Luigi Villari

“ The magnificent exploit of your gallant troops, who, in spite of the desperate resistance of the enemy and their infernal fire, in spite of the enormous difficulties of the ground, yesterday, with irresistible dash, captured Hill 1050 by assault, has filled me with admiration; the two columns of your heroic 162nd Infantry Regiment have covered themselves with glory, inscribing a new and splendid page in the annals of the Italian Army, which are already so glorious. Under your high leadership your officers and men have given brilliant proof of their great valour. ”

“ 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. ”

“ No one really wanted Greek assistance—neither the French nor the British, and still less the Italians and the Serbs. Everybody knew that the Greek Army was torn by political strife, disorganized, lacking in artillery and equipment, badly led and anything but friendly to the Entente, and that it could not therefore represent an important addition of strength to the Allies. There were, it is true, the three National Defence Divisions which included good material, and the officers at least were all volunteers. But they were only nine regiments in all, with a few mountain batteries. ”

“ 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,20 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 deeply regret with you the death of all the dear and gallant comrades-in-arms who have so heroically fallen on the soil of my Fatherland, and I bow my head with the most profound respect before their sublime self-sacrifice, before their proud contempt of death in the struggle for the Great Common Cause. If you have had to abandon temporarily the positions occupied, it is a material loss easy to make good with troops such as yours. ”

“ IRRITATION AGAINST GENERAL SARRAIL One fact which the operations in Greece had made clear was that the enemy were not at all inclined to carry out an offensive or were not in a position to do so. If they had had any such intention, no better occasion could have offered itself than at the moment when several Allied divisions had been withdrawn and when the troops were depressed by the unsuccessful offensive. If they did not know how greatly reduced was the strength of the Allied forces, they could not ignore the sending of troops to Greece. ”

“ It is the merit of the Italians if the miserable remnants of the Serbian Army, after the disastrous retreat through Albania, were saved from death by starvation, together with thousands and thousands of Serbian civilians, who found a refuge and a warm welcome in Italy, when their country was overrun by the enemy. Let us hope that in the not too distant future the Serbs will remember these facts, and also remember the many Italians who died on Serbian soil fighting for the liberation of Serbia. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But the expenditure was in a sense an economy, because it spared the wear and tear of the lorries, the renewal of which would not only have cost far more if the roads had been neglected, but they would have been difficult to replace owing to the scarcity of tonnage and submarine risks. These roads and the others built by the French and the Italians, were a magnificent legacy left to Greece and Serbia, but a few weeks of Balkan régime, after the greater Allies had handed them over, sufficed to reduce them to their original state of hopeless dilapidation and ruin once more. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Greece’s failure to meet her engagements arising from the Serbo-Greek Alliance, and later her whole attitude towards the Allies in Macedonia, culminating in the surrender of Rupel and the IV Army Corps, convinced Italian public opinion that the great majority of the Greek people were pro-German. On the other hand we were suspicious of Venizelos because he represented the Imperialist spirit of unlimited Greek expansion, and Italians did not believe that Greek Imperialism had a sound basis, because they considered that the Greeks lacked the qualities required in a race destined to rule. ”

“ But on the other hand we were even more opposed than the French or the British to the sending of fresh troops to Macedonia. The only other solution was to withdraw the Armée d’Orient altogether, or let it be starved for men and remain in idleness, with the ever-present risk of being driven into the sea by the enemy. France and Britain, who attached a little more importance than we did—though not very much more—to the Macedonian expedition, finally decided to apply for Greek help, trusting in Venizelos. ”

“ To the suggestions made by the Allies that these methods be adopted, the Serbs replied with typical Balkan vaingloriousness: “Wire entanglements and trenches are all very well for the Germans and Austrians, for the French, Italians, British or Russians, but we have no use for them; we fight in the open and drive out the enemy.” ”

“ It was impossible to punish a soldier even if he were guilty of the most infamous crime without the judgment of the committee, and the latter invariably acquitted the accused. If the idiotic blunders of Kerenski and the ignoble infamies of Lenin and Trotzky did not produce such immediate and disastrous effects in Macedonia as they did in Russia, it is because the Russians were but a small minority among the other Allied troops who were not infected by the plague. ”

“ France and Britain brought about Constantine’s fall and the return of Venizelos. We limited ourselves to occupying Epirus for a short time, as a pendant to the French occupation of Thessaly; we made ourselves still more unpopular with the Venizelists, without gaining the sympathies of the Royalists. Our true policy should have been to send important reinforcements to the East. Had we done so we should have been, after the Armistice, in a far better position to defend our own aspirations and interests in the negotiations with our Allies. ”

“ Depressed as the troops already were, the evacuation of the small tract of Serbian territory which they had reconquered with so much bloodshed, would have produced a regular débâcle, and as the Austrians at that time were offering them extremely advantageous peace terms, which an influential party in the army were prepared to accept, it was by no means impossible that the Russian collapse would have been followed by a Serbian separate peace. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Constantinople railway was interrupted at Demir Hissar, where the bridge, as we have seen, had been blown up by the French early in the war. The C.A.A. had therefore to limit the number of troops pushing north to an indispensable minimum. Nothing, however, could restrain the Serbs, irresistibly drawn forward by the longing to return to their homeland. For supplies they had to rely on lorries, and the British provided them with 300 Fords, carrying 500 kilograms each, for the roads over which heavier vehicles could not pass. ”

