In the winter of 1914 the Serbian army had been obliged to withdraw,
leaving Valjevo to the Austrians. The retrograde movement had to
continue; Belgrade was abandoned at the end of November, and the
people from those northern and western parts of the country could not
resign themselves to waiting for the enemy, after the manner in which
he had behaved. Terror-stricken fugitives began to block the roads and
to impede the movements of the army. Everywhere was panic. It is
remarkable that the Serbian Government at Ni[vs] chose this time
(November 24) for making to the National Skup[vs]tina the first
Declaration[87] that they proposed to carry on the War until "we have
delivered and united all our brothers who are not yet free, Serbs,
Croats and Slovenes." (Later on when old King Peter after many trials
managed to reach Durazzo he was given a few hours' notice in which to
leave that place; he was also thrust out of Brindisi by the Italians
because he declined to repudiate this Declaration.) "Machen Sie
Ordnung" would soon be heard. Even the army, unaccustomed to defeat,
was losing its self-possession. Putnik, the revered old strategist,
declared that he could do no more. No longer in his over-heated room,
struggling with asthma, could the famous marshal evolve a plan. And
then it happened that General Mi[vs]i['c], placed in command of the
first army, determined, after studying the situation, to risk
everything on a last throw. Mi[vs]i['c] was a quiet, methodical little
man, whose optimism was always based on knowledge--in the intervals
between Serbia's former campaigns he had won distinction as Professor
of Strategy. He now caused 1400 young students, the flower of the
nation, to be appointed non-commissioned officers; he likewise
produced a most brilliant scheme of operations, so that the whole army
was fired with enthusiasm, and so irresistibly did they attack that by
December 13 not a single armed Austrian remained in the country.
Ernest Haeckel, the great professor, had said at Jena that the native
superiority of the German nation conferred on them the right to occupy
the Balkans, Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia, excluding from these
parts the weaker and inferior peoples who were living there. On
December 15 King Peter made a triumphal entry into Belgrade--a
Hungarian flag which had floated from the Palace was employed as a
carpet on the steps of the cathedral when the King proceeded thither
with his generals to give thanks for the miraculous success of
Serbia's army. Once more the famous little town, the "white town" that
is throned so splendidly above the plain where two wide rivers meet,
was in possession of the Serbs. Against this rampart many human waves
have broken--Attila and his Huns encamped on the plain, the Ostrogoths
appeared, Justinian built the city walls, then came the Avars and
Charlemagne and the Franks, the Bulgars, the Byzantines, the Magyars.
The white town, Beli Grad or Beograd, which we call Belgrade--Wizzenburch
was the old German name--has a glorious past and surely a
magnificent future.
When the Serbs came back to Belgrade in December 1914, the total of
Austrian prisoners was more numerous than the Serbian combatants. But
35,000 of these prisoners, together with 250,000 Serbs of all ages and
106 Serbian and Allied doctors, were now to succumb to the plague of
typhus, which the Austrian troops had carried from Galicia. Hospitals
were hurried out from France and Great Britain; heroic work was done
by women and by men; doctors operated day and night--in the hospitals
the patients were so closely packed that it was impossible to step
between them.
"In Skoplje," says Colonel Morrison, who in civil life is senior
surgeon to the Queen's Hospital, Birmingham--"in Skoplje a British
unit was installed in a large factory accommodating over 1000 medical
and surgical patients. Besides their inherent unsuitability the
premises were detestably insanitary and the floor space overcrowded to
its utmost capacity. On the ground floor I saw 250 men lying on sacks
of straw packed closely together, covered only by their ragged uniform
under a blanket. Gangrenous limbs and septic compound fractures were
common, the stench being overpowering; yet every window was closely
shut." He tells how seven out of the members of the British staff went
down with typhus. At U[vz]ice he found over 700 patients crammed into
rooms containing about 500 beds; many were lying on the bare floor;
others were on sacks of straw; others on raised wooden platforms in
series of six men side by side. Often one would see an elderly
warrior, who had been wounded a week or two previously, being jolted
along in an ox-cart with several civilians who were suffering from
typhus--all trying to find a hospital that could take them in. And
meanwhile it was necessary to reorganize the army: all the men between
the ages of seventeen and fifty-five were called to the colours,
including those whom the doctors had declared to be totally unfit for
military service.