mentioning readiness to go to war if all else failed, that “perhaps the English government might urge the Austro-Hungarian government to moderate its demands”. 16

In the reply handed on 25 July, within the time limit, the Serbian gov-ernment accepted to meet all Austro-Hungarian demands except the one that encroached on the sovereignty of Serbia, the demand to accept an investiga-tion by Austro-Hungarian officials on Serbian soil. The Serbian government also expressed its readiness to comply with the decision of the International Court of The Hague or of the great powers which had diplomatically resolved the Annexation Crisis in 1909 in the event that Austro-Hungary should not find Serbia’s reply satisfactory.

Quite impressed with Serbia’s diplomatically impeccable reply accept-ing all demands but the one incompatible with the status of a sovereign state, Kaiser Wilhelm II wrote that “after this [Serbia’s reply] every reason for war drops away”. In Vienna, however, the decision to go to war at all costs had already been made. All attempts at mediation by the great powers, most of all by British diplomacy in which Belgrade placed its greatest hopes, failed to produce the hoped-for result. Austro-Serbian diplomatic relations were bro-ken on 26 July, when Baron von Giesl, dissatisfied with the reply personally handed by Pašić, left Belgrade in protest.

In this utterly hopeless situation, Prince-Regent Alexander appealed to the Russian Emperor Nicholas II to protect Serbia from the attack of a ten-fold stronger power. The emperor’s reply that “Russia will not abandon Serbia” came a day after the expiration of the time limit. Austria-Hungary declared

16 Dj. Dj. Stanković, Nikola Pašić, saveznici i stvaranje Jugoslavije (Belgrade: Nolit, 1984), pp. 39–40.

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war on Serbia on 28 July. In his note of 5 August, King Nikola I Petrović-Njegoš of Montenegro informed Niš that his country could not remain neu-tral. Determined to share Serbia’s fate, Montenegro unhesitatingly joined the war effort as Serbia’s only ally. Serbia was not a member of the Entente and did not have a separate treaty on political or military cooperation with any of the members. As interpreted by Athens, the alliance concluded with Greece in 1913 envisaged joint action only in the event of a Bulgarian attack on Ser-bia. Therefore, Prince-Regent Alexander and prime minister Pašić deemed it crucial to ensure Russia’s support, convinced that the Serbian soldier would do his best only if he was sure that Imperial Russia, popular in Serbia as a kindred Orthodox and Slav nation, had not denied her high patronage and military aid.

Russia declared partial mobilisation on 30 July 1914, even though, un-like Germany and Austria-Hungary, she was ill-prepared for war because of her poor railway infrastructure. Germany wasted no time and declared war on Russia on 1 August. On 3 August Germany declared war on France and in-vaded Belgium, which caused Britain to enter the war on 4 August. The failed attempt at localising the Austro-Serbian conflict was used by Germany as a pretext for starting a world war. The war was primarily motivated by Germa-ny’s underlying economic and imperialist ambitions which led her to aspire, with the aid of Austria-Hungary, to a redistribution of power, and not only in Europe but also in the seas dominated by British naval power, the Russian geopolitical ambit and the colonies held by European powers.

War Imposed and the first Serbian the victories on the Drina and Kolubara

After the official disruption of relations with Austria, all state institutions were evacuated in Niš, Serbia’s wartime capital, in the interior of the country, be-cause Belgrade was situated on the very border with the Dual Monarchy. Be-fore leaving for Niš, the Serbian cabinet notified the Serbian legations abroad that the Austro-Hungarian minister in Belgrade had left the country due to his dissatisfaction with the reply to the ultimatum, that a session of the Na-tional Assembly was convened for 27 July in Niš, that mobilization had been ordered and that a public proclamation was about to be issued. The news of mobilization was received as the only possible response to the unjust war, im-posed by the neighbouring empire. The vast majority of soldiers, with battle experience from 1912–1913, rushed to the colours. Serbia had no other than defensive military plans, which had been prepared in 1909 to deal with the eventual Austro-Hungarian attack after the annexation of Bosnia and Herze-

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govina. After having been presented with Count Berchtold’s open telegram on 28 July, Prime Minister Pašić stated: “Austria has declared war on us. Ours cause is a just one. God will help us.”17 At the closed cabinet meeting attended by all party leaders and high military officials, Pašić said: “We didn’t want war for we are still too tired and exhausted after the two last [Balkan] wars. But war is forced upon us and we have to accept it in defence of national honour and state sovereignty. Even a private person when attacked by someone, even if that someone is stronger, must defend himself and fight if he has any honour and self-respect. We hope, after all, that not all of Europe will leave us to the mercy of Austria-Hungary. But, whatever happens, even if we should stand alone, we shall defend ourselves to the last drop of blood...”18

In his solemn proclamation to the nation, Serbian Prince-Regent Al-exander stressed that “thirty years ago, Austria-Hungary conquered Serbian Bosnia and Herzegovina”, provinces which “it finally and illegitimately ap-propriated six years ago”. He called on the nation to defend “with all their strength, their homesteads and the Serbian race”. King Nicholas I of Montene-gro declared that “the pride of the Serbian tribe did not permit further yield-ing” and added: “My Montenegrins are ready to die for defence of our [Serb] independence.”19

The willingness to respond to the challenge was certain, but the victory Pašić announced was more than uncertain: Serbia was military and finan-cially unprepared for war, in a severe shortage of materiel (rifles, uniforms, ammunition for French cannons). The government issued the proclama-tion of a state of war. Response to mobilisation was good and within a few weeks more than 350,000 soldiers were mustered into twelve divisions (about 180,000 strong) comprising men aged 21–37, joined by reserve troops (38–41 age group). The war plan put together by Marshal Radomir Putnik with the assistance of General Živojin Mišić was exclusively a plan of defence against the invasion expected from the north. According to the military strategy, the 1st Army was to defend the approaches to the Zapadna (West) Morava River valley, while the 3rd Army was to impede the enemy’s advance across the Sava. The 2nd Army, whose assignment was to attack the flank of the enemy thrust-ing from the north, was kept in readiness until further orders. Also envisaged was full collaboration, joint plan of operations and joint command with the Montenegrin army.

17 A. Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War (London: Hurst, 2007), 44–52, quotation 52.18 Djordje Stanković, op. cit., 44–45.19 D. T. Bataković, Yougoslavie. Nations, religions, idéologies, 118.

