The Macedonian campaign

by Luigi Villari

In Italy, perhaps more than elsewhere, the advantages of the Macedonian expedition were doubted, and in many political and military circles, as well as among the mass of the public, the current of opinion was opposed to any Italian participation in the operations of that sector. Even when Italian participation had been decided upon, and the Italian expeditionary force was actually in Macedonia, it was not always possible for it to obtain all that it needed, and the command had to struggle hard to obtain the indispensable minimum of reinforcements and materials. Even among the officers of that force, many considered Italian intervention in the East useless and even harmful. Various reasons contributed to this opinion. In the first place, the fact that Italy’s war aims were at the gates of Italy and not in the Balkans influenced public feeling in general. Secondly, the fact that our expeditionary force was in a subordinate position seemed to many to be derogatory to Italian dignity; a feeling which may be compared with the one that the war with Austria was in a certain sense apart from the general World War. This attitude, which lasted to the end, has been very injurious to our interests in the Balkans and elsewhere, and those among us who really felt the inter-Allied character of the war have had to struggle without ceasing both to convince our dissident compatriots of their error, and to prove to the Allies that those who maintained the purely Italian character of the war only represented a part of Italian public opinion, and that part not the best informed.

Yet Italy’s participation in the Eastern expedition was inevitable. Independently of boundary questions of a general character, it was not possible that Italy should remain absent from that area, which subsequent events have proved to be extremely important. Even before the war we had great political and economic interests in the Balkans, interests in part destroyed and in part menaced by the Austrians and Germans in the course of the campaign; it was absolutely necessary that we ourselves should participate in reconstructing them, instead of leaving this work entirely to others. Further, in the new settlement which the war would create in the Near East, fresh interests and new currents of trade were bound to be created. For this reason too it was necessary that Italy by her presence should participate directly in shaping this new settlement. We complain now that our interests in the East are not sufficiently recognized and respected, but how could we have claimed recognition and respect for them if we had had no share at all in the Macedonian campaign? Above all, what would have been our prestige among the Balkan peoples if the latter had seen the victorious troops of France, Britain, Serbia and even Greece marching past, and not those of Italy? Our victory in Italy would not have sufficed to affirm our position among the Balkan peoples if they had not seen us take part in the victory won in their own homelands. It would indeed have been better if our participation had been far greater and our expeditionary force on a far larger scale.

The vicissitudes of the Army of the Orient are much less known than those of all the other armies in the World War, and in particular those of the Italian expeditionary force are largely ignored by the public, even in Italy. Many believe that it was merely a modest contingent, because it was called the “35th Infantry Division,” whereas in reality its strength was superior to that of an army corps; and considering the conditions of the area where it was fighting, its importance was equal to that of an army. It is with the object of making known to the public a little more of the actions of that fine unit and the debt of gratitude which the country owes to its officers and men for their long and arduous struggle, conducted in one of the most pestilent climates in Europe amid great hardship, and the increase of Italy’s prestige obtained by their merit, that I have undertaken to write these pages.

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When the World War broke out, Austria immediately commenced an offensive against Serbia, and the Entente Powers could not at first send assistance to the latter on account of her geographical situation, as she was surrounded on all sides by enemy or neutral States, except to the south-west, but communications through Montenegro were extremely difficult, and by that route only a few volunteers penetrated into Serbia. Supplies and armies could arrive by way of Salonica, but always in the face of serious difficulties, both on account of the obstruction offered by Greece, whose neutrality was not benevolent, and of the attempts made by Bulgarian bands, with or without the approval of the Sofia Government, which was also neutral but still less benevolent, to cut the Vardar railway. The Serbians, however, had proved themselves in the first months of the war capable of defending their country, and they inflicted serious defeats on the Austrians, first at Tzer, in the loop formed by the Save and the Danube, in September, 1914, and later on in the winter at Valievo, where the hostile army, after having occupied Belgrade and penetrated into the heart of Serbia, was beaten and put to flight, leaving thousands of prisoners and vast booty in the hands of the Serbians.

