The Forgotten Armies of the Western Front – 1914 to 1918

The Forgotten Armies of the Western Front - 1914 to 1918

EIGHT MILLION MEN fought in the British Army during the First World War. More than half of them (5 million) served in France and Flanders on the Western Front. [1] These men came from the U.K. as well as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India and even the West Indies.

SALONIKA, 1915–18

British 18-pdr field gun firing from a camouflaged position on the Doiran Front.

The Salonika campaign had its genesis in the bold strategic action taken by the Germans to shore up the Austro-Hungarian position in the Balkans in 1915. This was bad news for the Serbians, who had hitherto been waging war with relative success against the Austro-Hungarian Army since the outbreak of war in 1914. By September it had become apparent to the Allies that only a show of force could prevent the Bulgarians from taking advantage of the situation by attacking Serbia. The question was, could such a demonstration be arranged? With the Austrian Navy a threat in the Adriatic and the absence of harbours capable of supporting any serious expeditionary force on the Albanian coast, this left only the Greek port of Salonika as a feasible base for the launch of such a campaign. Greece was both torn from within and fearful of being drawn actively into the war. Although technically victorious in the Balkan Wars, the Greeks had still suffered a painful experience which they would rather not repeat quite so soon. So, at the outbreak of the Great War, Greece remained neutral, although this did not prevent bitter internal political battles ensuing over which side it should favour.

King Constantine naturally favoured the Central Powers, having been educated and carried out his military service in Germany; indeed, he was married to the Kaiser’s sister, Sophia. But the Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos had long favoured the Allies and saw their intervention as a means of expanding Greek influence in the Balkans. As the threat to Serbia became more acute and a Bulgarian intervention appeared more likely, the Allies attempted to bully Greece using Venizelos as the ‘inside man’ who made the initial offer to allow an Anglo-French force to land at Salonika. If the justification was the greater good, it was certainly not the interests of Greece that motivated the Allies.

For the Allies, to generate a suitable Salonika Expeditionary Force (SEF) to intervene in the Balkans was no easy matter. It was only the acceptance of the total failure of the Gallipoli operations that allowed the French to contribute their 156th Division, previously known as the 2nd Division (CEO), while the British sent the 10th Division commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Bryan Mahon. In overall command was the French General Maurice Sarrail. He was an interesting character, a politically left-leaning general who had done well during the opening campaigns in France in 1914, but who had then fallen foul of Joffre and had been dismissed in July 1915. Sarrail had some powerful friends, but also some equally powerful enemies, so the French military authorities considered that the command of the SEF would be an ideal compromise posting for him: it was a serious appointment, but a long way from the Western Front.

The first Allied troops began to disembark at Salonika port on 5 October 1915. Bulgaria had still not joined the war, but there was a more immediate complication in a violent disagreement between King Constantine and Venizelos over what in effect was a flagrant breech of Greek neutrality. The Greek prime minister was forced to resign and a prolonged period of political instability ensued. But in the end the Greeks offered no resistance to the Allies’ presence at Salonika. Yet what exactly were they there to do? When, on 6 October, Mackensen launched his offensive against Serbia, joined shortly afterwards by the Bulgarians, it was evident that whatever the SEF had been meant to achieve had been rendered redundant. Mahon had been given cautious orders from London, requiring him to stay close to Salonika pending the final decision of the Greek government as to whether to abandon neutrality, but Sarrail was determined to push inland anyway. He crossed the Serbian border on 15 October and advanced into the Vardar Valley with the intention of supporting the Serb forces. The most he could hope to achieve was to hold open a line of retreat for the Serbs. When the British finally moved forward, in early November, it was all far too little, too late, and, with hindsight, probably best not at all. The Serbian Army was already defeated, its remnants falling back towards the Adriatic coast. As they congregated in the small ports up and down the Albanian coast they were eventually to be rescued by the Royal Navy. Some 250,000 Serbian troops were evacuated to the Greek island of Corfu. It was a massive undertaking and must have appeared of little real military value as the emaciated Serbian scarecrows boarded the ships. Yet, given the chance to recover, new men would rise from what appeared like worthless dregs – some six Serbian divisions would eventually return to serve on the Salonika Front.

As the British and French fell back, they formed a line just inside the Greek border to try and hold back the Bulgarians. The British wanted to evacuate, but the French would not consider it. This attitude may seem inexplicable, given that a vital part of France was occupied by the German Army, but significant sections of the French political and military establishment considered the war there to be a hopeless stalemate and that another avenue must be taken to achieve victory. In this they were enthusiastically supported by the arch ‘Easterner’, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, who was quite obsessed with dreams of a breakthrough in the Balkans. In the end the French had their way and once again the British would ignore their better instincts in the cause of alliance warfare. The Salonika Front became a permanent fixture for the rest of the war: fighting the Bulgarians for reasons that seem opaque to this day. Clearly if they were to stay the Allies needed reinforcements, so the British 22nd, 26th, 27th, 28th and (temporarily) 60th Divisions were despatched, while the French allotted more and more reserves to the campaign until they had nine divisions serving in Salonika. The reconstituted Serbian divisions began to arrive from Corfu from April 1916. The Italians sent a division and even the Russians contributed a brigade. Sarrail was confirmed as commander of this Armée d’Orient. The truth of Clausewitz’s dictum ‘always direct [our] principal operation against the main body of the enemy army’ was to be demonstrated by the failure of the Allies to observe it.2 Despite all their efforts, the Allies still only had enough forces to defend themselves, and not enough to attack with much hope of success. As the Bulgarians were forbidden to press into Greece by the Germans, fearful of triggering direct Greek involvement in the war, there they would stay in a static oblivion that made a mockery of the fantasies of the ‘Easterners’.

Sarrail had his work cut out just building up the logistical framework within which his polyglot army could exist. Salonika itself was almost swamped as it was required to act simultaneously as a port, the main supply base depot and as a huge entrenched camp. Communications with the front lines were not good, with a paucity of roads and a long march beckoning for most of the newly arrived troops. The weather was also not conducive to the soldiers’ health: too hot in summer and far too bitterly cold in winter, especially in the mountain regions. There were also severe problems in controlling the endemic malaria which plagued the area. There was a plethora of pools, ponds and lakes, all of which provided the perfect habitat for the mosquitoes and any stagnant water soon became infested with their larvae. This was a concern that would endure throughout the campaign. Anti-malaria measures were vital, necessitating a constant vigilance in eradicating unnecessary standing water and regular issues of quinine to every man.

Any stranger seeing a soldier dressed up in anti-mosquito garb would for the first time imagine himself face to face with a scarecrow. The face and arms are thoroughly smeared with an anti-mosquito preparation called ‘parakit’, an excellent thing whilst it lasts; but its tendency is, of course, to get absorbed into the skin after an hour or two, and one often had to smear on a second coating. The mosquitoes didn’t like it, though, and always kept very clear of a ‘parakit’ face. I can recommend it to any young lady worried by an over-zealous admirer! After this, shorts were turned down and tucked up into the top of the puttees, thus safeguarding the knee. Thick gloves were worn, attached by a piece of tape running through the arms and under the tunic over the back. Over the tin hat was worn a mosquito net veil, which, like that apparatus worn by a bee-keeper, rendered the face and neck immune from danger.
Second Lieutenant Richard Skilbeck-Smith, 1st Leinster Regiment

Despite all these preventative measures the British would suffer over 162,000 cases of malaria during the campaign. Outbreaks of dysentery also weakened the troops, especially those who had already suffered at Gallipoli. Morale was a problem throughout the entire army, indeed many of the units were not of the highest quality and the overall situation in Salonika did little to inspire any great élan.
Sarrail was also forced to grapple with a complex political situation as Constantine maintained what might be called unfriendly neutrality after the fall of the Venizelos government. This was not unnatural as the French were very high-handed, first bringing the whole Salonika region under military control and then instituting a naval blockade to force the Greek government to adopt a less pro-German aspect. The position of the Allies was undoubtedly morally suspect in their treatment of a supposedly independent neutral country.

There was a further complication in that the success of the Russian offensive directed against Austria-Hungary in June 1916 had triggered the ambitions of Rumania to share in any spoils of war. This was very welcome to the Allies, for the Rumanian Army was some 400,000 strong and so obviously a valuable addition to the Allied forces. But one condition of Rumanian participation was a Salonikan offensive to pin down the Bulgarian Army. As the British, under the sway of the Westerner CIGS General Sir William Robertson, were still markedly unenthusiastic, Sarrail planned an attack mainly by Serbian and French troops on the left and centre, which entailed the British taking over the front line covering the Serbian border between the Vardar River and Lake Doiran. Despite the complication of a Bulgarian offensive which had to be countered in August, the French and Serbian assault began in mid-September. Although some gains were made – including a tiny symbolic corner of Serbia at Monastir – the onset of the Balkan winter brought the offensive to an inconclusive end in December. Meanwhile the chimera of a pan-Balkan alliance to sweep away Austria-Hungary was exposed by the humiliating defeat of the Rumanian forces by a combined German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian army. And so once again the Allied Salonika forces were left busy doing nothing.

In early 1917, Sarrail was given the role of ‘fixing’ as many Central Powers resources as possible while Nivelle won the war with his much-vaunted offensive on the Western Front in April. But Sarrail, perhaps recognising that his forces were achieving little of substance, resolved to launch his own major offensive that April. In this ambitious attack, the British Salonika Force, now commanded by Lieutenant General Sir George Milne, would for the first time play a major role, by attacking in the Struma Valley. Milne demurred, fearing that the low-lying valley, which was riddled with mosquitoes, was not a suitable arena for a major battle and instead suggested an attack on Bulgarian positions in the hill country west of Lake Doiran, thereby threatening the tactically significant Kosturino Pass. The terrain was tortuous, with deep ravines, steep-sided ridges and hills rising to 2,000 feet. The hills had been converted into a fortress by a series of trench lines carved out of the rock creating a defensive barrier some two miles deep. Although the aim of the British attack was initially only to take the Bulgarian first line, this was still an extremely tough proposition. After a sadly inadequate three-day barrage, the 22nd and 26th Divisions made a night attack with Zero Hour at 21.45 on 24 April. When the attack came it was certainly no surprise to the Bulgarian artillery, who laid down an effective barrage on the British front lines before shrapnel fizzed across the torn ground of No Man’s Land. The experiences of the men of the 10th Devonshire Regiment, given the thankless task of assaulting the imposing mass of the Petit Couronné, were not untypical.