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Instead of the expected invasion from the north across the Sava and Danube rivers and into the easily accessible valley of the Morava, on 12 Au-gust Oskar Potiorek launched the invasion by his “Balkan Army” from the west, from the barely accessible banks of the Drina. Promptly reorganised, the Serbian divisions were put on a fast march towards the enemy and the encounter took place in the night between 15 and 16 August on the spurs of Mt Cer. In the bloody four-day battle the Austro-Hungarians were routed and pushed back across the Drina. Both sides suffered heavy losses; 16,000 Serbian soldiers and 240 officers were put out of action. By 24 August all enemy troops were pushed back across Serbia’s borders; General Stepa Stepanović who had excellently led the Cer operation was promoted to the rank of marshal (voj-voda). The victory over much stronger Austro-Hungarian forces was the first Allied victory in the war against the Central powers and considerably boosted the spirits of the army and the people.

On 6 September 1914, at the request of the Allied Command aimed at taking pressure off the Russian and Western fronts, and although the Serbian troops were unprepared for such operations, the Serbian Supreme Command launched an offensive across the Danube and Sava rivers, and penetrated into Srem and eastern Bosnia. The offensive was soon cut short because of the ene-my’s new invasion from across the Drina in November 1914. The Austro-Hun-garian forces which took considerable parts of western Serbia within some ten days numbered 300,000 soldiers and 600 guns as opposed to 254,000 Serbian troops and 426 guns. Fierce battles with Potiorek’s “Balkan Army” along the front stretching from Šabac to Višegrad began to exhaust Serbian troops, espe-cially because of the perilous shortage of artillery ammunition which was ex-pected to come from France via Thessaloniki. The Serbian Supreme Command ordered retreat from the entire frontline. The mass operation lasted from 6 to 24 November, entailing severe losses and fighting for every inch of ground. Valjevo had to be given up and three Serbian armies redeployed to positions on the slopes of Mt Suvobor on the right side of the Kolubara and Ljig rivers. By shortening the front, the Serbian Supreme Command consciously sacri-ficed Belgrade, and the Austro-Hungarians triumphantly entered the city on 2 December 1914. Favourable to a Serbian counteroffensive was the arrival of the long-awaited artillery ammunition, troops were refreshed with food, sup-plied with ammunition and joined by fresh reinforcements, including 1,300 young corporals, students of Belgrade and foreign universities forming the so-called “Students’ Battalion”. In the respite from fighting, it was also possible to move civilians who retreated with the army, slowing down the movement and deployment of troops, farther away from the front lines. The unfavourable

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weather, practically winter conditions, and the poor road network made more difficult the resupply of the already battered Austro-Hungarian forces stuck far from their bases along the Drina, whose commander in chief, Potiorek, never came nearer than 70 km to the front.

The Serbian counteroffensive, in which the central role was played by the 1st Army now under the command of energetic General Mišić, was launched along the entire front on 3 December 1914. Surprised at the force of the counterattack, the Austro-Hungarians, tired, irregularly supplied with food and ammunition and unfamiliar with the terrain, suffered a routing de-feat at the Battle of the Kolubara. The disturbing news of the Serbian forceful counterattack came shortly after the triumphant parade celebrating the cap-ture of Belgrade. Within only twelve days the Austro-Hungarian forces were driven out of Serbia in disorder. Even though the previous weeks had seen the Austrian generals and government bragging about the capture of Belgrade, seconded by a gloating chorus of the press in Budapest, Prague and Vienna, the Serbian capital was liberated as early as 14 December 1914. The Austro-Hungarians were retreating in such disorder that the Serbs were able to cap-ture as many as 50,000 enemy soldiers, of whom 500 officers, as well as about 200 guns of all calibres and a large amount of other materiel.

Both Austro-Hungarian invasions of Serbia in 1914 ended in disaster, while the spectacular victories of the much weaker Serbian army were cele-brated by the Allied press as the unprecedented heroism of a small, much-suf-fering and unjustly attacked nation. The Serbian victories seemed all the more important as there was growing public indignation in Europe and America at the brutal crimes and massacres of civilians in north-western and western Serbia by the Austro-Hungarian army: “Austrian atrocities in Serbia are worse even than those the Germans are accused of in Belgium. Within a stretch of 65 kilometres from the border the land is deserted and a dead silence reigns over it. Hundreds of the inhabitants of Serbian towns have been executed. [.. .] Eighteen towns we passed through were completely deserted. In every town I saw one or two bullet-holed walls. Those were places of execution. Austrian and Hungarian officers would not admit to having been killing women, but admit to having executed hundreds of men.”20 The German journalist Maxi-milian Harden wrote about the Battle of the Kolubara: “Austrian troops .. . were battered by brave men of a pure and soldierly race, trained at a good

20 Despatch by William Shepard, reporter for the American agency United Press, see Politika of 9/22 January 1915 (D. T. Bataković and Nikola B. Popović, Kolubarska bitka (Belgrade: Litera, 1989), p. 193). On the scale of Austro-Hungarian crimes, see reports by Archibald Reiss.

22


school and the strategic skill of Marshal Putnik and General Mišić.” For this brilliant victory, Regent Alexander promoted General Mišić to the rank of marshal (vojvoda).21

Already in 1914 there were visible efforts of the occupying Austro-Hungarian forces to annihilate the civilian population, while the scale of vio-lence made a lasting imprint of the post-war memory of the whole Serbian nation.22 As testified by Dr. Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, renowned forensic expert from Lausanne, horrible war crimes were committed by the Austro-Hungarian invading troops during the two campaigns between August and early December 1914: the soldiers of the Dual Monarchy executed thousands of Serbian civilians, including elderly people, women and children in war-torn western Serbia, in total 69,000 persons.23 In addition, the 600,000 inter-nally displaced Serbs were a heavy burden for western and northern parts of Serbia. The Austrian actions in Serbia during the 1914, as clearly identified

