Original subtitles

I want to talk about the Serbian front

of the First World War. And I'll be

honest with you, I I came across this

story properly for the first time about

a year ago when I was reading about the

AustroHungarian Empire and stumbled into

a set of casualty statistics that

genuinely stopped me. I had to put the

book down and go back and read them

again because I thought I had misread

something. I hadn't. France lost 16.8%

of its mobilized soldiers in the First

World War. Germany lost 15.4, 4 Russia

11.5.

These are the numbers we talk about when

we talk about the scale of this war. And

then Serbia, Serbia lost 25% of every

soldier it put in the field. A quarter

of its entire army dead. And that is

before we count the civilians, which we

will because the civilian death toll in

Serbia was somewhere between 800,000 and

a million people out of a pre-war

population of 4 and a half million.

Depending on which estimates you use,

Serbia lost somewhere between a quarter

and a third of its entire population in

this war. I find it extraordinary, not

just because of the scale, but because

almost nobody in the English-sp

speakaking world knows it happened. You

can consider yourself a serious student

of the First World War. You can have

read widely and watched documentaries

and visited the memorials at theval and

tine cot and still have almost no idea

what happened to Serbia between 1914 and

1918. I think that's a genuine injustice

to the people who went through it. And I

think the reason it's happened is

actually quite specific. The Serbian

story doesn't fit the shape that Western

war memory is comfortable with. It

doesn't end in a victory parade with

crowds cheering in the streets. It goes

through something called the Albanian

Golgather. a retreat through winter

mountains that killed more people than

many of the famous battles of the

Western Front. And it ends at a battle

most people have never heard of that

military historians are increasingly

convinced ended the entire war. I want

to tell this story properly because what

happened to Serbia between 1914 and 1918

was one of the most extreme experiences

any nation has been put through in

modern military history. And the men and

women who carried it deserve to be

known. This is what happened. Serbia had

already fought two major wars in the two

years before the First World War began.

The first Bulan War of 1912 and the

Second Bulan War of 1913 had driven the

Ottoman Empire out of its remaining

European territories and then set the

Balkan states against each other over

how to divide the gains. By August 1914,

the Serbian army was not a fresh

peacetime force. It was a formation that

had been in almost continuous combat for

2 years, that had taken significant

casualties and not fully replaced them,

that was equipped with weapons and

ammunition it had been consuming for 2

years without adequate resupply. The men

who would fight the First World War were

men who had already survived two other

wars. Some of them had been fighting

since 1912. The Kingdom of Serbia itself

was a small country. Its pre-war

population was approximately 4 1/2

million people. Its army, fully

mobilized, could field approximately

450,000 soldiers. Though the figure of

400,000 is more commonly cited for the

force that actually took the field in

August 1914.

It had no heavy industry to speak of, no

domestic arms production that could

supply a sustained modern war and allies

whose nearest forces were accessible

only through Greece. What it had was a

military tradition forged over decades

of conflict. soldiers who had been

fighting in the mountains and river

valleys of the Balkans since childhood

and a specific quality of obstinate

endurance in the face of overwhelming

odds that would define the entire

Serbian experience of the war. Before

the guns of August 1914 had been firing

for two weeks, the Serbian front had

already produced the first aerial dog

fight in history, the first Allied

victory of the war and a military upset

that would define the relationship

between Serbia and the Austrohungarian

Empire for the remainder of the

conflict. AustriaHungary had gone to war

expecting to defeat Serbia in weeks.

What it got instead was an education

conducted at enormous cost in the

specific quality of what a small country

fighting for its existence is capable

of. The war began because of Serbia.

This is worth stating clearly because

the standard western account of how the

first world war started tends to move

quickly past the Serbian dimension and

into the European alliance system and

the Schlieffen plan and the race to

mobilize. The immediate trigger was the

assassination of Archduke France

Ferdinand of Austria in Sarvo on June

28th, 1914 by Gabrielo Princip, a

Bosnian Serb. AustriaHungary blamed the

Serbian government, presented an

intentionally unacceptable ultimatum on

July 23rd, declared war on July 28th

when Serbia accepted most but not all of

the demands, and bombarded Belgrade on

July 29th. That bombardment of Belgrade

was the first military action of the

First World War. and the man who had

been responsible for security

arrangements in Sievo on the day of the

assassination, the man who had refused

to call out additional troops to protect

France Ferdinand because their uniforms

were dirty from that morning's military

exercises, was the same man who would

command the Austrian forces in the first

three invasions of Serbia in 1914. His

name was General Oscar Poier. He failed

at Sarvo on June 28th and he failed in

Serbia three times in the following 6

months. And the connection between those

two failures is one of the specific

human ironies of a war that produced

many of them. The Austrian plan was to

knock Serbia out quickly. Conrad von

Hudzenorf, the Austrian chief of staff,

had publicly boasted before the war that

it would take 3 months to defeat Serbia.

The diplomats in Vienna were drawing up

plans for what they called a punitive

expedition. A brief decisive military

operation that would crush Serbian

military resistance and eliminate Serbia

as an independent threat to

Austrohungarian stability in the

Balkans. What they had not adequately

considered was the quality of the army

they were sending to conduct this

expedition, the quality of the army they

were sending it against, and the

specific military capacity of Oscar

Potier for operational disaster. On

August 12th, 1914, Austrohungarian

forces crossed the Dina River and

invaded Serbia.