Our guns had been blasting away all day blowing up the barbed wire and the front line trenches. As soon as it got dark we moved out of our trenches and down one side of the hill to get in the lower end of Jumeaux Ravine, ‘Johnny’ knew we were on the move and our route – they gave us a right pasting. We soon had many casualties. They seemed to know our every move. We got so far in the ravine and then it was hell let loose. Our lads were being knocked over like ninepins. We that were able, got about halfway, the noise of the explosions was terrific. Suddenly I found myself alone. We had to walk behind each other as it was not very wide. My mates behind and in front were knocked out, one poor chap was calling out for his mother, I was nearly choked with cordite fumes, but I was unhurt, not even blown over and my bag of bombs was untouched. I had to go on. I picked my way over the bodies, I could only see by the flash of the explosions.
Private Francis Mullins, 10th Devonshire Regiment

Despite it all, the Devons managed to over-run some Bulgarian trenches on the lower slopes of Petit Couronné. While the British tried to get forward reinforcements across the precipitous wasteland, the Bulgarians launched a series of increasingly furious counter-attacks. The Petit Couronné was the key to their positions and they were determined to eject the interlopers.

They came up blowing their bugles and shouting, I suppose they thought they were going to frighten us. It was the biggest mistake they made as we knew they were there, if they had crept up quietly in the dark they would have got us quite easy, as there was not many of us left. Well, they came up, I had used up all my bombs bar one, and this one saved my life: it seems unbelievable, the pin of this bomb would not come out – if it had I would have been blown up by my own bomb – as at that moment they pitched one of their bombs in with us and knocked us all out. When I came round I knew I had to get out. I then found that I couldn’t use my right leg very well, it seemed paralysed. However, there was another chap there who was hit in the fingers and he helped to drag me up over the trench as it was every man for himself. We left about three lying in the trench, we could do nothing to help them as the Bulgars were right on top of us. I do not think that I should have got back if it had not been for this lad sticking to me, and I haven’t seen him from that day to this. I have thought many a time how I would like to thank him. Going back over Petit Couronné was no joke, we fell into the barbed wire as it was not quite daylight. There were bodies everywhere.
Private Francis Mullins, 10th Devonshire Regiment

He would find that the bomb fragments had cut his sciatic nerve as well as inflicted some twenty minor wounds to his buttocks and legs. The attack was a dismal failure, with over 3,100 casualties in sharp contrast to just 835 lost by the successful defenders. A repeat attack ordered for a fortnight later, at 21.50 on 8 May, in a further attempt to pin the Bulgarians while the French and Serbs attacked to the west, met with no more success and the loss of over 1,800 casualties. The Serbian and French forces did no better, with any insignificant gains soon abandoned in the face of trenchant Bulgarian counter-attacks.

The failure of these offensives provoked a final crisis with the resolutely neutral Greek government. In June 1917 the Allies forced the abdication of Constantine and replaced him with his son, Alexander, who was far more malleable to their point of view. Almost immediately Venizelos, who had been running a pro-Allied government in exile on Crete, was reinstated as Prime Minister. He promptly declared war on the Central Powers on 27 June 1917. Most of the Balkans were now embroiled in the Great War. But still nothing much seemed to change. Certainly, the Greek Army seemed to lack any enthusiasm for the fray. As the Salonika campaign staggered on, Sarrail himself would be replaced after a change in government in France brought in the distinctly unsympathetic Georges Clemenceau as premier in November 1917. Sarrail’s replacement was first General Marie-Louis Guillaumat and then, on his recall to France in June 1918, the highly regarded General Louis Franchet d’Espèrey.

In d’Espèrey the Armée d’Orient had a commander committed to an ‘Easterner’ strategy; indeed, he had proposed a Balkan offensive as long ago as 1914. Now he managed to gain permission to launch an offensive as long as he did not require extra troops. The main attack was to be made by the Serbs and French through mountainous terrain to the west of the Vardar Valley. This was even more treacherous than the Doiran sector, but d’Espèrey had managed to assemble covertly superior forces that outnumbered the Bulgarians by some three to one. He had also amassed sufficient guns to deliver a bombardment that was extremely heavy by the standards of the campaign when the offensive opened on 14 September. This time the French were successful and, after hard fighting, managed to take the mountain peaks. In front of them lay the valleys which would channel behind the Bulgarian lines. On 18 September Milne was required to launch a pinning attack alongside the Greeks to prevent the Bulgarians rushing troops to the threatened sector. The result was disaster and the Second Battle of Doiran would cost some 7,100 British and Greek casualties. But this time the French broke through and, on 20 September, fearing encirclement, the Bulgarians finally abandoned their mountain fastness and began to retreat all along the line. There was considerable elation among the British once they realised that the Bulgarians had gone.

We really are on the move after the Bulgar who stole away in the night. Our patrols were in their line by 9 last night and now we have followed them up and infantry and guns are well inside. It was a very hurried flitting as two deserters told us they got the order to move at 8 at 7.30. I visited a bit of their line this afternoon. They have blown up a lot, but there are still some wonderful dugouts. The wire is tremendous everywhere.
Captain Robert Townsend, 10th Devonshire Regiment

Soon they were in hot pursuit.
It has been a tremendous day. We started off on sudden orders about 9 and have marched hard over two tremendous passes and down to a village called Strumnica which is at the head of the Struma Valley and we are well into Bulgaria at last. It is a pretty country, but the dust on the road has been simply awful. The Bulgar has gone quickly but it has been a fearfully hard march and I didn’t get in until 10 o’clock absolutely beat. However it is all part of a day’s work and we are finishing off the Bulgar in great style.
Captain Robert Townsend, 10th Devonshire Regiment

As the Allied aircraft and cavalry tore into the retreating Bulgarian columns, they soon became a rabble. Their morale was not helped by the unavoidable realisation that they had been following the wrong lodestar: the news from the Western Front made it clear that Germany was defeated and the Central Powers were doomed.

