It was the front where the war which seemed to have no end finally turned, where the world’s first truly global military force was assembled and where air power’s deadly potential was first demonstrated, but only now, a century after World War I began in the Balkans with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 in Sarajevo, is it being slowly rescued from the footnotes of history.
This month, French Junior Minister of Defense Jean-Marc Todeschini flew to Greece “to repair the injustice” by opening the first museum dedicated to the Salonica Front.
The fact that it consists of only two small rooms in the gatehouse of the vast Allied cemetery at Zeitenlick is not likely to mollify its veterans’ ghosts.
Photo: AFP
“They saw themselves as the ‘Forgotten Army’ even as they were fighting,” British historian Alan Wakefield said, their story “just too strange” for the usual Great War narrative.
You only have to walk through graves of the long-haired Moroccan spahi cavalry, Senegalese riflemen, Berber zouaves, Vietnamese Buddhists and Malagasy animists who fell for France — all incongruously marked by crosses — to realize this was not the same war you read about at school.
If few historians today stress how the Allies’ Macedonia campaign hastened the end of the slaughter, German commander General Erich Ludendorff was in no doubt at the time.
As his memoirs make clear that the stunning breakthrough Serb and French troops made on the top of 2,000m Macedonian mountains in September 1918 convinced him the war was lost.
“In this situation I felt incumbent upon me the heavy responsibility of hastening the end of the war,” he wrote.
Yet for decades the soldiers who won that victory were dismissed as slackers, the “Gardeners of Salonica,” tending their grapes in the Mediterranean sun while their comrades died in the mud of Flanders.
It is true, Wakefield said, that Allied soldiers in Salonica — now called Thessaloniki — were 20 times more likely to fall victim to malaria, dysentery or venereal disease than a bullet, bayonet or bombardment, but life inside its barbed wire defenses, known as the “Birdcage,” was not the endless of round of cafe, music hall and brothel visits that many back home imagined.
The region had already been ravaged by two Balkans wars and had trouble feeding its own people when Allied troops landed in neutral Greece in 1915, too late to save the valiant Serbs from defeat.
The Serbs’ retreat with terrible losses through the snows of Albania was another of the war’s great, rarely told stories.
“Serbs were then the heroes of the free, progressive world,” Serbian Consul Sinsia Pavic said, standing outside an ossuary that holds the bones of 6,000 of his countrymen. “People forget we lost one in three of our male population in World War I.”
Salonica was already a Babel — capital of what was then the mostly ethnically and religiously diverse corner of Europe, Thessaloniki Mayor Yiannis Boutaris said — before the arrival of troops and laborers from all over the world.
They came from France, Britain, Russia, Italy, India, north, west and central Africa, Japan, China, Vietnam and Madagascar, not to mention a Czech legion and the broken remnants of the Serb army.
Then a majority-Jewish city, it had a sizeable Greek and Turkish population that included the Donme, descendants of Jews who had converted to Islam, but its cosmopolitan exoticism was not to everyone’s taste.
Captain Cyril Falls, the official British historian of the front, described it as a hugely overcrowded “nest of spies.”
“In its tawdry fashion Salonika [Salonica] undoubtedly was gay, but the tawdriness was more notable than the gaiety; the very women of pleasure were the last reserves of the Army of Aphrodite,” Falls wrote.
The distractions did not end there.
The neighboring countryside produced the world’s best opium, fine hashish and Turkish tobacco, and to top it all, Russian troops revolted in sympathy with the October Revolution.
Against such odds a succession of dashing French generals managed to meld these disparate troops into a formidable multinational fighting force that swept north as far as Hungary in an almighty push in the autumn of 1918.
Another army wing turned through Bulgaria and Romania, while the British — who had sent the mostly Irish survivors of Gallipoli up into the snows of the Macedonian mountains in shorts and tropical kit to stop the Bulgarians — pushed on to occupy Istanbul, then still called Constantinople.
“Just organizing commemorations, you get some idea of the logistical headaches they must have had,” Wakefield said. “Everybody does everything differently.”
Indeed, another museum about the front has been delayed because of a cross-border political row.
Survivors of the campaign produced two extraordinary novels, Stratis Myrivilis’ Greek anti-war masterpiece Life in the Tomb and Capitaine Conan by Roger Vercel — later filmed by French director Bertrand Tavernier.
It follows the French troops who made the key breakthrough alongside the Serbs to Ukraine, where many would die fighting for the anti-communist “White” Russians against the “Red” Russian Bolsheviks.
“Before I entered the trenches I had not the slightest inkling of life’s true worth,” Myrivilis wrote. “Now I treasure its moments one by one.”
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion