Aleksandra's Note: The following testimony comes from
Fortier Jones, a young American from Texas who, in 1915, left his studies
at Columbia University in New York to join the WWI Relief Effort in Serbia. He
arrived in the summer of 1915, in time to get to know the Serbian lands and the
Serbian people during a relatively peaceful respite in the First World
War, before the Central Powers, with Germany leading the assault,
began pounding Belgrade in October of 1915. That was
the beginning of the "modern" 20th century and the use of a new kind
of devastating warfare from the sky.
The assault on Serbia by the Central Powers in October of 1915 would lead to Serbia's Great Retreat, an epic event in the history of mankind that has few parallels.
The memoir "With Serbia into Exile" by Fortier Jones was published in 1916, so his references to "last year" refer to 1915.
I'm very grateful for such testimonies. They tell the true story in ways that the official versions of history often ignore.
Sincerely,
Aleksandra Rebic
*****
From Chapter One
"Battle Lines at Peace"
of:
WITH SERBIA INTO EXILE
An American's Adventures With The Army
That Cannot Die.
By Fortier Jones
I have to thank a man on a Broadway express for the fact that at the
close of September, 1915, I found myself in a remote valley of the Bosnian
mountains. The preceding June (of 1915), this person, unknown to me, threw a
day-old newspaper at my feet, and because it fell right side up, I became aware
that men were wanted to do relief work in Serbia. In an hour I had become part
of the expedition, in a week I had been “filled full” of small-pox, typhus, and
typhoid vaccines and serums. Three weeks more found me at Gibraltar (British
territory on the southern end of the Iberian peninsula at the entrance of the
Mediterranean) enduring the searching, and not altogether amicable examination
of a young British officer, and within a month I was happily rowing with hotel keepers
in Saloniki, [same as “Salonica”, or “Thessaloniki”, the
second-largest city in Greece and the capital of Macedonia] having just learned in the voyage across
the Mediterranean that submarines were at work in that region. With a swiftness
that left little time for consideration, the next few weeks passed in camp
organization in Nish, in praying that our long-delayed automobiles would come,
and in getting acquainted with a country about which I had found but little
trustworthy information in America.
Then, because an English woman, Miss Sybil Eden, with the intrepidity
[resolution, bravery] and clear-sightedness which I later found characteristic
of British women, decided that relief must be carried where, on account of
great transportation difficulties, it had never been before, I spent six
wonderful weeks among the magnificent mountains of Bosnia at the tiny village
of Dobrun.
On a certain day near the end of this sojourn my story of the great
retreat properly begins. I sat chatting with a Serbian captain of engineers
beside a mountain stream six miles behind the Drina River, where for almost a
year two hostile armies had sat face to face, watching intently but fighting
rarely. It was a beautiful day, typical of the Bosnian autumn. The sunshine was
delightfully warm and drowsy; the pines along the rugged slopes above us showed
dull green and restful, while the chestnut grove near which we sat showered
hosts of saffron leaves into the clear stream at our feet. Overhead an almost
purple sky was flecked with fluffy clouds that sailed lazily by. Peace filled
the Dobrun valley, peace rested unnaturally, uncannily over the length and
breadth of beautiful Serbia, and our talk had been of the preceding months of
quiet, unbroken except for vague, disturbing rumors that were now taking more
definite form and causing the captain grave concern.
[...]
Talking to the captain there on the river-bank, I remarked that this
year of peace in war seemed strange to me. When first I came to Serbia in July
I had heard a rumor of a great Teutonic drive through the country. Mackensen
had massed half a million men along the Danube, it was said, and German troops
were coming. The Austrian commander would lead, and the way to Constantinople
up the Morava valley would be opened with Bulgaria’s aid. But everywhere things
were quiet. Along the Sava and the Danube, affairs might not be so sociable as
at Vishegrad, but were just as peaceful. As I knew her last summer [he is referring to 1915], Serbia was a land of pleasant places. There was still destitution
among her refugees, but the traces of war were fast being obliterated. For a
year she had been resting, merely toying with war, building up her army in
every possible way after its wonderful victory against an invading force that
outnumbered it three to one. [“Invading
force” refers to the Austrians who had invaded in 1914.]