On 29 September the Bulgarian forces occupying Skopje, the Serbian capital, surrendered and a day later Bulgaria formally surrendered. It was a bitter-sweet moment for the British Salonika Force. It had been on the winning team; but the excitement of victory had belonged to its allies. It had battled for the best part of three years but then had to be content with nothing more than a secondary role in the ultimate dénouement. Salonika proved a truly forgettable campaign – and with good reason. Little was achieved here that victory on the Western Front would not have secured in good time. And the cost, for the British, had been horrendous, for although they lost only 23,787 casualties in the actual fighting they suffered far more casualties from the pernicious effects of disease. At the height of the British deployment over 182,500 British troops were kicking their heels, left vulnerable to the depradations of the mosquito and malaria. There could be few more depressing fronts than Salonika.

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VICTORY WITHOUT PEACE

Britain’s handling of many issues, particularly those raised by Japan, was the product less of London’s wishes than of those of its dominions. Billy Hughes, Australia’s prime minister, reflecting his white population’s fear of the ‘yellow peril’, rejected Japan’s summons for racial equality. In trying to act as broker between two Pacific powers, the prime minister of a third, Canada, had to grapple with his own uncertainties. Canada, Robert Borden said, was ‘a nation that is not a nation’. For those who had been at Vimy Ridge such reticence seemed ill-placed; the war had made Canada a nation, as it had made Australia, New Zealand and South Africa nations. These were developments the peace settlements were being asked to confirm. Within Europe, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Finland and Lithuania had all achieved independence and a measure of definition before Woodrow Wilson even landed at Brest. The challenge he confronted was therefore a somewhat different one from that to which his speeches were directed. In Central and Eastern Europe war had effected change, and for those who sought such changes it continued to do so. Indeed, the United States’s own decision to intervene was confirmation of the same point. War could work.

For that reason the First World War did not end as neatly on 11 November as the celebration of Armistice Day suggests. ‘One year and three days’ later, Henry Wilson wrote to Lord Esher, ’we have between 20 and 30 wars raging in different parts of the world‘. Russia was engaged in a civil war to define its revolution, a war in which the allies had intervened. It included war in and for Poland. To the south Turkey’s war hero, Mustafa Kemal, was exploiting the support of the Bolsheviks to enable him to take on the Greeks and British in order to re-found the Turkish nation. And the example set by Europe spread. On 27 February 1919 the French pacifist Romain Rolland wrote to the socialist Jean-Richard Bloch, to tell him of a young Japanese friend who had just returned home after two years observing the war in Europe and America. ’My greatest surprise‘, the Japanese had said, ’has been that there are among you men who, truly, believe in the idealism that they profess. We others, we Japanese, think: “Idealism is for the Europeans a political means”. And we do not blame them; we are now going to act like them.‘

The notion of war’s utility was not just transmitted across continents. It spanned generations. Children who had grown up in the thrall of war had seen it permeate their schooling, their reading and their games: they, too, expected to defend their nations as their parents had done. Anna Eisenmenger, a Viennese grandmother, had three sons and a daughter. One son was killed, one blinded, and the third lost his reason; he killed his sister’s husband. One day in March 1920, Anna found her grandson playing with a schoolfriend. Both ‘were wearing soldiers’ caps … made for them out of newspaper. They had pokers in their hands and were sitting behind the backs of armchairs “in the trenches”. Wolfi was an “Austrian”, his friend a “Frenchman”. They were shooting at each other. Wolfi … was playing at war.’ Boys were told of an intensity of experience whose loss their fathers still regretted. From it came the adventures of Biggles, written by a pilot, W E. Johns, and of Bulldog Drummond. The latter’s creator, H. C. McNeile, wrote under a pseudonym, ‘Sapper’, which reflected what he had done in the war. ‘Cementing everything, crowning everything, the spirit of camaraderie, of good fellowship’, he wrote in the preface to the collected edition of his war stories: ‘No nightmare that, but a dream one would only willingly repeat today.’

The war memorials and the war literature that today can seem the war’s most pervasive legacy in Western Europe did not necessarily carry the messages of waste and futility that are now associated with them. The biggest memorial in Germany, erected at Tannenberg in 1927, trumpeted a victory. For many Entente veterans, Armistice Day was a focus for reunions and drinking, for celebration as well as commemoration. Wives and mothers were scandalised, unable to comprehend any response except overwhelming grief. About 10 million soldiers died in the war. Twice that number bore the scars of wounds _ some so mutilated in body or mind as to be unfit for further work and unable to lead fulfilled lives. Calculations of civilian dead remain inadequate, partly because so many deaths were indirect, the result of starvation or disease rather than of bullets or shells, and partly because they were forgotten in the war’s immediate aftermath. Globally up to 20 million succumbed in the influenza epidemic which swept from Asia through Europe and on to America in 1918-19. But the bereaved were not forgotten, because one of the purposes of mourning was to remember. ‘Every day one meets saddened women, with haggard faces and lethargic movements, and one dare not ask after husband or son’, Beatrice Webb wrote in her diary on 17 November 1918.

