The Macedonian campaign

by Luigi Villari

AREA OF THE ITALIAN FORCE.

To face p. 104.

Tepavci is a wretched little Macedonian village, half way up one of the barest of the nameless hills of this barren land. Close by a camp was made, which for six months sheltered the Italian Command. But during one of the long periods of inactivity on this sector, the interim commander thought of having a few stone huts built, as it seemed as though this front were to remain immobile for years. When General Mombelli took command he continued the work, and by the autumn of 1917 there was a smart new village of stone, with quarters for the officers, offices for the command, a wireless station, and a commodious mess hut decorated with clever caricatures (types of the Allied armies) by an Italian lorry driver, in which one was well sheltered from the intolerable heat of the summer as from the rigours of winter. The whole thing was done at a minimum of expense, as the raw material was there in abundance and the labour was supplied by the army. At no other H.Q. in Macedonia were the officers better housed and fed, and nowhere else were passers-by more cordially and hospitably received. General Mombelli did everything handsomely, and Tepavci became a favourite resort for Allied officers. Many indeed were the visitors to Tepavci, Italian and foreign. Among the latter was the Crown Prince of Serbia, who came there often, and was always on the best terms with General Mombelli; on the eve of the last offensive he expressed his deep regret that the Serbian Army was not to be in direct contact, during the coming operations, with the Italians, because, as he said himself, there was always cordiality between Serbs and Italians. The other Alexander, King of Greece, also came, a fanatic of motoring and an excellent horseman. Besides the three successive Commanders-in-Chief (Sarrail, Guillaumat and Franchet d’Espérey), and many other French generals, several British officers came up, including Generals Cory, the M.G.G.S., and Fairholme the Military Attaché at Athens, where he had been a colleague of General Mombelli in the work of thwarting German espionage. Comic relief was supplied by a British north-country doctor who came out, not as a doctor, but as something else; a dissenting parson wholly innocent of papers who got through the Zone des Armées goodness knows how; a well-known explorer in black town clothes and a bowler hat who refused to put his horse to a canter when the road was being heavily shelled from fear of breaking his photographic plates, and was held up by the French on the charge of supposed pro-German sentiments; and an aged and amiable Transatlantic General who had not the remotest notion of what was going on in the Balkans and was chiefly interested in the farming possibilities and prospects of the country.

To get a good general idea of the Italian sector it was best to begin with a visit to the Trident, as the divisional O.P. was called, reached on horseback by mountain paths, or by motor along the new road built partly by us and partly by the French (it also supplied the two French divisions on our right). Some dug-outs had been arranged for the G.O.C. and a few officers of his Staff, who often remained there for days at a time when operations were in progress. The view was very extensive and grand. Opposite arises the famous Hill 1050, with other peaks to the right—the Piton Rocheux, the Piton Brûlé, Hill 1378, etc. Still further to the right were the French positions. Between the O.P. and Hill 1050 was a sea of rocks, gullies and hillocks, amid which the second and third lines of defence wended their way; they had been cleverly planned and executed by General Mombelli, and greatly reduced the danger of an enemy break-through. Beyond Hill 1050 the broad plain of Prilep spreads out, the optatus alveus of our desires, which seemed, when I ascended the Trident for the first time, so hopelessly far and unattainable. Behind Prilep, to the north, were other mountains, higher and more arduous yet—the Babuna and the Baba—so that we could not help asking ourselves: “If we do succeed in piercing the enemy lines on the terrible 1050 and reaching Prilep, shall we not find ourselves faced by other obstacles equally formidable, guarded by not less imposing defences?” More to the west lies the plain of Monastir, once all cultivated with wheat, vegetables and fruit, but now almost deserted as it was under enemy fire. A white patch at the foot of the mountain is Monastir itself, and behind it we can make out other terrible peaks—Hill 1248, the Tzervena Stena, the Peristeri, and all the mighty barrier which separates Macedonia from Albania. To the extreme right is another wild sea of mountains, peaks and rocks extending to the Vardar—the area of the Serbian Army. Thus the whole of the western half of the Macedonian front is spread out before us like a topographical chart.

Hill 1050 is reached from Tepavci by a road, the first part of which can be used by lorries; and during the last months of the war the décauville from Brod had been prolonged almost to the foot of the mountain. The landscape is quite fantastic. From a wilderness of stone rise up pinnacles of black rock, suggestive of the scenery in the pictures of the Italian primitives representing the hermitages of the Thebaid, and one would hardly have been surprised if a thin, ascetic, monkish figure had suddenly emerged from a cave, or from the crevices of the rocks some monstrous dragon or serpent. Instead, we met Italian infantrymen escorting heavily laden mules, and in the little valleys we came upon A.S.C. camps or sanitary units, while from the dug-outs emerged officers in shirt-sleeves, shaving. The last bit of the road is on the flat, and being in sight of the enemy we always did it at a canter. The enemy did not keep up a systematic fire on the lines of approach, but the shell holes which we frequently encountered proved that they did fire sometimes. On other parts of our sector the approaches were so persistently shelled that supplies could only be carried up after dark.