21 Bataković and Popović, Kolubarska bitka, p. 193.22 Guillaume Apollinaire wrote: “It is well known that the Austrians are carrying out dena-

tionalisation in Serbia, which is one of the most vicious and most bizarre undertakings in this war. The Orthodox faith is being persecuted in a most fierce manner, sometimes in the most shameful and the least concealed manner, in favour of the Catholic faith, which partially explains the cautious silence about Serbia the pope has found necessary in his note to the warring states. National language is as persecuted as religion. Cyrillic script is strictly forbidden, because it is considered to be one of the features of the Serbian language. The names of streets in towns have been rewritten in Latin script. Moreover, this persecution has been expanded to national literature. Everywhere the collections of folk poems have been seized and harsh penalties await those who are hiding them. Since there is nothing anti-Austrian in those books and since they speak only of the struggle of the Serbs against the Turks, it is clear that the only purpose of banning them is to destroy every expression of the Serbian national spirit… In that struggle against the national language, the Bulgarians have gone even farther than the Austrians; they are burning Serbian books and manu-scripts, without even sparing church and court records and archives. The Bulgarian minis-ter of trade has modified these vandal measures inasmuch as he ordered that Serbian books and manuscripts be transported to the national printing house in Sofia to be recycled into feedstock for making paper. The Bulgarians have been furiously destroying even the Ser-bian monuments spared by the Turks. All inscriptions in churches and monasteries where Serbian rulers are mentioned have been rubbed out. The Bulgarians have gone so far as to force the Serbs to change their surname affix -ić into -ov, which is the affix of Bulgarian family names”, Mercure de France, 16th October 1917, 761.

23 R. A. Reiss, How Austria-Hungary waged War in Serbia: Personal Investigations of a Neutral (Paris: A. Colin 1915). More on war suffering in the documented analysis Dr. Rodolphe Archibald Reiss (1875–1929), who was covering Serbia and the Serbian fronts: R. A Reiss, Kingdom of Serbia. Report upon the Atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First Invasion of Serbia (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., LTD, 1916). The longest chapter is dedicated to the massacre of civilians, pp. 30–146.

23


by recent research had a planned exterminatory character.24 After two suc-cessfully repulsed Austro-Hungarian invasions, half of Serbia remained with totally destroyed economy, including agriculture. French journalist and writer Henry Barby wrote: “In spite of the mass killings, in spite of the horrible cruel-ties I witnessed in the previous wars [Balkan Wars], I carry in my mind such pictures of horror from my visit to the battlefield that I cannot help shudder-ing even at the very recollection of them. It seems that laying waste was the only goal the Austrian army had and it began the operation of laying waste from the moment it entered Serbia. What cruelties, what infernal orgies the soldiers and officers indulged in! So many times I was petrified at the result of the criminal, fire-setting or sadistic furore of the soldiers of a great country proud of its civilisation! What Austria, a great and mighty nation which came down on a small people, wanted was the destruction of Serbia, and it intended to achieve it systematically, by sword and fire, by plundering and setting towns and villages ablaze, and by extermination, by the slaughtering of the Serbian people. She did not hesitate because she hoped to have her criminal undertak-ing completed before Serbia had the time to defend herself and disclose all horror of Austria’s crimes to the civilised world.“25

The Defensive War Strategy and Ambitious Plans for Yugoslav Unification 1914–1915

Austria-Hungary was after 1903, when Belgrade chose the political backing of Russia and France instead that of the Dual Monarchy, a most likely adver-sary to Serbia. The eagerness to strangle Serbia by crippling her economy (The Tarrif War, 1906–1911) and imposing the humiliating recognition of the An-nexation of Bosnia (March 1909), developed into a tangible military menace in late 1912. In order to expel Serbian troops from the Adriatic littoral of au-tonomous Albania, Viennese protégé, the Dual Monarchy deployed its troops along the northern Serbian borders, thereby forcing Serbia to withdraw from Albania. Thus, the whole Serbian strategy was a series of plans for defence against potential Austro-Hungarian attack.26

24 Cf. more in B. M. Scianna, “Reporting Atrocities: Archibald Reiss in Serbia, 1914–1918“, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 25, 4 (2012), pp. 596–617.

25 Henry Barby, Avec l’Armée serbe. De l’ultimatum autrichien à l’invasion de la Serbie (Paris: Albin Michel, 1918), 112.

26 Cf. in detail: Vladimir Ćorović, Odnosi izmedju Srbije i Austro-Ugarske u XX veku (Bel-grade: Biblioteka Grada Beograda, 1991), 371–488.

2


After the Great War erupted, the Serbian strategists, as well as the Al-lied commanders, considered that the military conflict will end within two to three months. Their experience in the Balkan Wars additionally strengthened this opinion in Serbian General Staff. The Serbian military strategy applied in the first months of the Great War remained purely defensive, expecting, as later proved strategically justified, the major attack not through the open val-ley of the Sava river, but on the Drina river on Serbia’s western borders.27 The Serbian plan was based on the assumption that the mortal blow to the Austro-Hungarian troops can be inflicted only after they penetrate deeper into Ser-bian territory. The first invasion of Serbia from Eastern Bosnia was marked by the sparkling victory over Austro-Hungarian troops on the slopes of the Cer in August 1914. It was the first Allied victory in the Great War. The second invasion in December 1914 was successfully repulsed as well.28

Two Serbian breakthroughs on the Austro-Hungarian territory, first in eastern Bosnia – up to Pale near Sarajevo, and the second in the Srem area, presently Vojvodina, during 1914, despite a warm welcome by both local Serb and South Slav population, proved insufficiently prepared and overambitious for the limited effectives of the Serbian army. The defensive war strategy, how-ever, expanded in order to follow the political goals. The presumption of a short, only several-months long war influenced strongly the defining of both the military strategy and political objectives of Serbia. Serbian war aims were defined already at the early stage of the war.29

Already in September 1914 Pašić summoned the eminent Serb intel-lectuals in Niš to draft brochures on Serbia’s war aims, including the projec-tion of the unity of the Serbs, Croats and the Slovenes. When asked by intel-lectuals about the post-war frontiers of Serbia, Pašić was quite self-confident showing on a map the following line: Marburg–Klagenfurt–Szeged. If we fail, Pašić explained, we will fail in a good company – with the Entente powers.30

27 H. Strachan, The First World War, vol. I: To Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 335–347.

28 For the victory in the battle of Cer, General Stepa Stepanović was upgraded into Field Mar-shal (vojvoda). Still valuable account in: Crawfurd Price, Serbia’s Part in the War, vol. I, The Rampart against Pan-Germanism, London 1918, 85-114; Naoumovitch & Desmazes, Les victoires serbes en 1914 (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1928).