Those who mourned needed to find meaning in their loss. When the British struck their Victory Medal for issue to all those who had served, they provided one answer: ‘For Civilisation’, it said. It was a theme which linked the ideas of 1914 to the war’s outcome, and it was repeated throughout the British Empire and in France. In Germany the city of Hamburg commissioned Ernst Barlach to design a memorial to its 40,000 ‘sons’ killed in action. A stele, it has on one side another recurrent image in war memorials, the mother and child, equating the grieving mother with the Madonna. Five years later, in 1936, the 76th Infantry Regiment responded to Barlach’s memorial with one of its own: erected near that commemorating Hamburg’s dead of 1870, it linked the past to the future, declaring on its oblong block, ’Germany must live even if we must die.‘

By then the allies’ memories of victory were fading. ‘Armistice Day ceased to exist as a restaurant orgy: the Two Minutes Silence took its place’, as Ian Hay noted with irony. The trophies that had stood by the memorials, the captured guns and trench mortars symbolic of triumph, were removed, and only the memorials remained. The idea that the war had purpose languished. In 1926 Lance-Corporal John Jackson, who had served on the western front between 1915 and 1918, wrote his memoirs. ‘Let it ever be remembered’, he prefaced his story, that, but for British intervention, ‘German “Kultur” would dominate us all, and only those who saw it in force, in parts of France and Belgium occupied by German forces, can understand the humiliation such a situation would have entailed.‘ It was a plea which fell on increasingly deaf ears. A year later, in 1927, the dead of his regiment, the Cameron Highlanders, were commemorated with the opening of the Scottish National War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle, in itself evidence of another nation which used the war to shape its identity. In the memorial’s guide-book, Ian Hay noted with bemusement the change in attitudes over the years since the armistice. ’War has become a monstrous, unspeakable thing‘, he acknowledged. However, he insisted, there was more to its comprehension than that. ’Our reactions and emotions upon the subject of recent history are at present too fluid to have any lasting value. We must leave it to Time to crystallize them.

In 1929 Erich Maria Remarque published Im Westen nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front), a book which at a stroke revived the by-then flagging market for war literature. Within a year Remarque’s book was translated into twenty-eight languages, sold nearly 4 million copies, and became an academy-award winning film. And yet it was less about the war than about the problems of a generation unable to reintegrate itself with post-war society. Its message was one of shattered illusions, a theme often echoed in what Ian Hay called ‘the new style War novels’. In the 1920s there had been many interpretations of the war; thereafter one increasingly dominated over the others. It created a barrier between our understanding of the war and that of those who fought in it. Even those who survived came to see it in terms different from those which they embraced at the time. Hindsight bred arrogance, and _ worse _ misconception. Many of the ideologies which had given the war meaning became loaded, larded with later connotations.

The Second World War irrevocably demonstrated that the First World War was not, after all, the war to end all wars. But it also enabled posterity to have it both ways. It venerated the writers who condemned the war of 1914-18 but at the same time condemned those who embraced appeasement, the logical corollary. War literature and appeasement both derived their appeal from the same basic liberalism which had underpinned the ideals of the peacemakers at Versailles. Liberalism’s comparative failure in the inter-war years was in large part due to its own fundamental decency. It lost the determination to enforce its own standards, a quality it possessed in 1914 and 1917, and it was reluctant to assert itself in the internal politics of states that deviated from democratic norms.

The issues of course did not present themselves in such clear-cut fashion. One reason why Adolf Hitler could appeal to the German people in 1933 was precisely because many genuinely convinced themselves that they had been wronged in 1919. But that of itself does not explain the Second World War. Hitler was able to play back some of the themes of German popular mobilisation in the First World War – the ideas of the Burgfrieden in 1914, the Fatherland Party’s appeal to national unity over party loyalty, OberOst’s notion of Germany’s mission in the east, the expectation that a Second Punic War might be necessary to complete the agenda of the First. Above all, the Kaiser’s failure as supreme warlord generated a belief that a real leader would have delivered a German victory. But by 1918 Germans had also learnt what modern war entailed. They did not take to the streets to show their enthusiasm when war broke out in 1939. The Second World War is inexplicable without knowledge of the First, but there is no inevitability linking Versailles and the ambitions of the peacemakers to its outbreak.

The First World War broke the empires of Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. It triggered the Russian Revolution and provided the bedrock for the Soviet Union; it forced a reluctant United States on to the world stage and revivified liberalism. On Europe’s edge, it provided a temporary but not a long-term solution to the ambitions of the Balkan nations. Outside Europe it laid the seeds for the conflict in the Middle East. In short it shaped not just Europe but the world in the twentieth century. It was emphatically not a war without meaning or purpose.

The Salonika Campaign

In the aftermath of the Balkan Wars Bulgarian opinion turned against Russia and the western powers, whom the Bulgarians felt had done nothing to help them. The government aligned Bulgaria with Germany and Austria-Hungary, even though this meant also becoming an ally of the Ottomans, Bulgaria's traditional enemy. But Bulgaria now had no claims against the Ottomans, whereas Serbia, Greece and Romania (allies of Britain and France) were all in possession of lands heavily populated by Bulgarians and thus perceived as Bulgarian.

Bulgaria, recuperating from the Balkan Wars, sat out the first year of World War I. When Germany promised to restore the boundaries of the Treaty of San Stefano, Bulgaria, which had the largest army in the Balkans, declared war on Serbia in October 1915. Britain, France and Italy then declared war on Bulgaria.

Although Bulgaria, in alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, won military victories against Serbia and Romania, occupying much of Southern Serbia (taking Nish, Serbia's war capital in November 5), advancing into Greek Macedonia, and taking Dobruja from the Romanians in September 1916, the war soon became unpopular with the majority of Bulgarian people, who suffered enormous economic hardship. The Russian Revolution of February 1917 had a significant effect in Bulgaria, spreading antiwar and anti-monarchist sentiment among the troops and in the cities.
In September 1918 the Serbs, British, French, Italians and Greeks broke through on the Macedonian front. While Bulgarian forces stopped them in Dojran and they didn't succeed to occupy Bulgarian lands, Tsar Ferdinand was forced to sue for peace.