Nevertheless the Serbians were in urgent need of assistance. Their food situation was still very grave, their supply of arms and munitions quite inadequate, and a terrible epidemic of spotted typhus was raging throughout the country. But in addition to material obstacles, the very psychology of the people rendered it difficult to assist them. In the spring of 1915, when the intervention of Italy was certain, the Serbs had a chance of inflicting a new and perhaps decisive defeat on the Austrians by co-operating with us. France, Great Britain, and Russia then brought strong pressure to bear on the Serbian Government to induce it to launch an offensive in the direction of Agram at the moment when the Italians were about to attack on the Isonzo. The Government agreed, and submitted a plan of operations to the Allies, which was approved, but just when it should have been put into execution, the Serbian Army did not move; as a result of fresh pressure on the part of the Allies the Government again promised to attack, but again did nothing. Finally, when this pressure was renewed for the third time, reinforced, it is said, by a personal letter from the Tsar, Belgrade replied at the last moment that it had decided not to attack in the direction of Croatia, because it wished to carry out another plan against Bulgaria, who was still neutral! The reasons for this sudden change in the decisions of the Serbian Government must be sought in the influence of the secret societies which permeate the whole political life of the country, and especially the army. The most important of these societies was the notorious “Black Hand,” to which many of the regicide officers belonged. Although the Government itself was apparently favourable to the action proposed by the Entente, which offered great possibilities of success, inasmuch as the Austrians had only a small body of troops in Croatia, it was not strong enough to resist the influence of the secret societies, who placed their veto on any action in co-operation with Italy.[4] The full details of this affair are not quite clear, but one thing is certain, and that is that owing to Serbia’s inaction Austria was able to withdraw five out of the six divisions which were left on the Save and send them to the Italian front. At that period of the war the Serbian front was considered in the Austrian Army almost as a rest camp.

In the autumn of 1915 the Serbian débâcle took place, caused chiefly by the Bulgarian attack. The intervention of Turkey on the side of the Central Empires had rendered Bulgaria’s position extremely difficult, but that was not the chief reason of the latter’s intervention. Bulgaria had remained profoundly dissatisfied with the results of the Peace of Bucarest (1913), which brought the Turko-Balkan War to an end and deprived her of a great part of the fruits of her victory against the Turks. The fault was to a large extent her own, because she had attacked her ex-Allies, Serbia and Greece, and had been completely defeated by them; she then lost not only the whole of Macedonia, to conquer which she had entered the war, but also Eastern Thrace, with Adrianople and Kirk-Kilisse, which were reoccupied by the Turks when the Bulgarian Army had been beaten by the Serbs and Greeks, and a part of Dobrugia which had belonged to her since the creation of the Bulgarian State in 1878, and had been annexed by Roumania, who had intervened in the war at the last moment. This left a bitter feeling of spite in the soul of the Bulgarians, and sowed the seeds of a future war of revenge.

This violent irritation against the Serbs, Greeks and Roumanians was not the only cause which threw the Bulgarians into the arms of the Central Empires, and of their former mortal enemies, the Turks. Their main aspiration—almost their only one since the creation of the Bulgarian State—has been Macedonia. The Dobrugia and Thrace are of comparatively small interest to them, whereas Macedonia, on the contrary, is the bourne of all their desires. In Thrace and in the Dobrugia the population is very mixed, and the Bulgarians, in spite of the statistics drawn up by the Sofia Government, are a minority, and the non-Bulgarian elements of the population—Turks, Greeks, Roumanians—are racially entirely different. In Macedonia, on the other hand, at least in Central and Northern Macedonia, the great majority is Slav, and the Bulgarians consider it Bulgarian. In reality the population is racially and linguistically something between Serbian and Bulgarian, and the predominance of Serbian or Bulgarian sentiments varies according to the proximity of the frontier of one or other of these States, the activity of their respective propagandists, and the greater or less prestige and strength of the two Governments. I will not quote statistics which, being drawn up by Balkan writers, have a doubtful value and no scientific basis, but it is certain that the Bulgarian peoples are convinced that if Macedonia were annexed to Bulgaria, in a few years the population would become wholly Bulgarian, so that the State would find itself with a considerable increase of inhabitants—not aliens who cannot be assimilated, such as Greeks, Roumanians or Turks, whose territories can only be Bulgarized by massacre or deportation en masse, but of a race which is already very closely akin to the Bulgarian race. Further, in Macedonia there are several cities closely connected with the most ancient and sacred historical traditions of the Bulgarian peoples, such as Monastir and Ochrida. The latter was indeed for a time the capital of the Bulgarian Empire and for many centuries the see of the Bulgarian patriarchate. Bulgarian propaganda had always been much more active and more able than that of the Serbians under the Turkish régime, a propaganda based on excellent schools and assassinations, and, as until the wars of 1912–13, the Bulgarians appeared to be the most solid, and from a military point of view the strongest of the Balkan States, Bulgaria exercised a powerful force of attraction over the Macedonians. In consequence of this propaganda and of Turkish persecutions, a large number of active and intelligent Macedonians migrated into Bulgaria, where they occupied many important positions in the country. A large part of the political men, diplomats, consuls, high officials, professors, school-masters, officers and merchants in Bulgaria are Macedonians, and they have long dominated the internal and foreign policy of the country, directing it naturally towards Macedonia. On the whole, Bulgarian feeling predominates over Serbian or Greek feeling throughout almost the whole of Macedonia.