The force numbered approximately 200,000

men. The Serbian army, commanded by

Field Marshal Radimir Putnik, was

already in position. Putnik is one of

the most remarkable military commanders

of the First World War on any front, and

he is almost entirely unknown outside

Serbia. He was 67 years old in 1914. He

had been fighting in Serbia's various

conflicts since 1876.

He was the first man to hold the rank of

field marshal in the Serbian army. He

was also by August 1914 gravely ill. The

specific quality of his illness is

documented. He was nearly blind. He

suffered from the severe bronchitis that

repeatedly became pneumonia and he was

so physically frail that he could not

visit the front and had to command his

army from a heated room well behind the

lines. There was a specific moment in

the opening weeks of the war when

Austrian forces crossed the Dina and

Sava rivers in different locations

simultaneously

where Putnik had to calculate from a map

in a warm room where the main Austrian

effort was actually going and commit the

reserve formations of his army to

respond to it. He got it right. He

nearly always got it right. What he was

right about in August 1914 was that the

Austrian main effort was coming from the

west across the Dina rather than from

the north across the Sava. He ordered

his forces to concentrate against the

western invasion. The Serbian second

army under General Steer Steanovich was

sent to reinforce the third army under

General Pavle Uricm.

A man born in Germany who had attended

the Prussian Military Academy and the

French War Academy and had come to

Serbia as a German officer in 1876 to

volunteer in the Serbo Turkish War

changed his name from Paul Sturm to

Pavle Uricm and never left on a forced

night march to the slopes of Chair

Mountain. The night of August 15th to

16th, 1914, the Serbian troops came off

the march and found Austrohungarian

forces bivwacked on the mountain slopes.

Neither side expected a night encounter.

The Serbs caught some of the

Austrohungarian troops asleep and went

in with bayonets. The battle of Seir

lasted 9 days. By August 20th, the

morale of the Austrohungarian fifth army

had collapsed. What the Austrian

journalist Irv Kish wrote in his

eyewitness account of what he saw is one

of the specific pieces of testimony from

the Serbian front that deserves to be as

wellknown as the accounts from the

Western Front. Kish wrote, "The army has

been defeated and has found itself in a

wild, reckless, and panicky run. A

defeated army, no, a broken mob, rushing

in mindless terror toward the border.

Those Serbs, they are great guys. They

know how to defend their country." The

Austrohungarian forces fled back across

the Dina, thousands of them drowning in

the river in the panic of the retreat.

Serbian forces entered Sabbach on August

24th, marking the end of the battle and

the first Allied victory over the

Central Powers in the entire First World

War. The specific texture of the Battle

of Seir reveals things about the Serbian

army that no general description can

convey. The night engagement on the

slopes of Sir Mountain on August 15th to

16th was not a planned battle, but an

encounter between a Serbian force coming

off a night march and Austrian forces

that had bivwacked on the mountain

without adequate security. Some of the

Austrohungarian troops were asleep when

the Serbs arrived. The fighting in the

dark on the mountain slopes in pouring

rain that turned the ground to mud was

exactly the kind of close quarters

combat in difficult terrain that Serbian

soldiers had been fighting for 2 years

already in the Balkan Wars. For the

Austrian troops, many from the flat

plains of Hungary or the cities of the

Habsburg heartland. It was something for

which peaceime maneuvers had not

prepared them. By morning, the Austrians

had been driven from the Devaca range.

The Bosnian third regiment of the

Austrohungarian force attempting to

restore the situation on August 18th

advanced towards Serbian positions in a

manner that an eyewitness described with

the specific disbelief of a man watching

something he could not explain. The

regiment advanced as on the practice

field in overly thick formation without

seeking shelter accompanied by a

military band playing the Vicottsy

March. The Serbian artillery and rifle

fire decimated them. The regiment's

commander was wounded. His replacement

was wounded and the formation broke.

What had appeared as tactical confidence

or recklessness, marching in parade

formation into prepared defensive

positions while a military band played,

was in retrospect the expression of an

army that had been told Serbia would

fall quickly and had not yet been taught

what that particular speed bump actually

looked like. There is a footnote to sir

that most accounts miss. The first

aerial dog fight in the history of

warfare took place during this battle

when Serbian aviator Myodrag Tomic

encountered an Austrohungarian aircraft

while on a reconnaissance mission over

enemy positions. The Austrohungarian

pilot drew his revolver and fired at

Tomic.

Tomic escaped. Within several weeks, all

Serbian and Austrohungarian aircraft had

been fitted with machine guns. The first

aerial combat in history happened over

the first Allied victory in history on a

battlefield in Serbia in August 1914.

And almost no history of either aerial

warfare or the first world war mentions

it. Pochure was not finished.