In order to head off the revolutionaries, Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his son Boris III. The revolutionaries were suppressed and the army disbanded. Under the Treaty of Neuilly (November 1919), Bulgaria lost its Aegean coastline in favour of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers (transferred later by them to Greece) and nearly all of its Macedonian territory to the new state of Yugoslavia, and had to give Dobruja back to the Romanians (see also Dobruja, Western Outlands, Western Thrace).

The railway from the strategically important port city of Salonika (Thessaloniki) in northern Greece to Belgrade via Skopje (Uskub) offered a direct route to embattled Serbia. In September 1915, with Bulgaria mobilising for an attack on Serbia, Britain and France accepted an offer from the pro-Entente Greek prime minister Eleutherios (Elephferios) Venizelos to land troops at Salonika. The force at Salonika was initially composed of Anglo-French units, many of which had come from Gallipoli. It was reinforced by the Serbian army in exile on Corfu, Italians and a small Russian contingent. It remained until the war’s end.

The force landed on 5 October 1915, the same day that the pro-German Greek king, Constantine I – who was married to the Kaiser’s sister – forced Venizelos to resign. On 6 October 1915, the Central Powers invaded Serbia. Anglo-French units at Salonika pushed north up the Vardar (Axios) river valley to help the Serbs. It was too little, too late. The Serbs retreated through Albania to the Adriatic coast while the Salonika force retired back to the city. Bulgarian and German forces (with some Turkish units) then gathered along the Greek– Serbian and Greek–Bulgarian borders, while the Greek army, supposedly neutral, handed Greece’s Fort Ruppel, which commanded the Struma (Strimón) valley, to the Bulgarians (26 May 1916). In response to these threats, the supreme commander at Salonika, the French general Maurice Sarrail, transformed the city into a fortress surrounded by fieldwork defences. He took full control of the city from the Greeks in mid-1916, establishing the city as an alternative centre for pro-Entente Greek forces and politicians, a policy that embroiled the garrison in internal Greek politics.

While France was keen on the Salonika operation, senior British military advisers to the British government, such as William Robertson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, were never convinced of the usefulness of peripheral operations such as Salonika, which took troops away from the main western front. By early 1916 the number of British troops at Salonika exceeded 150,000. Robertson vigorously urged a withdrawal from Salonika but political factors made this difficult. The defeat at Gallipoli had lowered Anglo-French prestige in the Balkans and the Entente could ill-afford for Greece to join the Central Powers.

Sarrail’s record of military achievement against the Central Powers was not impressive. On 10 August 1916, Entente troops began preliminary attacks at Lake Dorian (Dojran) before a general autumn 1916 offensive. German- Bulgarian forces pre-empted this with attacks on the western and eastern extremities of Sarrail’s line. In the west, the reconstituted Serbian army in the Flórina sector retreated to Lake Ostrovo (Vegorrítis). Fighting then continued along the Crno (Crna) river east of Flórina. In the eastern sector of the front, the Bulgarians took the Greek town of Serres (Sérrai) in the Struma valley on 25 August, threatening the port of Kavala (Kaválla) whose Greek garrison surrendered without a fight on 14 September 1916. Under pressure, Sarrail put a halt to the faltering offensive at Lake Dorian.

When Sarrail’s troops did finally attack towards Skopje in September 1916, he hoped that this would relieve the hard-pressed Rumanians. Sarrail’s forces took Monastir (Bitola) in the western sector of the front on 19 November 1916 but they advanced no further. As the British struggled up the Struma valley, operations descended into western front-style trench deadlock. Checked, allied troops sat out the winter doing little. By early 1917, Sarrail had some 600,000 men at his disposal – a mixture of French, British, Serbians, Italians and Russians that made command and control difficult. This force was more nominal than real as the unhealthy, swampy climate of Salonika was a breeding ground for diseases such as malaria, paratyphoid and dysentery, which left much of Sarrail’s force in hospital and reduced his fighting strength to about 100,000.

Sarrail attacked again in March 1917. A Franco-Serbian force advanced on a line between Monastir and Lake Prespa, while the British spearheaded an attack at Lake Dorian. Advances were minimal: a few hundred metres were won at the cost of some 15,000 casualties. By the end of May, with Russian units in mutiny, Sarrail called off the offensive, and the front became static. Marie Guillaumat replaced the unpopular Sarrail in December 1917. In July 1918, another French commander, Louis Franchet d’Esperey, replaced Guillaumat. In June 1917, with Venizelos back in power, Greece entered the war (29 June 1917), adding 250,000 men to the Salonika force. On 15 September 1918, at the war’s end, the Salonika force launched the Vardar offensive against weary and ill-equipped Bulgarian opposition. The Bulgarians broke, and by 25 September their retreat had become a rout. The Salonika force advanced deep into enemy territory, reaching the Danube by the armistice. Serbian forces re-occupied Belgrade on 1 November 1918, by which time Bulgaria had surrendered (30 September).

This final victory should not overshadow the fact that the Salonika expedition did very little, except tie up large numbers of Entente troops that could have been used more fruitfully elsewhere. Although battle casualties were low – a reflection of the general inactivity of the front for most of the war – casualties from disease, notably malaria, invalided some 400,000 men. The Germans were right to dub the front ‘the greatest internment camp in the world’.

