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Before the French army had been riven by internal conflicts. In July , Marshal Joseph Joffre dismissed Sarrail from command of the 3rd Army, where his record had been solid until a surprise local German offensive captured enough ground and inflicted enough casualties to legitimate his relief. If Sarrail failed, he would be finished.

John French, 1st Earl of Ypres

And he just might help win the war. Sarrail might be a political general; he was not an obvious incompetent. Fewer than 50, men were involved in the initial deployment. Its commander, Sir Bryan Mahon, was under orders from London to remain near Salonika until the Greek political situation was clarified. Sarrail nevertheless pushed his French elements forward up the Vardar valley in support of a Serbian army whose situation was changing from exposed to desperate.

The Allies, engaging by battalions and batteries, got less than miles from Salonika before Serbia was overrun. What remained of its army made a fighting retreat to Kosovo, the Field of Blackbirds, site of the 14th-century defeat by the Ottoman empire that symbolized Serb identity. It included 20, prisoners of war, mostly Austrians captured in the fall of and brought along as a gesture of defiance.

Others had scarcely reached their teens. Meat came from slaughtered artillery horses. Bread was made from cornflower seed, when there was any bread at all. The landscape was oddly bright, she said, with the colors of defeat: blood on a bandage, the brown of exposed flesh, a yellow cap on the head of a dead child.

Typhus, dysentery, and frostbite ravaged the survivors. After three weeks of nightmare in a Balkan December, those who reached the Adriatic found. Instead the Allies decided on evacuation. By April , more than , refugees had been removed, most of them to the Greek island of Corfu. But , of them would fight again. Meanwhile the overextended French and British fell back in the face of brutal weather and Bulgarian pressure. But what were they to do next? Russia was willing to send troops.

While the politicians debated, Sarrail created realities on the ground. Its temporary buildings seemed afloat on a sea of mud, with not even trees to break the desolation. Salonika was already crowded with refugees from the Balkan Wars of , living in churches and shantytowns. The inflation that accompanied the Allied occupation made their lot even worse. Most of the troops who reached Salonika had little sympathy to spare for anyone but themselves.

Instead of riding trains or trucks to the front they marched, with full packs, as far as miles, along roads little better than tracks, through a wasteland of uncultivated fields and depopulated villages to reach a front line roughly paralleling the prewar Greek-Serbian border. Some of the forward positions were in sectors so barren that dynamite was needed to construct shelters. Its mortality rate was not high-one in over for the British contingent. Soldiers in Macedonia had little to do with their off-duty time except absorb enough cheap wine or brandy to dull the misery of their surroundings.

A common next step involved a transaction with a lady of professional love and doubtful hygiene. Venereal disease rates soared, including some varieties that defied treatment. Some of the latter were played within range of Bulgarian artillery, which out of chivalry or bewilderment usually held its fire.

Full text of "The Lord Kitchener memorial book"

Occasionally as well the hounds ran through the barbed wire separating the combatants, but each time they returned or were sent back. For those more culturally inclined there were theater groups and concert parties. The Balkan News appeared daily. The French were less readily placated. Not a few regarded even the Western Front as preferable. There they knew why they were fighting and had some contact with home. No one cared about the Bulgarians. That question was answered by Aristide Briand. The Serbian government was willing to provide six of those divisions, reorganized from survivors of the great retreat.

The rest would have to come from outside the theater.


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The British responded by arguing for the withdrawal of the forces already in place. It was an ambitious program, and Britain remained skeptical. By this time the Allied order of battle was bewilderingly multicultural. Many were in their 30s or older. Most bore the marks of hunger. But they were survivors, inured to privation and virtually immune to disease. A brigade of Russians arrived in July, with another to follow.

The French eventually reached a strength of nine divisions. One, the 30th, was an active army formation recruited from around Marseilles.

Mr. Punch's History of the Great War/Mr. Punch's History of the Great War

The rest were wartime creations, combining active regiments and battalions with units raised from prewar reservists and wartime conscripts. Depending on circumstances, their actual performance varied widely, both in Europe and Salonika.

France also sent to Salonika three battalions from Madagascar and four from Indochina. Despite the growing shortage of manpower, these units were used only as labor troops. The London territorials of the 60th Division would spend some time in Salonika on their way to Palestine. The strategic context was the Austro-German offensive that overran Romania in the last four months of To the west the Serbs rallied and held around the town of Ostrovo in four days of hand-to-hand fighting.

Sarrail coped well with surprise. Perhaps he had learned a lesson from his Western Front misfortune. On September 12, he launched his counterpunch. Supplying the projected envelopment would become virtually impossible once the fall rains began. That meant a rapid initial advance. To the epic of the Long Retreat was added a victory that became the stuff of legend in the postwar Yugoslavian army.

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But like so many of its counterparts between and , the capture of Butter Churn had no consequences. The Bulgarians in that sector were well entrenched; the French were tired and unenthusiastic. Sarrail bombarded his subordinates with messages insisting that fighting spirit would overcome barbed wire.

On October 21 it began to rain, further slowing an advance that had already lost most of its momentum. With some German help grudgingly given, the Bulgarians held in front of Monastir until November 19, then withdrew. Joffre was less sanguine. In December he peremptorily closed down the Salonika front for the winter. For much of this time Greece had been in a virtual state of civil war. Greek troops, unsure who their enemies were, surrendered strategic frontier positions to the Bulgarians without a fight in August.

Sarrail saw opportunity beckoning. His radical supporters in parliament were increasingly influential. This time he would attack all along the line, wearing out and breaking through a Bulgarian army that by his calculations had to be on the edge of exhaustion. The Doiran sector commanded several main roads into Serbia and Bulgaria.