The Macedonian campaign

by Luigi Villari

The absolute want of confidence of the Allied commanders under his orders in General Sarrail’s military qualities, his position became ever more impossible. To command an army composed of soldiers belonging to five different nationalities, two of them indigenous to the country, each with its own military organization, is at best no easy task, and only a leader endowed with great tact, a conciliatory spirit and a keen respect for the national feelings of others could have done so with success. In a national army the orders of the commander are obeyed without discussion; but in a force like the Armée d’Orient the Allied commanders under General Sarrail were representatives of their respective G.H.Q.’s and Governments, to whom they could always apply if he gave orders which appeared to them out of place. Sarrail ever gave the first consideration to the political effect which this or that event would produce, and he often gave orders for an operation simply because he believed that it would make a good impression on the public and on the Press, and consequently on the world of politicians, even if it were of no real military value. It was clear that with such a leader, even if he had had military qualities superior to those which he actually possessed, and if he had had really abundant resources at his disposal, it would have been very difficult to carry out an offensive on a large scale with any likelihood of success. In fact, while the Monastir offensive was only half a success and produced hardly any results, the offensive of May, 1917 was, as we shall see, a complete failure. Sarrail’s only real achievement was the deposition of King Constantine, and that was a political rather than a military enterprise.

A characteristic side of General Sarrail’s activities was his commercial policy. He took a lively interest in the promotion of French economic development in Macedonia, to the detriment, not of enemy interests, which were non-existent, but of those of the other Allies. He had instituted a very well-organized commercial bureau, but it was generally regarded as not quite correct that an inter-Allied Commander should avail himself of his position as such to develop the trade of his own country alone. To attain this object he also made use of the postal censorship, to which he devoted considerable attention. By its means he learnt which local merchants sent their orders to France and which to other countries; the latter were not infrequently the objects of thinly veiled threats and persecutions, inflicted with a view to inducing them to alter their ways. Matters reached such a point that the other Governments ended by establishing postal censorships of their own over the correspondence between Salonica and their respective countries.

General Sarrail had numerous conflicts with the Italian Command. I have already mentioned the incidents which occurred in connexion with the Monastir operations and the transfer of the division. But incidents were of almost daily occurrence. One day a movement order concerning our own troops was not communicated to the Italian Command; another time a communiqué from G.Q.G. on some operation in which an Italian detachment had greatly distinguished itself failed to mention the Italians at all. On one occasion the local French or Greek press was allowed or inspired to print articles attacking and libelling Italy, while on another the local Italian paper La Voce d’Italia was suspended for having replied in a somewhat violent tone. It might be thought that the Italians were too susceptible on these matters, but incidents of this kind occurred with such frequency in connexion with them that it was impossible to avoid the conclusion that there was considerable animosity on Sarrail’s part against them. But above all our Command was convinced that he had no notion of what war in the Balkans really was. In this it was in perfect agreement with the other Allied Commands.

With the other Allies too Sarrail’s relations were anything but cordial. He was in constant disagreement with the British, whose commander had succeeded in getting himself invested with the rank of Commander-in-Chief so as to reduce his dependence on Sarrail to a minimum. Even with the Serbs he was not on good terms. They complained that French help had come too late to save their country from disaster, and that the French never forgot to remind them of their debt to France. They did not wish to take orders in matters of tactics from the C.A.A., both because their army was commanded by the Crown Prince who refused to accept a subordinate position, and because they considered that they knew a good deal more about Balkan warfare than Sarrail, and in this they were not altogether wrong. They were moreover irritated by the fact that the French communiqués never gave sufficient prominence to the actions of the Serbian troops, so that their G.H.Q. ended by issuing communiqués of its own. Even with the Greeks, to whom, after the Venizelist revolution, he always spoke “honeyed words” in public, he was on the worst of terms, as appears from his memoirs and articles published since the war. The street in Salonica which had been gratefully baptized “Odos Sarrail” has recently had its name altered.

It can be fairly stated that General Sarrail stands condemned by his own memoirs more severely than by any outside criticism. The volume is very interesting and well written, but, as a distinguished Italian officer stated, “on a background of undeniable truths, he has woven a tissue of venemous untruths, with which he has sought in vain to justify his action in the Orient.” His political intrigues, his conduct towards the Allies, the manner in which he treated many gallant French officers, such as General Cordonnier—to mention one case alone—all this appears in the clearest light in his Apologia pro vita sua.

The G.H.Q. of the C.A.A. was of course at Salonica. It was, like other French Army Commands, divided into two main branches—the État-major de l’Avant and the Direction de l’Arrière. The Chief of the General Staff under General Sarrail was first Colonel George and then General Michaud. The Avant was divided into four bureaux: 1st, effectives and materials; 2nd, information (intelligence); 3rd, operations; 4th, supply and transport. Relations between the liaison officers and the Command and its bureaux were as a rule extremely cordial, and for my own part I shall always have the pleasantest remembrance of them, especially of my connexion with the Deuxième Bureau, to which we liaison officers were for a long time attached; its successive chiefs (these unfortunately were constantly changing) were regular, and usually very distinguished, officers of field rank, and the other members of it were reserve officers, some of them eminent men in different walks of life—university professors, archæologists, jurists, etc. With the 3rd bureau too, to which we were afterwards attached, I always got on well. But it should be added that with the French Command (advisedly, I call it French, although in theory it was inter-Allied) there was never that same camaraderie that there was with the British. With the former we were welcome guests, whereas the latter treated us as brothers and hid nothing from us. Let me quote an instance of this difference with regard to the question of strength returns. It was very important for all the Allies to know each other’s respective strengths. We naturally communicated ours to the C.A.A. and the other Commands periodically and in the greatest detail. To learn the French strength required immense labour and ingenuity in collecting, collating and completing the figures; they were communicated to us unwillingly, in an incomplete form and with considerable delay—it was indeed far easier to learn what were the enemy’s effectives than those of the French. The British on the other hand placed their statistical returns at our disposal, showing the organic strength, the actual strength, the reinforcements asked for and those known to be on their way out, for each unit and specialty. Nor did the Serbs or Greeks have any objection to communicating their strengths to us. It was generally believed that the reason of this reticence on the part of the French was that, while they maintained the number of their units unchanged, their effective strength was greatly reduced, and that they feared that the Allies, especially the British, might avail themselves of this state of things as a pretext for refusing to recognize France’s right to the supreme command of operations in Macedonia. I do not know whether this was the real or only reason, but the fact in itself is undoubted, and it certainly rendered co-operation much more difficult than it ought to have been.

TRANSPORT IN WINTER.

THE ALLIED LIAISON OFFICERS AT G.H.Q., SALONICA.