AustriaHungary launched a second

invasion of Serbia in September 1914 and

a third in November. The third, the

battle of Kubara, is the one that

matters most because it came closest to

succeeding and because the Serbian

response to it produced the kind of

military achievement that had it

happened on the Western front would have

been celebrated for a century. By mid-

November 1914, Poturk's forces had

driven the Serbs back to the Calibara

River. Serbian ammunition was running

critically low. On November 29th,

Belgrade was abandoned to the

Austrohungarian Fifth Army. Poture

celebrating what appeared to be the

imminent defeat of Serbia appointed a

man named Stipan Sarotic as the governor

of the occupied country before the

occupation had actually happened.

Austrian soldiers were holding a

military parade through the streets of

Belgrade on the day the Serbian

counterattack began. On December 2nd,

1914, Field Marshal Putnik ordered a

full counterattack all along the front

simultaneously. What happened next is

documented in a specific detail that I

find extraordinary. The aging king Peter

I of Serbia, 71 years old, nearly blind,

a man who had stepped aside in June to

let his son, Prince Alexander, rule as

regent, took a rifle and walked to the

front to fight alongside his soldiers.

He did not do this as a symbolic

gesture. He did it because the situation

appeared hopeless and because he

believed that his presence at the front

might be the thing that tipped the

balance and he was prepared to die if it

was not. The Serbian soldiers who saw

their king arrive at the front carrying

a rifle described the effect in terms

that are consistent across multiple

accounts. It transformed the morale of

men who had been retreating for weeks.

The Austrohungarian forces were by this

point dangerously overextended. Their

supply lines were stretched. Their units

were tired. They had not fortified their

positions because Pochure believed the

war was essentially over. The Serbian

counterattack hit them before they were

ready. By December 6th, the

Austrohungarian 6th Army was in retreat.

Valjo fell to the Serbs on December 8th.

The Austrohungarians abandoned Belgrade

between December 14th and 15th. The

Serbs recaptured their capital the

following day. What this victory cost

AustriaHungary is documented in a

specific figure that deserves emphasis.

The Austrohungarian Balkan army group in

1914 had engaged approximately 450,000

soldiers in the Serbian campaign. By the

end of the year, it had lost

approximately 224,500

of them, half the force in three failed

invasions of a country a fraction of

AustriaHungary's size. The German

general Eric Ludenorf, watching the

Hubsburg military performance with the

contempt that the German high command

consistently felt for its Austrian ally,

produced the specific phrase that has

attached itself to this period of the

war, alley. Ha! We are shackled to a

corpse. Conrad had employed almost

400,000 troops against Serbia in 1914

alone against 921,000

on the Russian front. Serbia with a

fraction of the military resources of

Russia was tying down a comparable

proportion of Austrohungarian force.

Then the typhers came. The conditions in

Serbia by the winter of 1914 to 1915 had

created precisely the environment in

which typhus spreads fastest. large

numbers of men in close proximity,

inadequate sanitation, widespread louse

infestation, insufficient food,

insufficient shelter, and an overwhelmed

medical system. The epidemic that began

in late 1914 and peaked through the

spring of 1915 has been described by

epidemiologists as the worst typhus

outbreak in world history up to that

point. The New York Times estimated

150,000 deaths in 1915 alone. Of

Serbia's approximately 350 physicians,

remember this was a country of 4 and a

half million people, 126 died of typhus,

36% of the doctors gone of disease in a

few months. The specific account of

conditions that survives from this

period comes from multiple sources, but

the account of the hospital at Kraujivak

captures what the numbers mean in human

terms. There were 1,600 patients in a

hospital designed for a fraction of that

number. There were two surgeons and

eight nurses. Of the 42 medical staff

who had been working at the hospital,

only three remained free from infection.

The rest were sick or dead. I want to

spend a moment on the Scottish women's

hospitals because the story of how they

came to exist in Serbia is one of those

specific moments from this war that I

find genuinely infuriating every time I

come back to it. Dr. Elsie English was a

Scottish surgeon and suffragette who in

August 1914 offered the British War

Office a complete field hospital unit

staffed entirely by women. The war

officer's response was delivered by a

male official who told her, "My good

lady, go home and sit still." She did

not go home and sit still. She took her

hospital units to Serbia, France,

Russia, and Romania, working

continuously until her health gave out

completely. She set up 14 field

hospitals in Serbia alone, including

four specifically for typhus cases. She

was captured by the Austrians when they

occupied Serbia in 1915, and was

eventually repatriated, only to

immediately volunteer for service in

Russia and Romania. She died of cancer

on November 26th, 1917, still in

service. She had been working for 3

years without adequate rest on the front

lines of multiple theaters of the war.

The British War Office's assessment of

what she was good for, delivered in

August 1914, was go home and sit still.

They were wrong in every particular. The

Austrian occupation that followed the

1915 collapse is something I don't think

most people who know the Western Front

story have any awareness of at all, and

it's important. The Austrian military

command issued orders that the laws of

war regarding civilian populations were

to be applied with maximum severity to a

population it characterized as hostile

and not entitled to the normal

protections of occupied territory. The

specific figures are disputed as all

atrocity figures from the period are

disputed, but the documented minimum

includes tens of thousands of Serbian

civilians executed during the occupation

period with higher estimates running

into the hundreds of thousands. What is

not disputed is this scale of

destruction. By the time Serbian forces

returned to their country at the end of

the war, entire villages had been

erased. The population of Serbia in 1921

was approximately 30% lower than the

pre-war population. The difference

between what demographic projection

would have predicted and what actually

existed, consisting of the dead, the

permanently disabled, and those who had

simply never returned from wherever the

war had scattered them. The 114,000

Serbian war invalids who were alive at

the end of the war had to rebuild their

lives in a country whose infrastructure

had been systematically dismantled.