[...]
After a while the rain stopped, and we made good time on the perfectly
level road that runs along the broad floor of the Morava valley, which many
ages ago served as an easy highway for the Third Crusade. For miles on each
side stretched smooth fields of Indian corn, small grains, and magnificent
truck-gardens. Despite the primitive methods of agriculture, the Morava valley,
which runs almost the length of Serbia, is one great garden plot, and is as
beautiful and fertile as the valley of the Loire, in France. Last summer
(1915), viewing this valley and its lesser counterparts along the Mlava, the
Timok, and in the Stig country, the possibility of famine in such a rich land
seemed too remote to consider. There were many workers in the fields, but all
were women and children. It was they who gathered the ripened corn into the
primitive ox-carts, reaped with scythes the waving wheat and rye, or plowed
with wooden shares the rich, black loam. Women drove the farm stock along the highways,
women filled the market-places in every village, and women for the most part
waited upon us in the cafes. Almost the only men we saw were the lonely
cheechas [older men] sparsely scattered along the railway to guard the bridges from
the spies that lurked everywhere. We passed many prosperous villages in which,
with the exception of the scarcity of men, life seemed to move on prosaically
as in times of peace. We stopped and looked over the large sugar mills at
Chupriya, now silent on account of the war and the scarcity of labor, and we
passed some of Serbia’s best coal mines. Finally, at dusk, we came to Polanka
through a narrow road where the mud was so bad that we had to be hauled out.
From Polanka we had come next day for lunch at Semendria, and after a
pleasant chat with the prefect and his son, a very likable young fellow with
happy manners, we took the road to Belgrade. For fifteen or twenty kilometers
the way ran on the bank of the Danube, there being barely room for a first-line
trench between it and the river. Three hundred yards away the Austrian trenches
were in plain sight across the river, though sometimes masked behind
willow-trees. Leaving Semendria by way of the old fruit-market, where there
were for sale at very low prices unlimited quantities of white and purple
grapes, huge plums, large red apples, figs, pears, and fine peaches, we were at
once exposed to the fire of the enemy’s cannon. Only there was no fire. The
guns were there, the trenches, and the men, but unconcernedly we sailed along
for an hour, flaunting our car in their faces, as it were, without calling
forth as much as a rifle-shot. This was disappointing, for we had been told
that they seldom let automobiles pass without taking a pot-shot or two, and for
the first time since coming to Serbia we had seemed in a fair way for a war
thrill. The Serbian trench was deserted except for sentries at great intervals,
but higher up in the vineyards, on the other side of us, were more trenches
and, beyond these, dug-outs where the soldiers lived.
Now on another such day, two months later, suddenly a rain of shells
began on that town and stretch of road. It continued for forty-eight hours
until there was no town and no road and no trench. Then across that quiet,
beautiful river men set out by fifties from the Austrian side in large,
flat-bottomed boats and, confident that nothing remained alive on the other
shell-torn shore, made a landing. They were met by men who for two days had sat
crouched in dug-outs under an unparalleled fire. The fighting that ensued was
not war deluxe, with all the brilliant, heartless mechanisms of modern war. It
was with rifle and bayonet and bomb and knives and bare hands, and it raged for
a long time, until finally the enemy was driven back across the river, leaving
more than a thousand men behind. Only at
Posharevats did they cross. The rear guard at Semendria was nearly annihilated
but it won the fight. An eye-witness, writing in the “Nineteenth Century,”
gives this description:
'There was no demoralization amongst the survivors in the river trenches.
For that the Serbian temperament has to be thanked, which is perhaps after all
only the temperament of any unspoiled population of agricultural peasants that
live hard lives and have simple ideas. The effect of the bombardment had rolled
off them like water off a duck’s back, and they set to [proceeded] in the twilight
and bombed and shot the landing parties off their side of the river with great
energy and application.’
