Memories Of A Side-Show – Macedonia, 1918

By A.M. Woodward.

“Have you heard the news, sir?” said John, the waiter, as he brought me my lunch; “I don’t know if it’s official, but the corporal heard it from a man in the Y.M.C.A., who had it from a transport man down on the dump. The Serbs have attacked near Monastir and gained a lot of ground and taken 3,000 prisoners.” Seldom had good news reached me through such an unconvincing channel, but true it was, and it was soon confirmed in an official version.

The date was, I fancy, September 15th, 1918, and I was away, recuperating after sand-fly fever, in a charming little country hotel built by the enterprising staff of a certain gallant division among the hills behind the central sector of the British front in Macedonia.

An unwonted air of movement and preparation prevailed at the time, all due in one way or another to the “push” which I knew, vaguely as far as all details were concerned, to be forthcoming before the late Balkan summer ended. But none of the passing visitors knew that already the first page of the last chapter of the long drawn-out story of the Salonika Force had been written in that brilliant break-through between Sokol and Vetrenik which the Serbs had effected in the early morning of September 15th.

When I got back to duty at Divisional H.Q. on the afternoon of the 17th, signs of liveliness were clearly visible. The “P” Ridge and Grand Couronné and the lesser spurs which run down from the main ridge towards Lake Doiran were smoking like volcanoes with many craters under our bombardment, but the enemy artillery seemed to be making but little reply. We kept it up most of that night with varying intensity, and on the 18th at about dawn the infantry attack was launched.

Students of war will, I fancy, debate the strategy of this attack for many years to come, unless their attention is entirely absorbed with the epic deeds on the Western Front, and any detailed criticism would be presumption on my part.

One must, however, not overlook the following facts

(1) It was of vital importance to detain all possible Bulgar reserves where they could not be drawn on to check the successful advance of the Serbs, French and Greeks west of the Vardar.

(2) There was the chance of surprise effecting success in the British sector, for we were for the first time in the Balkans bombarding with gas shells. The Bulgars’ gas masks were known to be old, and might be useless, and his anti-gas drill might break down.

Moreover, if all went well in our attack, and the heights were taken and held, the whole sector from Lake Doiran to the Vardar would have to be abandoned, and the way would lie clear for us to turn the right flank of the division holding the Belashitza. And, further, this retirement would uncover the enemy railhead at Cestovo, and the main aerodrome at Hudova, for it was known that the Bulgar had no retired line on which to fall back.

“L’homme propose, mais. .” On the right of the attack all went well. A Greek Division proved – if proof were needed – that the Greeks’ capture of the Srka di Legen in May, 1918, had been no fluke, by seizing and holding the “O” trenches which had twice resisted the utmost efforts of a British Division in 1917. In justice to the latter it must be said that 16 months of bombardment had made the defences less formidable, and better lines of approach had been recognised and were now made use of. But it was, none the less, a feat showing that Greek infantry, when well trained and led, are past masters in attack.

On the left all went well at first; good progress was made up the “P” Ridge and on its lower eastern buttresses. But nests of machine guns in emplacements too strong for our artillery to demolish, and labyrinthine dugouts of concrete enabled the Bulgar to hold on, and the crest could not be won. A further effort on the fo1lowing day took us for the moment nearer the objective, but the limit of human endeavour had been reached, and the most impregnable position attacked frontally by any force during the war remained indisputably in the enemy’s hands.

Our losses were, needless to say, heavy in proportion to the numbers engaged, but the Bulgar had lost heavily too.

In the afternoon of the 19th the battle died away. All had not been in vain, one believed and hoped, for the progress west of the Vardar continued unabated, but it still remained doubtful as far as the Doiran-Vardar sector was concerned, whether we might not, after all, settle down to another winter of the same warfare of positions.

Friday left us still wondering, but before nightfall on Saturday all doubt was set at rest. Saturday, September 21st, was a memorable day, and, for a recent invalid, a strenuous one. After standing by early in the morning with some of “Q” staff to watch the arrival and settling in of the of a hastily brought up Hellenic Division, where luckily no complications arose to strain the resources of my modern Greek vocabulary, I motored to H.Q. of our left brigade, nearest the Vardar, to assist or impede Brigade Intelligence Officer in interrogating some deserters who had come in from the Bulgars the previous evening. They knew but vaguely of the Allies’ continued progress on the other side of the river, and had heard of our failure to gain the “P” Ridge and approximately knew of their losses in prisoners on that front. But of their own intentions not a word was vouchsafed, and I believe they told all they knew. More important than mere words were other noises heard during this same morning from far behind the enemy lines, followed by great jets of black smoke that rose and spread like giant stone pines outlined against the sky.