While Serbia was fighting the typhus

epidemic, the diplomatic situation was

shifting in ways that would produce the

greatest military crisis the country had

yet faced. Bulgaria, which had fought

Serbia in the second Balkan War of 1913

and had territorial grievances about the

outcome, was being courted by both

sides. The Central Powers offered it

more. On October 6th, 1915, a combined

German and Austrohungarian force under

Field Marshall August von Mackinson

attacked Serbia from the north. On

October 14th, Bulgaria declared war and

attacked from the east. Serbia was now

fighting on two fronts simultaneously

against a combined force of over 600,000

soldiers. The exhausted, typhus depleted

Serbian army had approximately 250,000

men to oppose them. France and Britain

had landed at Salonica in Greece in

October, but they could not advance

north in time. The arithmetic was final.

Putnik conducted a series of skilled

fighting retreats, frustrating

Mckenson's efforts to produce the

encirclement and destruction of the

Serbian army as an entity, but he could

not hold the country. The specific

texture of what fighting on the Serbian

front looked like at the level of the

individual soldier is documented in

accounts that have almost never been

translated into English. Serbian

soldiers fighting the Austrohungarians

in 1914 were dealing with a specific

material disadvantage that shaped every

engagement. They had almost no

standardized equipment. Some units were

equipped with modern rifles. Others had

older weapons. As many as a quarter of

the men in some Serbian units marched to

the front carrying shovels rather than

firearms because there were not enough

weapons to arm every soldier. The

Austrian units facing them had 486

machine guns. The Serbian army had 200.

In the opening weeks of the war, Serbian

artillery quickly ran so low on

ammunition that the guns fell almost

silent while the Austrohungarians were

able to maintain sustained fire. Serbian

casualties reached 100 men per day per

division simply from attrition in the

trenches without any major engagement.

What compensated for this material

deficit was the specific tactical

quality of the Serbian infantry.

veterans of two Balkan wars, men who had

been fighting in this terrain for years,

and understood it in ways that no

Austrian soldier from Vienna or Budapest

or Prague could quickly learn. The

mountains and rivers of Serbia were not

the obstacle for Serbian defenders that

they were for Austrian attackers. The

rugged terrain that made the country

difficult to traverse was the terrain

these men had grown up in. They knew

which routes were passable and which

were not. Which ridgeel lines gave

observation over which valleys, which

river crossings were affordable in

autumn and which were not. This

knowledge was not in any Austrian

military manual. It was in the bones of

men who had been there all their lives.

On November 23rd, 1915, the Serbian

government and the Supreme Command made

a joint decision. There would be no

surrender. The army would retreat

through the mountains of Montenegro and

Albania to the Adriatic coast where

Allied ships would take them off. They

would reconstitute and return. It was

the only option that preserved Serbia as

a fighting force and as a nation in

exile. It was also in terms of the human

suffering it would produce. One of the

most extraordinary decisions of the

entire war.

What became known in Serbian memory as

the Albanian Golgoa the Great Retreat

began in late November 1915.

Approximately 220,000 soldiers and an

estimated 200,000 civilians started the

journey. What they were walking into was

the Proclate, the mountains. That is the

actual name. The mountains of Albania

with a mean altitude of over 6,000 ft in

the middle of winter with one week's

rations without adequate cold weather

gear with roads that were barely tracks

in the best conditions and were now

buried under snow. The eyewitness

accounts of the retreat are among the

most extreme documents produced by the

entire war on any front. A nurse who

made the journey described what she saw.

Every few hundred yards we came on

bodies of men frozen or starved to

death. At one point there were four in a

heap. Two other nearly naked bodies were

evidently those of Serbian soldiers

murdered by Albanians. She described the

passes, a two-foot track wound upwards.

On the right were snow-covered cliffs.

On the left, a sheer drop to the river

1,000 ft below. Two mules could not pass

each other on that path, deep in snow or

slippery with ice. And when a pack mule

fell and died there, they froze and the

trail passed over them. Men who reached

the Albanian coast exchanged their

weapons for food before the end.

Soldiers sold their rifles for bread.

The hunger was, as one account puts it,

stronger than disgust. Men ate raw

horsemeat because it was all there was.