29 D. Djordjević,“Vojvoda Putnik. The Serbian High Command and Strategy in 1914”, in: B. K. Király & N. Dreisziger, eds., East Central European Society in the First World War (Boulder, Colorado: Social Science Monographs, 1985), 569–585; The Creation of Yugoslavia 1914–1918, D. Djordjević (ed.) (Santa Barbara & Oxford: Clio, 1980).

30 P. M. Draškić, Moji memoari, ed. by D. T. Bataković (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1990), 87.

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The idea of Yugoslav unification in Serbia was a program embraced prima-rily by Independent Radicals, the second largest political party in Serbia. An influential group of internationally renowned Serbian intellectuals strongly advocated Yugoslav unity in years prior to the war (Stojan Novaković, Jovan Cvijić, Jovan Skerlić, Jovan M. Žujović, Aleksandar Belić) justifying the union by the closeness of language, culture and the common ethnic roots, while the Croat-Serb Coalition in both Croatia-Slavonia (under Hungary) and Dalma-tia (under Austria), in a decade that preceded the Great War, together with growing pro-Yugoslav feelings among younger generations in Bosnia-Herze-govina, provided tangible support to the Yugoslav movement.31 Prior to 1914, the cultural unity of the Yugoslavs (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes) was advocated by the influential enlightened scholarly elite, among the Croats as well (V. Jagić, T. Maretić) Yugoslavs were described as “the nation in the making” (Milan Marjanović, Šukrija Kurtović) that will represent a synthesis of the East and the West in the Slavic south. Stojan Novaković, an eminent historian and dip-lomat, predicted in 1911 that a future Yugoslav state would spread from Split in the west, to Subotica in the north, and from Lake Ohrid in the south, to Marburg (Maribor) in the north. Among the Croats, the bearers of the Yu-goslav ideology were popular leaders from Dalmatia, which, unlike Croatia, formed within the central European cultural milieu, developed under the in-fluence of the Mediterranean heritage, inspired by Mazzini’s model of unifica-tion around a Piedmont.32

The most important theoretical basis for the Yugoslav idea, was pro-vided by geographer Jovan Cvijić, on the Dinaric Alps, covering most of Mon-tenegro, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Dalmatia, Croatian littoral in the Balkans as a specific geopolitical whole with an almost uniformed ethnic composition, since numerous migrations in the past had resulted in the mixing of the Serbs and the Croats creating related cultural and civilizational patterns.

The Yugoslav program, mostly cultural rapprochement before 1914 be-came an essential political element of Serbia’s war aims in the Great War. The struggle with the Dual Monarchy now waged with military and political sup-port of Triple Entente, for the first time created the opportunity for achieving Yugoslav unity. Furthermore, the formation of a large Yugoslav state under the Serbian dynasty would release Serbia from relentless threats to her sover-eignty and independence by Austria-Hungary.

31 M. Ekmečić, Ratni ciljevi Srbije 1914 (Belgrade 1971), 80–112; Lj. Trgovčević, Naučnici Srbije i stvaranje Jugoslavije 1914–1920 (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1986), 28–32.

32 D. T. Bataković, Yougoslavie. Nations, religions, idéologies, 124–129.

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A circular instruction by Prime Minister Pašić to all Serbian legations on 4 September 1914 stated “that Serbia should become a strong south-west-ern Slavic state that would include all the Croats and all the Slovenes as well“. Only such a state would be, as Pašić stressed, “in the interest of the eradica-tion of Germanic supremacy and its penetration towards the east”; only such a state could offer resistance to “all the combinations whose aim would be to endanger European peace or to annul the successes of the Allies’ weapons”33.

After another military success during the second Austro-Hungarian in-vasion in late 1914, the self-confidence of both the Serbian government and the army, successfully defending their homeland significantly increased. Nev-ertheless, the overall situation in Serbia, despite two acclaimed military vic-tories was extremely difficult: in two 1914 campaigns out of 250,000 Serbian soldiers 163,557 of them perished, while an additional 69,000 civilians died in combined actions of terror by Austro-Hungarian troops.34 As testified by Dr. Rudolph Archibald Reiss, renowned forensic expert from Lausanne, horrible massacres were committed by Austro-Hungarian troops who executed thou-sands of civilians, including elderly people, women and children in western and central Serbia.35 The 600,000 internally displaced Serbs were a heavy bur-den in a country that successfully repulsed two Austro-Hungarian invasions but remained with destroyed economy and agriculture.

Serbia’s war aims were publicly proclaimed after the battle of Kolubara in December 1914, considered being a decisive victory against the Dual Mon-archy, a vanishing empire which will eventually be totally defeated by the Al-lies. Proud but exhausted, Serbia was expecting a rapid end of the war that already drained most of her military forces and economic resources. When the last Habsburg soldier was expelled from the Serbian soil and the capital, Belgrade, situated on the frontiers with the Dual Monarchy, was liberated in early December, the moment seemed right for an official proclamation of Ser-bia’s war aims. In Niš, a war capital of Serbia, the new coalition cabinet under Pašić, including ardent pro-Yugoslav Independent Radicals, summoned the National Assembly and on December 7th 1914 issued the Niš Declaration. The

33 M. Ekmečić, “Serbian War Aims“ in: D. Djordjević, The Creation of Yugoslavia 1914–1918, 21–23; see also Dj. Dj. Stanković, Nikola Pašić, saveznici i stvaranje Jugoslavije, 47–55.

34 The architect of the Serbian counter-offensive in the Battle of Kolubara (3–14 Decem-ber 1914), General Živojin Mišić, was promoted into the rank of Field Marshal. Cf. D. T. Bataković & N. B. Popović (eds.), Kolubarska bitka, op. cit.

35 R. A. Reiss, Report upon the Attrocities Committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First Invasion of Serbia, London 1916, 30–146 (chapter “Massacres and Atrocities Per-petrated on Civilians“).