Czechs on the decks of their Majesty’s navy – exhibit sheds light on Czech sailors’ life at sea

The Czech Republic is a landlocked country, and as such, life at sea is not the first thing that comes to mind. But before and during World War I, many sailors from Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia served for the Austro-Hungarian Navy, the Imperial and Royal War Navy. An exhibition currently on in the Roudnice nad Labem town museum explores this relatively obscure chapter of Czech history.

It all started with a postcard, sent by sailor Jaroslav Marcin to his native town of Roudnice nad Labem from Croatia. Jan Mrázek, the director of the Roudnice nad Labem museum and the curator of the exhibit “Czechs on the decks of their Majesty’s navy” explains what inspired this show, which runs through September.

“In 2008, we had an exhibit devoted to the role of Czechs in World War I, and one of the pieces on display was a color postcard, which sailor Jaroslav Marcin sent to Roudnice from the Croatian harbor of Malinska. That sparked the idea to organize an entire show devoted to the life of Czech sailors at sea, especially those who served in the Adriatic Sea in World War I. This chapter of history is relatively little known, even today. So the postcard and the fact that there were quite a few Czech sailors at the time inspired us to organize this exhibition.”

At one point, up to ten percent of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial and Royal War Navy was made up of Czech sailors. Czech participation in the navy is also the subject of academic research. Historian Jindřich Marek of the Military History Institute Prague explains how Czechs became sailors.

“They started serving in the Adriatic Sea around 1905, when the Austro-Hungarian navy was being modernized. Back then, qualified sailors were in demand, and Czechs, along with Germans, were among the most skilled within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. And briefly before World War I erupted, the number of Czechs in the navy reached its peak; some ten percent of its sailors were Czech.”

When the First World War erupted in 1914, the Austro-Hungarian navy expanded its fleet to include U-boats. One of the empire’s U-boats torpedoed the flagship of the French Mediterranean fleet, the Jean Bart, at the start of the war, in 1914, causing serious damage to it. Soon, the underwater boats of the Austro-Hungarian navy were feared by their enemies. But of course these very complicated pieces of machinery had to be operated by highly skilled sailors. Jindřich Marek again.


“The Austro-Hungarian fleet was mostly made up of modern German boats, and about a third of the men who served on them were Czech. That is because those sailors had to be very skilled and well-trained, engineers for example, or radio operators. But sadly, the U-boat war was a cruel one and there were many more fatalities below water than on the surface. A lot of Czech sailors were killed at sea. Serving on those U-boats was physically and psychologically difficult, and very taxing on their health. The air was bad and there was a lack of provisions. So those sailors had to be strong and determined men.”

Czechs also worked as engineers and musicians in the navy band – but also Czech doctors were eager to join the navy, says Jindřich Marek.

“Of course, we have to keep in mind that Czech doctors were also represented in the Austro-Hungarian navy. For example the doctors’ choir of the navy was mostly made up of Czechs. I think it was because we have this hang-up, we are tormented by the fact that the sea isn’t nearby. Everyone loves the far sea, there is a certain romance attached to it. And especially those young Czechs who had studied medicine and came from rather poor families were looking for options for their future at sea, and they hoped that the doctors’ choir of the navy would fulfill their wish to get away. Among them were some important personalities, such as Dr. Robert Lím, who was the commander of the doctors’ choir in 1918.”

Even though they came from a landlocked country, Czech sailors did not find it difficult to get used to serving in the Austro-Hungarian navy, says Jindřich Marek. Not even the fact that German was the official language presented a problem for them.

“They were able to pick up the special skills they needed very quickly, and even swimming was not a big problem for them. There is a nice story about this actually: A lot of Croatians who grew up by the sea were not able to swim when they were adults and had to learn it during their military service, while the Czech men learned swimming in our various fish ponds and lakes and had no problem with that. Even German, which was the official language of the navy, did not cause them difficulties. And for some nations that were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the language would have presented an obstacle.”

However, the war took its toll on the thousands of men who served in the Imperial and Royal War Navy. By 1918, fatigue with the war and desperation were quickly growing within its ranks. Following the February Revolution in Russia in 1917, strikes and insurgencies were on the rise. On February 1st, 1918, sailors serving on some 40 war ships in the Bay of Kotor hissed the red flag in what later became known as the Bay of Kotor mutiny. One of its central figures was a sailor from Moravia, Franz Rasch. He was not the only Czech involved in it, however.


“Another Czech participant in the mutiny was Rudolf Kreibich, a Prague resident who had been a musician on the SMS Sankt Georg. He was a hot-blooded leader and tried to organize the sailors. Some of the temperamental Italians and Croatians destroyed and looted during the first part of the mutiny, whereas the Bohemian sailors were aiming for a more organized and rational approach.”
While the mutiny was interpreted as a rebellion of the oppressed Slavic nations against their German leaders at first, it turned out to be an effort to finally arrive at peace or at least be given better provisions. Among those who participated in the mutiny also was Jaroslav Marcin, the mariner from Roudnice. Curator Jan Mrázek explains his involvement.

“Jaroslav Marcin recorded his experiences meticulously. He kept a diary during his time at sea and the entries in it, to this day, are valuable sources of information. He served on up to ten different ships during the war. He took part in several special courses of training, for example in artillery and on using mines. Towards the end of the war, he ended up in the Bay of Kotor. There, he participated in the mutiny, which was less a result of the revolution in Russia, than a reaction to the lack of provisions for navy members during the end of the war, and that was a situation across the entire monarchy.”

The mutiny ended within three days. Franz Rasch and other mariners involved in it were sentenced to death by a military court. While the legions were still fighting in France, Italy and Russia up until the downfall on October 28, 1918, some 80 to 120 mariners had returned home, deserted the navy or been sent back after participating in the mutiny. They then formed the basis for the first active army of the newly established state of Czechoslovakia, which was founded in October 1918 .