Austrian aircraft dropped bombs on the

retreating columns from the air. It was

the first aerial bombardment of

civilians in the history of warfare. And

it was happening over a column of

starving, freezing refugees in the

Albanian mountains. King Peter I, 71

years old and nearly blind, made the

journey in an oxcart. Field Marshal

Putnik, who had been commanding the

Serbian army from a heated room all year

because he was too ill to visit the

front, made the entire journey through

the Albanian mountains in a sedan chair

carried by his escort. He reached Qutari

on December 7th. The image of this man,

the architect of the victories at Se and

Kolibara, the strategic intelligence

behind two years of Serbian resistance,

being carried through the mountains in a

chair because he was too ill to walk,

deserves to stand alongside any image

the First World War has produced as a

document of what that war cost the

people who fought it. The specific

quality of what the Albanian Golgather

felt like is preserved in a small number

of eyewitness accounts from people who

survived it and wrote about it. Most of

them foreign observers, nurses, doctors,

journalists attached to the Serbian

forces. The accounts of Serbian soldiers

themselves are fewer in English because

translation has not happened. But what

the foreign observers describe is

consistent enough across multiple

independent sources to produce a clear

picture. The columns stretched for

miles. Soldiers, civilians, prisoners,

old men, children, ox carts loaded with

whatever could be carried. Horses and

mules already weakening from

underfeeding. All moving in the same

direction, west into the mountains

toward a coast that was weeks away in

conditions that were worsening every

day. The track, and in many places it

was only a track, a foot wide path

through snow and ice above cliff drops

of hundreds of feet, was not wide enough

for the volume of human traffic trying

to move along it.

Progress was measured in hundreds of

yards per hour. Animals that fell and

died were frozen where they lay, and the

column walked over them. The cold was

the specific enemy of the retreat in a

way that enemy action was not. Frostbite

took more men than Bulgarian bullets.

Men who stopped moving for too long in

the temperatures of the Albanian passes

in December 1915 and January 1916 did

not start moving again. The accounts

describe men sitting down by the side of

the track. Not from enemy fire, not from

wounds, but from cold and exhaustion and

hunger and the specific point at which a

human body stops being willing to

continue. Once a man sat down in those

temperatures, he did not get up. The

bodies of men who had simply stopped

were present in the accounts at every

stage of the mountain crossing. Two

here, four there. A group of five near a

pass where the cold was particularly

ferocious. The Albanian irregular

fighters who attacked the retreating

columns added a dimension of danger that

the cold and hunger did not have,

unpredictability.

The Proclia had always been bandit

country, and the presence of what

appeared to be a defeated army carrying

valuables and equipment was an

opportunity that the local fighters

understood. The attacks came at night,

primarily hitting the flanks of the

column, seizing what could be taken,

disappearing back into the mountains.

Serbian soldiers who had been fighting

major European powers for 2 years found

themselves also fending off hit-and-run

attacks from men who knew the mountain

terrain better than anyone alive and

whose objectives were not military but

predatory. Among the soldiers who made

the retreat was a specific category of

human being whose story almost no

account of the Albanian Golgoa

adequately addresses. The Serbian army

had taken with it every boy of military

age it could find. Young men born in

1896, 1897, and 1898, between the ages

of 14 and 17, taken from their homes and

put in the retreating columns so that

the enemy could not conscript or kill

them so that they could become the next

generation of the army when they were

old enough. Approximately 43,000 boys

started the retreat. 36,000 of them died

in the mountains. Of the original

43,000, only 7,192

reached Bizerte in North Africa, the

secondary evacuation point on May 26th,

1916.

The death rate among the boys was nearly

85%. They died of cold and hunger and

disease in the attacks of Albanian

irregular fighters, and there is no

monument to them outside Serbia, and

almost no account of the Serbian front

mentions them. Of the approximately

400,000 people who began the great

retreat, approximately 120,000 soldiers

and 60,000 civilians reached the

Adriatic coast. The rest died in the

mountains or were captured. The French

Navy deployed 87 liners and hospital

ships escorted by 70 warships to take

the survivors off the Albanian shore. I

want to give you the island of Veto

because I think it is one of the

specific places in this entire story

that deserves to be visited in the mind

before we move on. The island of Corfu

received the survivors of the Albanian

Golgatha through January and February

1916. The French Navy, which had

deployed 87 liners and hospital ships

escorted by 70 warships to take the

survivors off the Albanian shore,

brought approximately 120,000 soldiers

and 60,000 civilians across the

Adriatic. The men who arrived at Corfu

were in a condition that the French

medical officers who received them

described with a clinical precision that

has not lost its force. They were

skeletal. Many could not stand without

assistance. Their feet were frostbitten.

Their clothes were rags. Some had been

walking barefoot through the Albanian

mountains for weeks because their boots

had disintegrated or been sold for food.

The island of Veto, a small eyelet in

the harbor of Corfu, was designated as

the quarantine and treatment facility

for the most seriously ill. The

rationale was straightforward. put the

men most likely to die somewhere

separate from the main camp to reduce

the risk of epidemic spread to the rest

of the survivors. What this meant in

practice was that the men on Vaido were

the men who were dying and they died in

large enough numbers that the medical

staff eventually ran out of capacity to

bury them. The bodies of the men who

died on Vaido were committed to the sea.