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unification of the South Slavs (Serbs, Croats and Slovenes) from the Yugoslav provinces of Austria-Hungary was proclaimed as Serbia’s ultimate war aim.36

In parallel, the Serbian war aims were supported by the Yugoslav Com-mittee, created by exiled Croats, Slovenes and Serbs in May 1915 in Paris. Sponsored by the Serbian government the leading members of the Yugoslav Committee (its president A. Trumbić, F. Supilo, N. Stojanović, F. Potočnjak, H. Ninković) strongly promoted the idea of Yugoslav unity in allied capitals. Thus, the Niš Declaration was not merely a Serbian vision of Yugoslav unity, but also a response to genuine demand of prominent Yugoslav political fig-ures, exiled from the Dual Monarchy, calling for a formation of the common state with Serbia and Montenegro. The first Manifesto of the Yugoslav Com-mittee addressed to allied governments on May 6th 1915 already called for South Slav unification, including all Yugoslav provinces, thus envisaged the dismemberment of the Dual Monarchy.37

Furthermore, the Yugoslav Congress, presided by the Dalmatian writer Ivo Ćipiko was held in Niš in May 1915. The Congress adopted a resolution calling for a “complete and indestructible national unity of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes”. In 1915 the Serbian government sent a group of leading Serbian scholars (J. Cvijić, A. Belić, P. Popović, J. M. Žujović, Lj. Stojanović) to allied capitals in order to promote the union of Yugoslav peoples, a Serbian proposal that, envisioning the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary in the early stage of the war, was not always welcomed. 38 Moreover, the Russian diplomacy strong-ly objected to the unification of Serbia with Croats and Slovenes, since they fought fiercely against Russian army on the Eastern Front.39

The project of a Yugoslav union confronted Serbia with the hostility of Italy: the Italian war aims codified by the 1915 Treaty of London, created a major point of conflict with both the Serbian government and the Yugoslav Committee. Rome was supposed to obtain most of Dalmatia, Adriatic islands

36 D. Janković, “Niška Deklaracija (Nastajanje programa jugoslovenskog ujedinjenja u Srbiji 1914. godine)”, Istorija XX veka, 10 (1969), 7–111.

37 [Le Comité yougoslave], Le programme yougoslave: avec une carte, Paris 1916; D. Šepić, “Srpska vlada i počeci Jugoslavenskog odbora”, Historijski zbornik, vol XIII, Zagreb 1960, 1–45.

38 J. Cvijić, “La pensée de la nation serbe”, Revue hebdomadaire, 10 avril 1915, 209–219; St. Novakovitch, “Problèmes Yougo-Slaves”, La Revue de Paris, 1er Septembre 1915; W. M. Petrovitch, Serbia: her People, History and Aspirations (London: George G. Harrap & Com-pany, 1915); Lj. Trgovčević, op. cit., 35-54.

39 M. B. Petrović, “Russia’s Role in the Creation of the Yugoslav State” 1914–1918, in: D. Djordjević (ed.), The Creation of Yugoslavia 1914–1918, 76.

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and Istria, which the Croats had claimed as their own homeland and a part of the future Yugoslav state with Serbia, as it’s Piedmont. Despite being focused primarily on the dismemberment of Austria-Hungary, the first wider action of the Yugoslav Committee was a fervent campaign against the provisions of the 1915 Treaty of London between Triple Entente and Italy.40

Furthermore, at this early stage of the war, the demand of dismember-ing Austria-Hungary proved to be detrimental to the treatment of Serbia’s population, after all of Serbia had been occupied in late November 1915, after the third assault on Serbia. In occupied Serbia, divided into an Austro-Hun-garian and a Bulgarian zone, a systematic attempt to denationalize the Serb population was accompanied by the ravaging of cultural goods, including the plundering and destruction of valuables from libraries, archives and monas-tery treasuries. In addition, the terror employed by the Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian military authorities against civilians gradually intensified, includ-ing frequent internment in detention camps in Hungary, arbitrary arrests, and mass executions from august to October 1916. 16,500 Serbs were deported in detention camps in Hungary; in May 1917 there were already 40,000 Serbs interned into the camps of the Dual Monarchy. Mass deportations, includ-ing children, motivated Vatican to intervene in Vienna against internment of children. Deportations and mass executions were augmented in particu-lar after 1917 Serb insurrection against occupation in the region of Toplica (Toplički ustanak), led by Kosta Vojinović where roughly 30,000 inhabitants were killed.41

Bulgaria’s Claims, The Entente Powers and the Serbian Campaignin Albania 1915

The 1915 efforts of Entente Powers to bring Bulgaria into its camp provoked growing pressure on Serbia to cede most of Macedonia (the 1912 “contested zone”) to Bulgaria. In exchange, the Allies offered in August 1915 to Serbia compensations in Austria-Hungary, with Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slavonia, Bačka, Slavonia, northern Albania and most of Dalmatia, up to the port of Split. All these proposals were not accepted: Prime Minister Pašić considered

40 Cf. more in: Jugoslavenski odbor u Londonu u povodu 50-godišnjice osnivanja (Zagreb: JAZU, 1966); G. Stokes, “The Role of the Yugoslav Committe in the Formation of Yugo-slavija“, in: D. Djordjević (ed.), The Creation of Yugoslavia 1914–1918, 51–71.

41 D. Djordjević, “Austro-Ugarski okupacioni režim u Srbiji i njegov slom 1918“, in: Naučni skup u povodu 50-godišnjice rapada Austro-Ugarske Monarhije i stvaranja jugoslovenske države (Zagreb: JAZU, 1969), 220–221; A. Mitrović, Ustaničke borbe u Srbiji 1916–1918 (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1987).

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the axis Morava-Vardar rivers as a key for maintaining Serbian influence and the power balance in the Balkans, heavily threaten by the any further enlarge-ment of Bulgaria. The Serbs were confident that Bulgaria will side with the Central Powers, who would offer Sofia more territorial concessions than the Allies.42

In parallel, Serbia waged an undeclared war on the borders with Alba-nia: recurrent incursions of Albanian paramilitary units, trained by Turkish officers and financed by Dual Monarchy aimed to instigate a large-scale re-bellion of the Kosovo Albanians. Pašić had sent 23,000 soldiers into Albania to support Essad Pasha Toptani, his only partner in this traditionally hostile neighbourhood. An ally of Serbia (he concluded two agreements on closer political cooperation with the Serbian government in Niš 1914 and in Tirana 1915), Essad Pasha was a supporter of the Entente as well. Due to Serbia’s military support Essad Pasha dispersed the pro-Central Powers rebels, and re-established his authority in central Albania. Military assistance to Essad Pasha was a bold political decision of Pašić that was fully justified several months later during the Serbian retreat into Albania.43