Czech Soldiers in World War I

The Czechoslovak legions occupy an almost legendary place in Czech history. They comprise the armed forces that fought during and after World War I on the allied side in pursuit of an independent Czechoslovakia. The biggest force, and most potent myths, centre on the Russian force, which became embroiled in the civil war, spending three years and travelling thousands of miles before returning home. We look at the myths and facts about their exploits.

At the outbreak of World War I, the Czechs and Slovaks showed little enthusiasm for fighting for their respective enemies, the Germans and the Hungarians, against fellow Slavs, the Russians and the Serbs. Large numbers of Czechs and Slovaks defected on the Russian front and formed the Czechoslovak Legion. Masaryk went to western Europe and began propagating the idea that the Austro-Hungarian Empire should be dismembered and that Czechoslovakia should be an independent state. In 1916, together with Edvard Beneš and Milan Rastislav Štefánik (a Slovak astronomer and war hero), Masaryk created the Czechoslovak National Council. Masaryk in the United States, Štefánik in France, and Beneš in France and Britain then worked to gain Allied recognition. When secret talks between the Allies and Austrian emperor Charles I collapsed, the Allies recognized the Czechoslovak National Council in the summer of 1918 as the supreme organ of a future Czechoslovak government.

In early October 1918, Germany and Austria proposed peace negotiations. On October 18, while in the United States, Masaryk issued a declaration of Czechoslovak independence. Masaryk insisted that the new Czechoslovak state include the historic Bohemian Kingdom, containing the German-populated Sudetenland. On October 21, however, German deputies from the Sudetenland joined other German and Austrian deputies in the Austrian parliament in declaring an independent German-Austrian state. Following the abdication of Charles I on November 11, Czech troops occupied the Sudetenland.

Hungary withdrew from the Habsburg Empire on November 1. The new liberal-democratic government of Hungary under Count Mihály Károlyi attempted to retain Slovakia. With Allied approval, the Czechs occupied Slovakia, and the Hungarians were forced to withdraw. The Czechs and Allies agreed on the Danube and Ipeľ rivers as the boundary between Hungary and Slovakia; a large Hungarian minority, occupying the fertile plain of the Danube, would be included in the new state.

Small armed units were organized from 1914 onwards by volunteer Czechs and Slovaks. Their purpose was to help the Entente and win their support to the creation of an independent country of Czechoslovakia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Later, many Czech and Slovaks captured during the war joined these units; with help of émigré intellectuals and politicians (Tomáš Masaryk, Milan Rastislav Štefánik and others) the Legions grew into a force of tens of thousands. The independence of Czechoslovakia was finally obtained in 1918.

Czechoslovak Legions

Czechoslovak Legions in Russia were created in 1917, in France in December 1917 (including volunteers from America), and in Italy in April 1918. Their membership consisted of Czech and Slovak prisoners of war in Russia, Serbia and Italy, and Czech and Slovak emigrants in France and Russia who had already created the "Czech company" in Russia and a unit named "Nazdar" in France in 1914.

The Legions were actively involved in many battles of World War I, including Vouziers, Arras, Zborov, Doss Alto, Bakhmach, and others. The fact that the Czechoslovaks fielded military units on three fronts was critical in convincing the Allies to recognize of the right of the Czechs and Slovaks to an independent nation.

The term "Legions" was not widely used during the war but was adopted shortly afterwards.

Battle Honours for Czechs fighting in France : Alsace, Argonne, Peronne and L.E. (Légion EtrangËre - the Foreign Legion), for actions in Russia : Zhorov, Bachmac, Sibir (Siberia) and C.D. (Czech Brigade) and for actions in Italy : Doss'Alto and Piave.

Siberian Legion

Perhaps the best known of this period comes from the Czechoslovak Legions in Siberia and its forerunners. The first Czech unit in Russia was the Cheshskaya Druzhina, a unit of the Imperial Army largely staffed by Czechs and Slovaks living in Russia. As the war progressed large numbers of Czechs serving in the Austro-Hungarian army units surrendered, often entire units crossing the line en mass. Originally recruitment of prisoners for Czechoslovak military units were allowed only among new POWs in one sector of the Russian front, but eventually it was also permitted in the prisoner of war camps. After the success of Czechoslovak units during the Kerensky offensive, Russian authorities permitted unlimited recruitment of Czech and Slovak POWs which led to the expansion of the Legion until it consisted of 70,000 troops. Most of the units were located in the cities along the Trans-Siberian Railroad and its spur lines where Czechoslovak units were headquartered.

Legion in France

The center for Czechoslovak opposition to the Central Powers was embodied in the Czechoslovak National Council in Paris. Following the recognition of the Council as a co-belligerent, three Czechoslovak regiments, the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, were formed on the Western Front. Prior to the creation of these independent units, a smaller unit comprised of Czechs and Slovaks served in the "Nazdar" company of the French Foreign Legion. The Czechoslovak regiments in France were stationed in one sector of the front. The French units were among the first to return to Czechoslovakia following independence, mainly in Slovakia where many of these units were sent to help defend the boarders of the new state.

Legion in Italy

Like the Czechoslovak military units formed in Siberia, those in Italy were formed predominately from Czech and Slovak prisoners of war. However, the Italian government was slow in allowing Czech and Slovak prisoners of war into combat units. Most of the former prisoners spent time in construction or guide units supporting Italian units before combat units were permitted.