The channel between Vaido and KFU that

became known as the blue graveyard. The

Serbian poet Milutin Boyich who had

survived the retreat wrote Plava Gronika

blue graveyard to commemorate his

comrades who had died at Vaido. He

himself contracted tuberculosis and

died. He was buried in the blue

graveyard. The poem is considered one of

the finest works of Serbian literature

and is almost entirely unknown outside

Serbia. The dead at Vido have a memorial

today. It stands on the island. The

inscription reads, "Here in the deep

blue sea rest the remains of Serbian

warriors who fell for freedom and their

fatherland. The exact number of men who

rest in the blue graveyard is not known.

They were too many to count accurately

at the time, and the records from that

period are incomplete. They died at

Vaido the same way they had died in the

Albanian mountains. From cold,

starvation, typhus, the accumulated

physical destruction of months of

retreat, and the sea received them as

the mountains had received the rest.

Now, the specific human beings, because

numbers at this scale, 160,000 civilian

dead, 77,000 soldier dead in the retreat

alone, defeat comprehension without the

specific weight of individual people to

anchor them. I want to stop here and

give you Melinka Savage properly because

her story is genuinely one of the most

remarkable individual stories of the

entire war on any front and I think most

people reading about her for the first

time will feel the same way I did when I

first came across her. Milonga Savic was

born on June 28th, 1892 in the village

of Coprnika near Novi Pazaar in the

southwest of Serbia. The same date 22

years later on which France Ferdinand

would be assassinated in Sarvo and the

war would begin. In 1912, when the first

Balkan war started and her brother

received his caller papers for

mobilization, he was ill with

tuberculosis and could not serve. Mila

Savage cut her hair, put on men's

clothing, and went in his place. She

named herself Milun Savvich. She was

accepted without question because

nothing in her bearing or manner

suggested anything other than a young

Serbian man ready to fight. She was

promoted to corporal after the battle of

Brigalika. And it was only when a

Bulgarian grenade wounded her on her

10th combat mission in 1913 that the

doctors treating her discovered she was

a woman. Her commanding officer faced

with this situation offered her a

transfer to the nursing corps. She stood

at attention and told him she would only

serve her country as a combatant

soldier. He said he would give her his

answer the next day. She said, "I will

wait." She remained standing at

attention in front of him. He relented

after 1 hour and sent her back to the

infantry. She served through the rest of

the Balkan Wars and into the First World

War, fighting as a woman under her own

name once her gender was established

because Serbia was one of the few armies

in the world that permitted this. During

the Battle of Kubara in December 1914,

she crossed no man's land alone, threw

grenades into Austrian trenches, and

captured 20 Austrian soldiers

single-handedly.

When her commander asked afterwards who

deserved the Karaji star with swords,

Serbia's highest military decoration,

the entire regiment answered

simultaneously with her name. She

received the decoration a second time in

1916 at the battle of Kabend when she

captured 23 Bulgarian soldiers on her

own. She was wounded nine times in total

across her military career. her

decorations. Two karajia stars with

swords. Two legions donor from France.

The cuadigar with gold palm. The only

woman in the entire first world war to

receive it. The cross of St. George from

Russia. The order of St. Michael from

Britain. 12 medals in total from four

countries earned in combat over 6 years

of continuous warfare. What happened to

Mila Savic after the war is the part of

her story that I find hardest to read

because of what it says about how

countries treat the people who bled for

them. After the war, she was given her

first formal military rank, sergeant.

She married a banker named Velico

Gigorich, had a daughter, and adopted

three more children. Her husband

eventually abandoned the family. She

found work cleaning offices at the

Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She then

cleaned offices at the mortgage bank.

She raised her daughter and her adopted

children and the 32 other children she

helped put through school on the salary

of a government office cleaner. When the

second world war came and the Germans

occupied Yugoslavia, she organized an

infirmary in Belgrade where she treated

both partisan and cetnik wounded. For

this, the German aligned police beat her

bloody in front of her children and sent

her to the concentration camp at Banjika

where she was scheduled to be shot. A

German general recognized her,

understood what he was looking at, and

had her released. When the war ended and

the commemorations began, Milinka Savic

was there in her uniform. Officers came

to speak with her and hear about what

she had done. She was finally acquiring

in her 60s the public recognition that

she had not been given in her 40s and

50s. The French president, Charles de

Gaul, when he visited Belgrade,

requested a specific list of Serbian

veterans to invite to meet him. Of all

the Serbian veterans of the First World

War, he invited only one to his

presidential inauguration. He invited

Meunka Savage. The Belgian government

had offered her a house in 1919. The

French government had offered her a

pension and an apartment. She had turned

both down because she would not leave

Serbia. In 1972, after a newspaper

campaign highlighted her financial

situation, the Bgrade City Assembly gave

her a small apartment. She died the

following year, October the 5th, 1973,

aged 81. She was re-eried in Belgrade's

Alley of the Great in 2013, 40 years

after her death. She is the most

decorated female combatant in the

recorded history of human warfare. She

was a government office cleaner. I also

want to give you Flora Sandez because

she is one of the most extraordinary

British figures of the entire war and

she is almost completely unknown in

Britain. She was born in Yorkshire in

1876, the youngest daughter of erector,

and she arrived in Serbia in August 1914

with a St. John ambulance unit of 36

women. By the time the retreat into

Albania began in late 1915, she had been

through the typhus epidemic, treated

thousands of wounded soldiers, and

crossed the boundary from nurse to

soldier in the way that the specific

chaos of the Serbian war made possible.