Although the Serbian Front with Austria-Hungary was quiet for nearly a year after the Serbian victory in the battle of Kolubara (3-14 December 1914), the military and economic exhaustion of Serbia caused by the war crimes and the ravaging of western and central Serbia by Austro-Hungarian troops, led in early 1915 to the outbreak of a typhoid epidemic. Out of 400,000 infected, the epidemic took the death toll of more than 100,000 soldiers and civilians, thereby considerably weakening Serbia’s defensive capacity.44 The various ru-mours and proposals from Austro-German agents on separate peace with Ser-bia in autumn 1915 were firmly rejected by Pašić, who strongly believed at the eventual victory of the Quadruple Entente.45

The Third Campaign against Serbia: Military Defeat and Exile, 1915–1916

Halted on the Marne and compelled to resort to trench warfare, the German High Command chose to do away with a lesser theatre of operations, the

42 D. T. Bataković (ed.), Histoire du peuple serbe (Lausanne: L’Age d’Homme, 2005), 272–273. 43 D. T. Bataković, “Essad Pasha Toptani and Serbian Government“, in: A. Mitrović (ed.),

Serbs and Albanians in the 20th Century (Belgrade: Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1991), 57–78.

44 Cf. chapters on Serbia in 1915 in: John Reed, The War in Eastern Europe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Son, 1916), 22–96.

45 Dj. Dj. Stanković, op. cit., 79–82.

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Serbian Front. After two humiliating defeats suffered by Austro-Hungarian troops, Germany had taken over command over the campaign against Serbia. Delayed due to the offensive against Russia in Galicia, the offensive against Serbia was prepared since late August 1915. Bulgaria finally joined the Central Powers and, on 22 September, ordered a general mobilisation. The outlines of the impending offensive were taking shape: German attack from the north towards the Morava river valley under the command of General Mackensen46; Austro-Hungarian attack across the Drina from the west; Bulgarian penetra-tion into the Vardar valley from the east to cut off the southward route of retreat for Serbian troops. As the Entente Powers had adamantly rejected the proposal of Field-Marshal Putnik and Pašić, to neutralize Bulgaria by a pre-emptive strike, Serbia remained unable to fight on two fronts, longer than 1,000 kilometres.

Since 1913, Greece was in a defensive alliance with Serbia against Bul-garian aggression, it was Serbia’s only ally in the Balkans besides Montenegro. Greek Prime Minister E. Venizelos requested that 150,000 Allied troops be transferred to Salonika from the Near East, and ordered the mobilisation of the Greek armed forces a day after Bulgaria. On October 5th 1915 the Allied troops began to disembark in Salonika. The pro-German King Constantine responded by dismissing Venizelos from office. Athens new cabinet declined Serbia’s desperate appeal to honour the terms of the 1913 treaty of alliance against Bulgaria.47

The Austro-German offensive on Serbia was launched from the north on October 5th 1915, and Bulgaria’s attack from the east ensued two days later. The offensive, taken on a 1000 km long front, involved three German and three Austro-Hungarian army corps, which crossed the Sava River in Belgrade, and two Bulgarian armies advancing towards Niš and Skoplje. Belgrade, under fierce attack, was abandoned after heroic defence. The Serbian General Staff ’s plan was to secure the route of retreat Niš–Skoplje–Salonika, in order to come together with the Allied forces General Sarrail. Moreover, the fall of Venize-

46 In the order to his troops before their departure for the Serbian front general von Macken-sen said: “You are going neither to the Italian nor the Russian nor the French front. You are going into battle against a new enemy, formidable, robust, brave and sharp. You are going to the Serbian front and against Serbia, and the Serbs are a freedom-loving people who fight and sacrifice to the last men. Make sure that this small enemy does not outshine your glory and jeopardise the previous successes.”

47 D. T. Bataković, “Serbia and Greece in the First World War. An Overview“, Balkan Studies, 45/1 (2004), 59–80.

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los’s government and the slow disembarkation of Allied troops in Salonika thwarted the effective realisation of Serbia’s defence plan.48

As early as October 16th, the vital communication line, the Niš–Skoplje railway, was severed by the rapidly advancing Bulgarian troops. The Serbian attempt, on 18–20 November, to breach the Bulgarian front line at Kačanik and proceed towards Skoplje ended in failure. The strategic plan of gradual retreat towards Allies in Salonika eventually failed after General Sarrail was slowing down the advance the French forces deeper into Macedonia to meet the Serbian troops. Field-Marshal Mišić, the hero of the Battle of the Kolu-bara, suggested force concentration in Kosovo and a decisive encounter with the combined German-Austrian and Bulgarian force. His suggestion was not accepted and instead, on November 25th, the Serbian General Staff ordered a general retreat across Albania.

The retreat had to change direction and to head through Montenegro towards Scutari and Saint Giovanni di Medua. Defending the western flank of the withdrawing Serbian troops, on January 7th 1916, the Montenegrin army seriously defeated the Austro-German troops in the battle of Mojkovac, but could not resist a new attack. The parliament of Montenegro decided to follow Serbia’s example – to withdraw in exile without surrender. Nevertheless, King Nicholas, crushed and demoralized, crossed to Italy in early 1916, while Mon-tenegro, after the fall of Lovćen, was forced to sign a capitulation.49

The other direction led from Prizren. The only safe area for the retreat-ing Serbian troops was the domain of Essad Pasha in Durazzo and its hinter-land in northern and central Albania. Putting up fierce resistance and launch-ing occasional counterattacks, the Serbian rear-guard secured the retreat of the main body of the army, and masses of civilian refugees, to Kosovo Polje, and further to the border with Albania west of Prizren. According to the Ser-bian High Command’s initial plan, in Albania, under the protection of Essad Pasha, the troops would be re-gathered, regrouped and re-equipped with the necessary material that the Allies were to supply by sea.50

The Serbian plan for reorganisation in Albania soon proved to be un-feasible and, at the initiative of France and the insistence of the Russian Em-

48 Cf. C.E.J. Fryer, The Destruction of Serbia in 1915 (Boulder & New York: Columbia Univer-sity Press, 1997), 74–93.

49 N. Rakočević, Crna Gora u Prvom svjetskom ratu 1914–1918 (Cetinje: Istorijski institut, 1969), 152–167.

50 A comprehensive analysis in: Ž. Pavlović, Rat Srbije i Crne Gore sa Austro-Ugarskom, Namčkom i Bugarskom 1915. godine (Belgrade: Naučno delo, 1974); D. Tripković, Srpska ratna drama 1915–1916 (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 2001).