During the Turko-Balkan War, the Bulgarians had conquered a large part of Macedonia and Thrace, and their legitimate aspirations might thus have been satisfied, but, owing to the mad ambition of their Government, or rather of a small number of ambitious officers, they attempted to obtain a great deal more, and threw themselves without reflecting into the foolhardy enterprise which was the second Balkan War. The unfortunate result of that campaign made them lose the whole of their conquests, with the exception of Western Thrace and the districts of Strumitza and Djumaya forming part of Macedonia. They retained, it is true, the port of Dede-Agatch and the railway connecting it with the rest of Bulgaria, passing through a strip of Turkish territory (Sufli—Demotika—Adrianople—Mustafa Pasha). But if they were justly prevented from obtaining satisfaction for these exaggerated ambitions, they were on the other hand deprived of territories to which on national grounds they had some legitimate claims. The Serbian authorities in Macedonia, while maintaining that that country was purely Serbian, showed by their policy that they considered the population preponderantly Bulgarian, inasmuch as they instituted a system of such extreme and rigorous terrorism as is only explicable on the ground that they were ruling over a conquered territory, whose inhabitants were hostile to them, and must be kept down by force.

The Bulgarian aspiration to regain Macedonia was by no means eliminated by the unfortunate outcome of the second Balkan War. On the contrary, it was strengthened and embittered, and when the World War broke out Bulgaria regarded it merely from the point of view of a possible readjustment of the Macedonian frontier in her own favour. I have been told that the Bulgarian Prime Minister, when a British diplomat went to see him a short time before Bulgaria entered the war, pointed to a map of the Balkans on the wall and said: “We care little about the British, Germans, French, Russians, Italians or Austrians; our only thought is Macedonia; whichever of the two groups of Powers will enable us to conquer it will have our alliance.” I do not know if this anecdote is true, but in any case it represents crudely but accurately Bulgarian mentality. The Governments of the Entente understood this state of feeling, but their situation was embarrassing and delicate. They tried to convince Serbia of the necessity of handing over Macedonia, or at least part of it, to Bulgaria, promising her compensation elsewhere. But they did not care to insist too much, because Serbia was an ally, and the compensation offered to her was in territories still retained by the enemy, whereas Bulgaria was a neutral, but a short while ago Serbia’s enemy, who was attempting a sort of blackmail, and who hitherto made use of comitadji bands, or at least gave them a free hand, to blow up the bridges on the Vardar, Serbia’s only line of supply. Serbia would not hear of this proposal, and in fact intended, as we have seen, to attack Bulgaria before the latter came to a decision; but the Entente, and particularly the Tsar of Russia, naturally dissuaded them from such action, which would have been little different from that committed by the Germans in invading Belgium. Certainly Serbia would have been wiser had she shown herself more conciliatory towards Bulgaria; if she had done so, she would have avoided the catastrophe of 1915 and the three terrible years of German-Bulgarian slavery. But the Serbians, we must not forget, are a Balkan people. They have no high political sense nor broad views, and probably even on this occasion the secret societies, with their insatiable and megalomaniac ambitions, brought pressure to bear on the Government to induce it to reject any idea of compromise. However this may be, Serbia did not give way, and the diplomacy of the Entente could do nothing.