When her medical unit reached terrain

that ambulances could not navigate, she

removed the Red Cross badge from her arm

and asked to join the second infantry

regiment as a private. The colonel took

the small brass regimental badges from

his own epilelettes and fastened them to

her shoulder straps. That was her

enlistment. She was the only British

woman officially to serve as a combat

soldier in the First World War. In

November 1916, during the Serbian

advance on Monister, she was caught in

hand-to-hand combat and seriously

wounded by a grenade. The specific

clinical description of her injuries, 28

shrapnel wounds from knee to shoulder on

the right side of her body, her right

arm shattered and badly lacerated.

Bleeding and unconscious, she was

rescued by a lieutenant who crawled out

under fire to drag her back to safety.

Her blood dripped through the stretcher

onto the ground as she was carried to

the first aid station. She received

Serbia's highest military decoration,

the Order of the Carees Star, while

recovering from those wounds. She

returned to the front in May 1917. She

was still in the Serbian army in 1922.

There is a road named after her in

Belgrade. The only British memorial to

her is a plaque in the village church in

Suffukk where she grew up. The Serbian

army reconstituted at Corfu through the

first half of 1916. The men who had

survived the Albanian Golgoa were fed,

rested, re-equipped with Allied weapons

and ammunition, and transferred to the

Macedonian front, a stretch of

mountainous terrain running east to west

through what is now North Macedonia,

Greece, and Bulgaria. The Salonica

front, as it was known in Allied

capitals, was deeply unpopular with

Allied strategists who considered it a

waste of resources too far from the

decisive theater. The soldiers who

served there called it the bird cage

because they were surrounded by neutral

Greek territory and could go nowhere.

The Salonica front had been called the

bird cage since 1915 and the British and

French press had called the forces there

the gardeners of Salonica. Men wasting

their time in an inactive theater while

the real war happened in France. Winston

Churchill called Salonica a strategic

error. Lloyd George called for its

abandonment. The Germans and Bulgarians

who faced the Allied Army of the Orient

across the Macedonian front lines took a

different view. They kept approximately

600,000 soldiers on the Macedonian front

throughout 1917 and 1918. Soldiers who

were not on the Western Front, not

reinforcing the lines in France, not

available for the spring offensive of

1918. The bird cage, whatever the Allied

critics thought of it, was tying down a

significant fraction of the central

powers military capacity in a theater

that those powers took seriously even

when their opponents did not. By 1918,

the Salonica front had grown to include

Serbian, French, British, Greek,

Italian, and Russian contingents.

General Franch Desperee, who had taken

command of the Allied army of the Orient

in June 1918, was planning the offensive

that would become Door Pole. He

identified the weakest point of the

Bulgarian line, the high ground around

Door Pole in central Macedonia, and

concentrated his best forces against it.

The plan called for a surprise assault

in terrain that the defenders had

believed was too difficult for a major

offensive. The Serbian and French forces

would climb the mountains at night and

strike at dawn. The Salonica front

deserves a specific account of what it

was like to serve on it because the

standard history tends to present it as

an inactive theater. The front line in

Macedonia ran through some of the most

rugged terrain in Europe. Limestone

mountains with few roads, extreme summer

heat and bitter winter cold, river

valleys that flooded seasonally and

turned the ground into a swamp. The

British forces at Salonica suffered four

times more casualties from disease than

from enemy action. Malaria was endemic.

Dissantry was ubiquitous. The Serbian

forces fighting on the western sector of

the Macedonian front were consistently

the most aggressive element of the

Allied army of the Orient. They had

something the other contingents lacked.

They were fighting toward home. Every

mile of ground gained on the Macedonian

front was a mile closer to Serbia. The

French were fighting for an alliance.

The British were fighting out of

obligation. The Serbs were fighting for

the country whose mountains they could

see from their positions on the right

days across the Bulgarian lines in the

blue distance to the north. This is not

a sentimental observation. It is a

documented military reality. The

formations that fight toward their own

territory fight differently from

formations that fight on behalf of

obligations and alliance structures. And

the Serbian performance on the

Macedonian front from 1916 to 1918 is

the specific evidence for that

proposition. It was here in the

mountains of Macedonia on September

15th, 1918 that the Serbian front

produced the battle that ended the First

World War, the Battle of Door Pole. Most

people who know a great deal about the

First World War have not heard of it.

Most people who know about it cannot

fully explain why it matters. Military

historians who have studied it closely

have increasingly argued that Dobro

Pole, not the 100 days offensive in the

West, was the decisive blow that brought

the war to an end. Here is the chain of

causation which is documented and

unambiguous.

On September 15th, 1918, French and

Serbian forces under General Luie Franch

Desperee launched a surprise offensive

against the Bulgarian positions on the

high ground around Doro Pole in central

Macedonia. The Serbian shock corps,

including the elite Sumadia division,

led the assault. The Bulgarian defensive

line was shattered. The attack had

generated fewer than 5,000 Allied

casualties. The breakthrough was

complete. What followed happened at a

pace that the static fronts of the First

World War had not produced since 1914.