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peror, plans began to be made for rescuing the Serbian troops by Allied ships. The difficult terrain and wintertime conditions compelled the Serbian army to destroy all military equipment, including the French cannons, and to cross into Albania with only small arms. The terrible ordeal of retreating across Albania, which took place without due preparations, amidst shortages of food and warm clothing and footwear in extreme winter conditions, has been re-membered as the “Albanian Golgotha”. In late November and early December 1915, the whole army and a substantial number of civilians, exhausted with famine and extreme cold, trekked over the snow-laden Albanian mountains and swollen rivers.51 Outside the region controlled by Essad Pasha’s Durazzo-based gendarmerie, they suffered surprise attacks by hostile Albanian tribes. Due to the Italians’ obstruction, the exhausted Serbs were obliged to fight their way through to the southern port of Valona, where French ships were waiting to transfer them to safety.52

“Albanian Golgotha”, the epic retreat of the Serbian army and civilians through the mostly hostile Albanian mountains was remembered as the worst human catastrophe in the modern history of Serbia. The worst part, when most of the soldiers died of famine and exhaustion was along the march from Durrazo to Valona. The overall losses of the “Albanian Golgotha” (1915–1916), initially estimated at roughly 140,000 victims, rose to 247,887 dead, wounded, arrested or missing.

The Serbian army, government, the two-thirds of the National Assem-bly, in total 151,828 soldiers and civilians, who survived the severe winter and Albanian attacks during the “Albanian Golgotha”, were gradually transferred by Allied ships and settled on the Greek island of Corfu in early 1916,53 while the remaining 11, 214 were transported to the French base in Bizerte in Tu-nisia. Among them were also about 2,000 volunteer soldiers from the Mon-tenegrin army that surrendered after helping the Serbian retreat to Albania. The evacuation of the Serbian army from the ports of Scutari, San Giovanni di Medua, Durazzo and Valona to Corfu was operated by forty-five Italian,

51 J. C. Adams, Flight in Winter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1942), 151–197.52 F. Jones, With Serbia into Exile. An American’s Adventures with the Army that Cannot Die,

New York 1916, 351–391; cf. also H. Barby, Epopée serbe. Agonie d’un peuple (Paris : Librarie militaire Berger-Levrault, 1916).

53 Among the rich literature on the Serbian retreat the most important testimonies are: H. Barby, L’Epopée serbe, Paris 1916, op. cit; F. Jones, With Serbia into Exile (New York: The Century Co, 1916); Ferri-Pisani, Le drame serbe (Paris: Perrin 1916); A. Boppe, A la suite du gouvernement serbe de Nish à Corfou (Paris: Edition Bossard, 1917); cf. also excellent survey by J. C. Adams, Flight in Winter, op. cit.

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twenty-five French and eleven British steamers, through 1,159 escort voyages. It was the “largest sea evacuation in history until Dunkirk”.54

Despite the warm and friendly welcome by the Greeks in Corfu and strong efforts of the French mission who were in charge of their recovery, the Serbs, plagued with typhus, exhausted by famine and other diseases, were dying in hundreds during the first weeks of their sojourn on the island.55 The infected ones were, therefore, transported to the nearby islet of Vido, in order to be isolated from those who remained in Corfu. At least 7,000 Serbian sol-diers died in Vido, of whom the majority were buried in the Ionian Sea which later became known among the Serbs as a “blue tomb”.56 In Corfu, where tens of thousands soldiers died of hunger and diseases, until the recovered Serbian army, rearmed by the French allies was reorganized into three armies, com-prising six infantry and one cavalry divisions.57

From the middle of April to the end of May 1916, the whole, fully re-covered Serbian army, comprising 6,025 officers and 124,190 soldiers, was transferred by five military and 45 transport allied ships to the Salonika front to join the Entente forces. After a short training, the Serbian troops were al-ready in August 1916 deployed on the frontline on the Greek-Serbian border to join Allied forces under the supreme command of French General Mau-rice Sarrail. Their arrival gave fresh impulse to Allied Command to plan and execute an offensive on the front. After initial setbacks, the first victory of the Serbian troops was the in the battle of Gorničevo (Keli), from 11 to 17 September 1916. After fierce fighting of the Drina division with the Bulgarian troops an important strategic position, slightly inside Serbian state territory at the Kajmakčalan height (2525m), opening the way to Monastir area, was recaptured.

After the next military success, the joint French-Serbian capture of Mo-nastir on 19 November, General Sarrail paid tribute to the effort of the Serbian troops in his Ordre Général aux Armées Alliées: “Serbs, you were the first to open the way. You were first to see our enemies in flight and your sustained

54 M. Gilbert, First World War: A Complete History (London: Henry Holt, 1995), 209.55 Cf. more in : Lieutenant-Colonel de Ripert d’Alauzier, Un drame historique. La résurrection

de l’armée serbe. Albanie – Corfou (1915–1916) (Paris: Payot 1923).56 More than a thousand dead soldiers were buried at the island of Vidos, the “Island of

Death”, while the other victims of hunger and disease, in total 7,000 were buried in the sea several miles off Corfu.

57 M. Larcher, La Grande Guerre dans les Balkans. Direction de la guerre (Paris: Payot, 1929), 119–120; P. Opačić, Le front de Salonique (Belgrade: Republički zavod za zaštitu spomenika kulture, 1979), 46–47.

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effort brought about the taking of the Monastir.”58 However, due to the harsh Balkan winter the victory could not be exploited and Sarrail suspended all operations on 11 December 1917.

Despite official praise the price of the victory for the Serbs was very dear. The heavy loses (1,209 officers and 31,432 soldiers dead, missing or wounded) due to the ill-conceived tactics of the previous offensive, dissatisfaction with the Allied commander who was constantly ignoring Serbian demands to be consulted on all strategic decisions, made general discontent within Serbian troops more evident. The lack of significant military activities after the November offensive of 1916 on the Salonika front opened the way for the renewal of political disputes within Serbian officers.