“ At the same time, the rest of the troops who had been fighting against us on the Stramol and Baba mountains—over 10,000 men and many batteries—surrendered to the 11th French Colonial Division near Kichevo, because it was easier of access. It was thus against a total of nearly 18,000 men with a large number of batteries and machine guns that the troops of the 35th Division, inferior in numbers and material, had fought for three days and won. Except for the fighting of the British at Lake Doiran, it had been the bitterest struggle of the great battle of the Balkans. ”

“ Thus the Russians, who were at first divided into two separate groups, were between two French divisions, the 35th Italian Division was also between two French divisions, while French units separated the Italians from the Serbs and the latter from a British and the Greeks. He knew that he did not enjoy sufficient prestige with the other Allies to be able to do what he liked with them, so that he kept French troops scattered about all over the front, and he stated that he acted thus in order to avoid incidents between Allies who did not get on with each other. ”

“ Gradually the Russian Division was dissolved, by no means a simple matter, owing to the administrative chaos in which its officers had left it. The Russian officers remaining in Macedonia or relegated to Greece did not, save a few exceptions, give a very edifying spectacle of themselves. They continued their unseemly riotous living, extravagantly spending money obtained no one knew how, and bombarded the French Intendance, to whom the liquidation of the force was entrusted, for increases of salary, advances, demobilization bonuses, etc. ”

“ The Serbs continued to advance, fighting from height to height and had even captured Hill 1050, destined to become so famous, but worn out and exhausted as they were with the long-drawn struggle and endless marching, they were unable to withstand the fierce counter-attacks of the enemy and the highest summit was lost. ”

“ There was a whole school of strategists, professional and amateur, competent and incompetent, known as the “Westerners,” who desired that every effort should be concentrated exclusively on the French and Italian fronts, and that the operations on the various Eastern fronts should be neglected or even abandoned altogether. Until the Balkan offensive of September 1918, that front, in the opinion of the great majority of the public and even in that of many political and military circles, was of small importance ”

“ The British were scattered all over the town, but most of the offices of the General Staff, which had at first been spread over three or four villas, were concentrated in a huge building, formerly a hospital and orphanage, popularly known as the “War Office,” far more commodious than the French quarters. The Serbs were modestly housed in the ex-Austrian Consulate and one or two other buildings, and the Greeks mostly in the large ex-Turkish barracks in the Place d’Armes. We were close to the Greeks in a group of small buildings, some of them constructed for the purpose by Italian soldiers. ”

“ The plan of operations of the successful battle of Psitos was his. From Rhodes he was sent to Constantinople as Military Attaché, and remained there until Turkey entered the war, when he was transferred to Athens. There he had occasion to display the most valuable activity, both in counter-espionage and in affirming Italy’s steady loyalty within the Entente. In his dealings with the French and British on more than one occasion he was able to thwart the shady manœuvres of the Germans and their Royalist satellites. ”

“ A hasty and intensive course of military training had to be imparted to all. Even the troops of the National Defence Army had but scanty notions of modern warfare, trenches, barbed wire, the scientific use of machine guns, hand grenades, camouflage, signalling, etc. As for their supply and transport services, they were even more defective, so that at first everything had to be provided and transported by the Allies, and the latter, even at the end of the campaign, had to supply the Greeks with most of their services. ”

“ If the Army of the Orient was enmeshed amidst the marshes and arid rocks of Macedonia, on the other hand that Army nailed down the whole of the Bulgarian Army, consisting of close on three-quarters of a million men,3 amply provided with artillery both Bulgarian and German, throughout the whole of the war, and for a time certain German and Turkish divisions as well, forces which might themselves have been employed elsewhere. Incidentally, the operations in Albania against the Austrians could not have been maintained without the support of the Army of the Orient on its right. ”

“ On November 17th, 1915, the Anglo-French troops were about 120,000, of whom two-thirds were French, and on the 20th a fresh British division arrived, but they were still far from the 300,000 men deemed necessary for operations on a large scale. There was another greater danger which was anything but indifferent. The Greek Army, comprised about 240,000 men, of whom half were in Macedonia, and if its military value was not very formidable, it might have, in alliance with the enemy, represented a serious menace to the Entente. ”

“ The Bulgarian advance in the Monastir area at one moment made the situation of the Allies appear really critical, because if the enemy had succeeded in breaking through the line on the mountains north of Vodena there would have been nothing more to stop them from descending to the plain and consequently penetrating into Greece, and the Allies would have had to remain besieged within the entrenched camp of Salonica. But the further they advanced the more they became exhausted, whereas while the Serbs fell back they were more and more strongly reinforced. ”

“ It should always be borne in mind that the war in Macedonia, owing to the nature of the country in which the operations took place, the scarcity of railways, roads and resources, the pestilent climate, the sparse population and the great distances which separated us from our centres of supplies, was essentially a colonial campaign. ”