2 days after Do fell, Allied forces had

carved a salient 6 mi deep and 20 m wide

into the Bulgarian lines. 10 days after

the offensive began, Serbian forces

captured Gradskco, the main

communication center for all Central

Powers forces on the Macedonian front.

German commanders could no longer

coordinate with their Bulgarian

counterparts.

On September 29th, French and Serbian

forces captured Scorpia. On September

29th, Bulgaria capitulated and signed an

armistice. Before I close, I want to

make the case for Door Pole properly

because I genuinely believe it is the

most underrated military event of the

entire First World War and I think most

people who hear about it for the first

time will find the argument compelling.

The Western Front in September 1918 was

advancing. The 100 Days offensive, the

series of Allied attacks that began at

Amy on August 8th, 1918, was pushing the

German lines back and had broken through

in several sectors. The German army was

retreating under pressure and the high

command understood that the war could

not be won. But the German army in

France in September 1918 was still a

coherent fighting force. It was

retreating to shorter, more defensible

lines. Hindenburg and Ludenorf believed

in early September 1918 that the Western

Front could be stabilized, not one, but

stabilized long enough to negotiate a

peace that preserved something. On

September 29th, 1918, Bulgaria

surrendered. The Bulgarian armistice

exposed AustriaHungary's entire southern

flank. It opened a route through the

Balkans that threatened Germany's

connection to its Ottoman ally. It

created a potential Allied advance

northward through the Balkans toward

Germany's southern border. Hindenburg

and Ludenorf on September 30th told the

German government that the strategic

situation had changed overnight and that

peace must be sought immediately. The

armistice request went out on October

4th. The war ended on November 11th. The

chain from Dobro Pole September 15th to

17th to the armistice November 11th runs

through Bulgaria's collapse. Bulgaria

collapsed because Serbian and French

soldiers broke the line in Macedonia.

The battle that produced it was fought

by men who had walked out of the

Albanian mountains with nothing and had

spent two years on the Macedonian front,

fighting their way back toward a country

they could see on the right days in the

blue distance to the north. General

Oscar Piorek, the man who had failed at

Sievo and failed three times in Serbia,

was retired after the battle of Kolara

and never commanded troops again. He

lived until 1933,

long enough to see the empire he had

served dissolve and the war he had

helped cause, conclude in total defeat

for the central powers. Conrad von

Hudzenorf, who had planned the punitive

expedition that would defeat Serbia in

three months, and watched it fail three

times in 1914, survived the war and

retired to Austria. King Peter I of

Serbia who had carried a rifle to the

front in December 1914 died in Belgrade

in 1921 at the age of 77. He is buried

in the church of St. George at Oplanak.

Field marshal Radimir Putnik did not

live to see Dorro Pole. He died in Nice

on May 17th 1917 at 70 years of age of

lung emphyma. He had been dismissed from

command in January 1916. Informed of his

dismissal by a cashier who handed him

his salary without the chief of general

staff's supplement, which is how he

discovered he had been removed from his

position. He traveled to Nice, where the

French government welcomed him with

honors and provided him with a villa. He

died without seeing his homeland again.

His remains were returned to Serbia in

1926 and buried at Belgrade's new

cemetery. The inscription on his grave

reads, "Grateful homeland to Radomir

Putnik." I want to say something at the

end about what happened to Serbia's

memory of this war because I think it's

important. The First World War gave

Serbia Yugoslavia, the Kingdom of Serbs,

Croats, and Sloven proclaimed in

December 1918, and in doing so created a

new country on top of the ruins of the

old one. The Serbian soldiers who had

survived four years of the most extreme

experience any nation's military went

through. in that war came home to a

country that was being remade around

them. The specific Serbian memory of the

war in the Albanian Gortha, the triple

invasion and the triple repulse, the

sacrifice of S and Kubara, the boys who

died in the mountains, the blue

graveyard off Corfu, Mila Savage and

Floraandees and Radimir Putnik in his

sedan chair. All of this was folded into

the larger Yugoslav narrative of South

Slavic unity, diluted, made to serve a

political purpose that was not its own.

Outside Serbia, the memory barely

existed at all. And I think that's where

we come in. You can consider yourself a

serious student of the First World War

and still not know about the Battle of

S, the first Allied victory of the

entire war. You can know about Verdon

and Pashandelle and the Som and have no

idea that a 71-year-old king nearly

blind took a rifle and walked to the

front in December 1914 and turned the

battle around. You can know about the

poets of the Western Front, Owen Cissoon

Brooke, and not know that Serbia had its

own war poet who survived the retreat

and died of tuberculosis in the blue

graveyard. You can study the end of the

First World War and not know that the

battle which triggered the collapse of

the Central Powers was fought by Serbian

soldiers on a front that Allied

newspapers called a sideshow. The 25%

statistic sits at the top of this

account and it should sit there. 25% of

mobilized soldiers dead. France lost

16.8%.

Germany 15.4.

The country that proportionately paid

the highest price in military debt was a

country of 4 and a half million people

fighting for its survival against

empires. And it paid that price in full.

And then it went back and broke the line

that ended the war and the world moved

on and forgot.