The Serbian Army in the 1918 Salonika Offensive

Already since March 1917, the Serbian army had been reorganized into two armies: the First Serbian Army (comprising Morava, Drina, Dunav and Ca-valry divisions) under the command of Field Marshal Živojin Mišić, which was in charge of the twenty kilometers of the front from Sokol to Cerna Reka, while the Second Serbian Army (comprising Šumadija, Timok and Vardar di-visions), under the command of Field Marshal Stepa Stepanović, which was deployed along the thirty five kilometers-long frontline from Fužan to Sokol, executing on the difficult terrain small-scale fighting activities against well-positioned Bulgarian troops, with minor strategic success, but significant los-es. In 1917, the Serbian army had lost 156 officers and 4075 soldiers.

Both General Sarrail and his successor General Guillaumat, who as-sumed command in December 1917, were reluctant to accept the Serbian pro-posal to the Allied command of 20 September 1917, for general offensive on the Veternik – Dobro Polje – Sokol frontline, in order to split the Bulgarian front in two and make a crucial breakthrough behind the enemy lines. It was only after the Allied command was entrusted to General Franchet D’Esperey in June 1918 that the proposal of the Serbian Supreme Command was taken into account and seriously reconsidered and eventually approved by Maréchal Foch.59 The reinforcement of the Salonika front by fresh troops made prepara-tion for the general offensive more intensive.

The decisive offensive at the Dobro Polje front, based on the Serbian proposal from 1917, was planned for mid-September 1918. The mastermind

58 M. Sarrail, Mon commandement en Orient (1916-1918) (Paris: Ernest Flammarion, 1920), 182.

59 M. Larcher, La Grande Guerre dans les Balkans. Direction de la guerre, 230, 284.

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of the Serbian offensive, apart from General Franchet d’Esperey, was Field Marshal Živojin Mišić, who assumed the office of the Chief of Staff, while General Petar Bojović assumed the command of the First Serbian Army. The last details of the offensive were arranged during the visit of General Fran-chet d’Esperey to the Serbian headquarters at the Kajmakčalan heights two days before the offensive. The roughly 150,000 men-strong Serbian troops (in-cluding the Yugoslav division of volunteers)60 were reinforced by two French divisions. General Franchet d’Esperey had concentrated on the thirty three kilometers long main frontline, three times more troops and cannons than expected.

After long preparations, on 14 September 1918 the intense artillery bar-rage of the enemy lines announced the final offensive which started early in the morning of 15 September. Within the first 24 hours the Serbian troops (the Šumadija division of the Second Serbian Army) on the Veternik – Dobro Polje frontline were successful in penetrating the enemy trenches.61 After fierce fighting on 17 September, the Second Serbian Army, supported by the two French divisions, had broken through the Bulgarian line after the battle of Moglenica, advancing twenty five kilometers behind their positions, thus cutting in two the collapsed Bulgarian front. Only six days after the beginning of the offensive, the Serbian troops arrived to the Vardar River, cutting the railway connection and capturing the Gradsko region, essential for the supply of the enemy forces.62

The Bulgarian and German troops were in retreat, while the highly mo-tivated Serbian troops, after three long years of waiting for the day of the final offensive that would eventually bring them home, continued the pursuit of

60 Most of the volunteers fighting in the Yugoslav division in the Salonika front were Serbs from Montenegro, Bosnia, Herzegovina, Croatia, Vojvodina and Dalmatia, or Serb vo-lunteers originating from these regions coming mostly from Russia, US and Latin Ame-rica, while only several percent of the roughly 20,000 men-strong division were Croats or Slovenes. However, it was due to the war goals of Serbia, aiming to form a united Yugoslav state as solemnly reaffirmed by the Corfu Declaration of July 1917, this division of mostly Serbian volunteers was renamed Yugoslav division (N. B. Popović (ed.), Jugoslovenski do-brovoljci 1914–1918. Zbornik dokumenata (Belgrade: Grafos, 1980).

61 Colonel Bujac, “L’Armée serbe dans l’offensive de septembre 1918”, L’Armée d’Orient vu à 15 ans de distance, Revue des Balkans, Paris 1932, 91–98.

62 Général D. S. Kalafatovitch , “L’Armée serbe dans la campagne d’Orient”, L’Armée d’Orient vu à 15 ans de distance, 67–71. More details on Serbian part of the offensive in: P. Opačić, Solunska ofanziva 1918 (Belgrade, Insitute of Military History, 1980).

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the enemy forces jointly with the French allies.63 The First Serbian Army was advancing towards Veles–Kumanovo–Niš, and eventually heading towards Belgrade, while the Second Serbian Army was directed via Štip towards Sofia. The Bulgarian defense collapsed and their leaders demanded armistice. The German Kaiser Wilhelm II, surprised by the outcome of the Allied offensive and the armistice in Salonika signed by the Bulgarians, wrote in his telegram to King Ferdinand the following: “It is a shame that sixty-two thousand Ser-bian soldiers had decided the outcome of the war.”64

In forty six days since the beginning of the Salonika offensive, sup-ported by the forces of the Armée Française d’Orient, the Serbian troops man-aged, despite constant fighting with the enemy, to advance 600 km and reach the banks of the Sava and Danube, liberating Belgrade on 1 November 1918. General Franchet d’Esperey wrote: “Who are those heroes that can proudly say that they are worthy of one of the greatest honours in the world? They are peasants, almost all of them, they are Serbs, strong in hardship, clear-minded, modest, unbreakable, they are free men, proud of their race, masters of their fields. Rallied around their king and flag for the freedom of the land; those farmers turned, effortlessly, into soldiers, the bravest, the staunchest, the best of all.” After restoring the independence of Serbia, the victorious troops, in-vited by local national councils crossed the rivers Drina, Sava and Danube and entered Bosnia, Vojvodina and Croatia-Slavonia, heading towards Dalmatian coast and eventually Slovenia on the northwest front, while supported by the French troops on the southwestern front, regained Kosovo and then liberated Montenegro. On 1 December 1918, the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, under the house of Karadjordjević, was solemnly proclaimed in Belgrade.

63 Out of 9,303 Serbian soldiers that died during the decisive 1918 Salonika offensive, 7,565 were buried in the Serbian Military Cemetery in Salonika, along with the soldiers of other Allied armies. P. Opačić, Le front de Salonique, 1979.

64 The number of the Serbian soldiers refers to the Second Serbian Army. Quoted from: D. T. Bataković, Yougoslavie: Nations, religions, idéologies, 136.

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Batakovic -Serbia 1914-1918 War Imposed Martyrdom