This phenomenon, new to us on the Balkan Front, was at once recognised as due to the enemy blowing up his dumps, and left no doubt that he was preparing for immediate retirement. These explosions continued till after sunset, and the sky to the northward was full of smoke and an unaccustomed, lurid glow.

On my return to D.H.Q. I found orders awaiting me to call at once on the Commander of the Hellenic Division whom I had seen that morning, and take him his instructions for the immediate future; and finally, in view of later developments, I visited him again about midnight to cancel all my messages of the afternoon. He was now to be prepared to move forward at the shortest possible notice, and it was not surprising that this warning reconciled him to the unsuitability of his camp, about which he had commented at some length when I saw him in the afternoon. .And so back to report to G.S.O. I and to bed. That same evening patrols had gone forward and found the Bulgar front-line trenches unoccupied and their forward battery positions evacuated, and by Sunday morning, 22nd, preparations for a general advance were well in hand.

Thirty-four months of waiting were at length to have their reward, and long accumulations of personal kit and office files were ruthlessly weeded out.

Before we finally moved forward I had an opportunity of investigating some of the enemy dugouts in and behind the main line. Boyau Hill yielded nothing of interest beyond striking evidence of the accuracy of our artillery fire, though several of the big characteristic double-entranced dugouts were still undamaged; and we marvelled here, as in every dugout we examined, at the excellence and abundance of the timber employed in their construction. Battery dugouts, Battalion and Regimental H.Q. all showed the same care in construction. Six inch by six inch timber must have been plentiful, and matchboarding an “issue.” Everything showed that the Bulgar had left in haste; the cook-house at Regimental H.Q. was littered with half burnt maps, but the unconsumed portion yielded some valuable salvage. Except for a single long-range gun in Boar Ravine all the guns had been got away from their positions, but shells lay in hundreds in and around the pits. Fortunately, with one or two exceptions, perhaps due to German ingenuity, there were no land-mines or booby-traps left, and the water-supplies were not contaminated or even put out of order.

The night of September 25th we spent at Bogdanci, in the abandoned billet of a German Machine Gun Company. I hope that the former occupants of my room were harassed no less than I was by the local fauna. From mosquitoes I was protected by my net, but the combined assault of sandfly and – I suspect – other minor horrors kept me awake most of the night.

Bogdanci showed us the minor horrors, but the next day was to show us the major horrors in profusion. The heat was intense, and an ammunition shed in the big dump at Cestovo provided welcome shade through the heat of the afternoon. Cestovo dump had been successfully bombed by our machines in the spring and many thousands of rounds of ammunition had gone up, but a few empty sheds were still standing. Later in the afternoon we started in our untiring Ford to cover the last stage up to our camp for the night on Costurino ridge, north of the village. The road leading up to the ridge had been the Bulgars’ via dolorosa, and for many miles it was littered with the débris of the enemy retreat. Here our machines had had the most “sitting” of targets all the previous Saturday and Sunday. The German planes did not even show above the horizon (many had been captured intact at Hudova, the rest had fled for home), the “Archies” were hastening northward with the rest of the fleeing army, and only the clouds of dust arising from the road prevented perfect shooting. The traffic congestion must have been appalling. The infantry, artillery and all other units of the Ninth Bulgarian Division pouring down from the Furka ridge and across the Cestovo Valley had been met at right angles at the foot of the Costurino ridge by a disordered stream of traffic from the Fifth Division, which had crossed the Vardar below Hudova and was making for the same road over the pass. The scene on the 26th was one of indescribable horror. Clouds of fine white dust and the smell of putrefying flesh that had lain for days under a Balkan summer sun permeated the air. Both sides of the road were lined with abandoned guns, wrecked and burnt lorries and light cars, limbers and native carts, dead horses and oxen, shells of all calibres, packs and equipment, uniform, rifles, and in general a miscellaneous jetsam baffling the imagination. Fewer dead were to be seen than might have been expected, but many were subsequently found among the scrub and in ravines below the road, where they had been left unburied or, badly wounded, had crawled to die.