We descend into a gully where we are fairly sheltered, and cross a broad torrent-bed, nearly dry in summer. Beyond it are sundry dug-outs excavated out of the rock, as enemy shells and trench-mortar bombs are frequently dropped. Here are detachments of Italian mountain artillery and trench-mortar batteries and of the French field and medium calibre artillery assigned to the Italian force, but the Italian guns and trench mortars are not here; the former are higher up and further back on the slopes towards the east, hidden amid the undergrowth and rocks, whence they can fire without being discovered. The trench mortars are also higher up, but further forward, half way up Hill 1050. We now begin painfully to toil up the famous mountain, which for over twenty months has been the centre of Italian military life in Macedonia. All roads lead to 1050, all thoughts are concentrated on its hideous slopes. Steamers convey hundreds of thousands of tons of food and munitions to feed men and guns on the hill; the Santi Quaranta road has been built in the face of immense difficulties so that lorries may transport the reinforcements sent to take the place of the killed, the wounded and the sick. From Italy and foreign countries all sorts of improved scientific instruments are brought up to help in the study of the 1050. A map department has been created at the Divisional H.Q., the principal duty of which is to portray the topography of 1050. Amid these wild rocks and lower down towards the plain numerous cemeteries have been made where sleep the victims of the pitiless monster, and they are not few. The whole activity of the Italian Command is concentrated on the study of the hill in all its details, the officers on the Staff visit it day and night without respite, risking death so that they may know it better, the officers and men of the infantry regiments live on its slopes and in its caverns, and each one tries to know his own sector stone by stone, sod by sod. Every peak, every topographical detail, every gully, every tiny watercourse, every irregularity has its own fancy name, conferred on it by the soldiers on account of some fancied resemblance or remembrance—Il Pane (bread), Il Capello di Napoleone (Napoleon’s hat), La Graziosa (the gracious one), L’Albero isolato (the lonely tree). Curiously enough, the figure whereby the hill is known is inaccurate; it is called Hill 1050 owing to an error in the original triangulation, and is in fact considerably higher. But as that figure appeared on the first maps of the area it has always been maintained. Seen from a distance, the hill looks like an enormous tooth, and indeed it is a poisoned tooth, which pierces and kills. For the soldiers it has acquired a character of almost diabolical malignity. Other positions on the sector—the Piton Brûlé, the Piton Rocheux—are no less terrible, but none exercises the same baleful fascination as the 1050.

The Italian sector is not all on 1050; it begins at the extreme western end of the Cerna loop in the plain. The loop encircles a chain of rocky heights, arid and broken, which are an extension of the Prilep mountains, constituting what is known as the Selechka Planina, rising here and there to the height of 1,500 metres. The Cerna, which has its source in the mountains north of Monastir, flows across the plain in a southerly direction, broadening out at certain points into a marshy lake; south-east of Monastir it makes a conversion towards the east at the foot of the Kaimakchalan, passing Brod and Skochivir, and then turns northward through a narrow mountain gorge to its confluence with the Vardar. The slopes of the Selechka Planina, high and steep in the eastern part of the loop, decline towards the west, and all the western part is flat. The Monastir-Prilep plain is one of the rare gaps through the rugged mountain chains extending across the country from east to west, a passage through which innumerable hordes and armies have made their way since the dawn of history. It is, however, dominated by the heights within the Cerna loop. The possession of those heights was therefore indispensable for dominating the Monastir corridor; and as half of them were in the hands of the Allies and half in those of the enemy, neither side could be regarded as master of the plain and of the passage. Had we lost our positions, the road would have been open to the enemy towards Greece; if we had succeeded in capturing the whole of the range all the enemy’s communications in the Vardar valley would have been menaced. That is the meaning of the long-protracted struggle for the possession of those arid rocks.

The lowest point of the ridge is the Makovo pass; to the north of it a long spur stretches out, whose culminating point is the famous 1050. The position, as we have seen, had been reached by the Serbs in the autumn of 1916, and its conquest had obliged the enemy to evacuate Monastir. But the Serbs were so exhausted with the long and desperate struggle that they were unable to hold their ground, and a Bulgaro-German counter-attack drove them off the ridge. This enabled the enemy to hold their own in the Monastir area for many months longer. In order to secure the position the enemy Command garrisoned it with some of their best troops and provided it with all the most perfect defences known to the modern art of war. The fighting which took place on these rocks left their traces in the corpses with which they were covered, and the mere fact of remaining there cost the lives of innumerable Italian, French, Serbian, Russian, Bulgarian and German soldiers. The 1050 was as famous among the enemy as among our own men; in the Bulgarian town of Dubnitza the chief restaurant was called—even after the Armistice—the “Restaurant of Hill 1050 of the Cerna.”

The enemy line followed the crest of the mountains comprised within the loop to north of the valley of the Morihovo torrent in the eastern part, and that of Hill 1050 and of the great pitons to the north of the Suha torrent in the western part, and then crossed the plain to a point north of Novak on the Cerna. The Allied line was a little below the crest, but at many points very close to that of the enemy. The total length of the line within the loop was about 25 km., of which the western part (a little more than half) was held by the Italians, and the rest by the French.

To the north of the Makovo pass rises a great mass of rock known as the Piton Rocheux, from whose summit the enemy dominated our lines to the right and the left, as well as the Morihovo and Suha valleys. In the Piton Rocheux the enemy had excavated numerous caverns and dug-outs, which hid machine-gun nests and sheltered the troops from the fire of Allied artillery. The Italians here occupied a series of irregular tooth-like rocks, between which were lines protected with sand-bags. But they were dominated by the enemy on the Piton Rocheux, so that one could not go from one position to another with comparative safety except at night. Further west the enemy held another dominant position, the Piton Brûlé, whose fire dominated the Italian positions which were out of the range of that of the Rocheux. Our infantrymen in the front lines had no other shelter in this part of the sector than the shallow holes dug into the rock known as “Serb holes,” with low parapets of heaped up stones and sand-bags in front of them; they were about 30 m. from the enemy and 10 m. below them. The communication trenches between these holes were so exposed that they could only be used after dark. In no other sector of the Macedonian front were the troops more exposed to the burning heat of summer, to cold, snow and wind in winter, and to enemy fire at all seasons.