Close to our camp north of the village were further signs of the hasty retreat. A German artillery camp had been abandoned almost intact, with wagons parked and tents still standing, and not even all the guns had been got away. Indeed that very morning an enemy field battery covering the retreat had come into action a few hundred yards further along the road and had been knocked out at short range by our Divisional artillery; the guns were stillstanding in their hastily dug emplacements where they had been abandoned. A touch of light relief is associated, by the way, with the abandoned camp, for here were found many giant jars of honey, one of which quickly found its way to the General’s mess. The rumour spread before long that their honey had been infected with cholera germs, and two other messes, which had also acquired jars, determined to destroy them, one by pouring the honey into the gutter, and the other still more conscientiously by burning it with petrol.

The next day we camped beside the road near Popcevo, a few miles short of Strumnitza, and I spent many hours interrogating prisoners and stragglers. Little could be gleaned with regard to the Bulgars’ intentions except that they were going back towards old Bulgaria and were not likely to make a stand in the Strumnitza Valley, and that the retreat by the Costurino road had been a mere sauve qui peut, which the officers had been powerless to restrain. A German warrant officer, who was captured dead beat by our cavalry in Strumnitza, the previous day, was unfortunately too exhausted to be interrogated at length, for he had come from the west of Vardar and had had 72 hours, without sleep, in the saddle.

Interest was further aroused by the arrival in a powerful limousine with a white flag, of the Secretary of the American Legation at Sofia, with a Bulgarian major from Headquarters. They were, I fancy, carrying a duplicate of the message brought by the Parlementaire who came into our lines on the 26th, as stated in General Milne’s despatch. (Gazette, January 22^nd Times, January 23rd, 1919.)

Next morning, 29th, I rode early into Strumnitza, where some zoo stragglers from the Bulgar Army had given themselves up to our cavalry when they entered the town, and many more sick and wounded were found abandoned in a hospital. That night we camped in a picturesque orchard west of Strumnitza, and the next day after further interrogatories of the stragglers in the town, I rode on towards Hamzali, the village fixed as our camp for that night, close under the hills forming the north wall of the Strumnitza Valley. Hamzali, however, we were not destined to reach, and halted at Petralic, a poor hamlet 2 1/2 miles to the south, whence we saw the enemy shelling with their mountain guns and howitzers the road between us and Hamzali. A stubborn rearguard action was in progress, and Brigade Headquarters close to the outskirts of Hamzali were not feeling too comfortable, in the scanty cover given by a wide-spaced orchard.

Meanwhile the Hellenic Divisions on our right, who had come up at a splendid pace, were likewise faced with the prospect of a rearguard action in and about the village of Yeni-Keui, and artillery fire was lively till late into the night. But neither our attack nor that of the Greeks was destined to be pushed home, for, as some of us knew before midnight, and the remainder early next morning, the convention had been signed by which hostilities were to cease at noon the next day, September 30th.

After a few days’ halt at Petralic we turned eastwards down the Strumnitza Valley, then north by the fine high road which runs beside the Struma. We were, however, ordered to turn eastwards before reaching Sofia, and struck up and across the northern spurs of the great Rila massif, past Samakov, where a visit to the American Agricultural School and Missionary College revealed a pleasant oasis of civilisation, and thence through a magnificent pine forest in which were dotted many nouveau art chalets of the plutocracy of Sofia, down to Kostenets, on the Sofia-Constantinople railway. Three more long days’ trek by road, of which the most interesting feature was a halt in Philippopolis and a night spent in the barracks there, recently vacated by our British officer prisoners, brought us to Mustafa Pasha, on the Maritza, where our Division, which had come round through Sofia by train, was assembled for its threat to Adrianople. Within a day or two of my arrival there came news of the armistice with Turkey, and before we left, for the Danube by rail, hostilities with Austria and then with Germany had terminated.

The cessation of hostilities on our front did not mean that the duties of an intelligence officer had ceased. Evidence of enemy identifications was still needed, especially regarding the German units attached to the Bulgarian Army. Documents and shoulder-straps, limbers and lorries might all yield valuable information as to the German units which had shed them in their retreat. A single post-card, or even a temperature chart from a dismantled field hospital might, and I fancy often did, actually solve questions as to the presence on the Macedonian front of a unit presumed, but never previously confirmed as present.

Of course one’s search was often comparatively or even entirely fruitless. Some abandoned lorries yielded nothing at all, and one promising-looking heap of correspondence, which I toiled a long way to examine, proved to belong to the sanitary section attached to the non-combatant company in charge of the Bulgar Ninth Divisional Gardens – not a very formidable unit! But on the whole the interest continued all the time during which we followed the route of the enemy retreat, and I am left with the impression that intelligence officers have a good deal in common in their methods, on the I one hand with rag-pickers, and on the other with archaeological explorers.