So that was what was hanging over the sunshiny peace of road that we so
blithely sped along, while the two prosaic looking battle lines watched each
other across the Danube – at peace.
[Aleksandra's note: Mr. Jones moves back
and forth in time in his narrative, so don’t get confused by that. There
are times in his narrative when he talks about something that will happen in
the future as he is describing the present time, etc.]
In the late dusk we came to the heights behind Belgrade, and
looked down on the lights of the city strung along the Sava and the Danube,
while just beyond the river the towers of Semlin gleamed in the waning light.
London and Paris were dark every evening last summer [1915], but Belgrade,
always within range of the Austrian guns, was lit up as usual.
With the exception of the section along the rivers that had been
bombarded during the first invasion, and one hotel on the main street, which a
shell had demolished, Belgrade might have been the capital of a nation at
peace. The street cars were not running, but in such a little city no one
missed them. We ran up a very rough street and placed the car in the yard of a
private residence. Then M. Todolich took us over to his home which, when the
capital was moved to Nish, he had had to lock up and leave like all the other
government officials. One could see the pride of the home-loving Serb as he
showed us over the charming little villa built around a palm-filled court where
a small fountain played. Belgrade, being the only one of their cities which the
Serbs have had the time and resources to make modern, I found them all very
proud of it, with an almost personal affection for each of its urbane
conveniences. With great enthusiasm monsieur showed us the mysteries of his
very up-to-date lighting and heating apparatus.
'All the Serbian homes must be so some day when peace comes
to us,’ he said earnestly. His was typical of many homes in Belgrade before
October 6.
In a fairly good
hotel we spent the night…I was awake early next morning and, dressing
hurriedly, went out into the brilliant August sunshine. The air was wonderfully
clear and bracing. Newsboys cried along the streets, which many sweepers were
busily at work cleaning. Nothing but peace in Belgrade! Searching out the automobile,
I found a curious audience around it. There was Mitar, twelve years old, as
straight as a young birch, with blue-black hair that fell in soft curls to his
shoulders, and jetty eyes that peered with burning curiosity into every crevice
of the motor, which he feared to touch. His beautiful body was tightly clothed
in a dull-green jersey and white trousers that ended at the knees and left
bare, sturdy legs very much bronzed. And there was his little brother Dushan,
age seven, with still longer hair, but a dark brown, large hazel eyes, pug
nose, and freckled face, furnished with a toothless grin, for he was at that
exciting age when one loses a tooth almost every day. He stood behind his big
brother and admonished him not to touch the car. In the seat, bravest of the
lot, saucy, impudent, naughty, sat Milka, age five, dressed in a blue wisp of
cloth that left tiny throat and arms and legs bare to the summer sun. She had
hold of the wheel, and was kicking at the foot levers in wild delight, quite
obviously driving that battered Ford at ten thousand miles a minute. But when
suddenly she heard the step of the funny-looking American, one screech of
laughter and fear, and Milka, like a flying-squirrel, was safe on the doorstep,
demurely smiling. I tried to coax her back, but could not. Even when I lifted
the hood, and Mitar danced about with excitement at the sight of the dirty
engine thus disclosed, and Dushan stood with eyes of wonder, Milka remained
smiling at me, posed for flight. As I worked about the car, a woman came out of
the house toward me. I heard her light step upon the paved court and looked up.
She was dark, not very tall, but dignified and wonderfully graceful, as all
Serbian women are. Smiling pleasantly, she offered me a tray of the inevitable Slatko.
This is a time-honored custom in Serbia, and is observed very generally,
though, of course, as Western ideas come in, the old customs go. When a guest
comes to a Serbian home, the hostess—always the hostess in person—brings in a
tray with preserved fruits. On it are spoons, and the order for each guest to
help himself to a spoonful of slatko, place the spoon in a water-filled
receptacle, and take a glass of water. Then Turkish coffee follows, and a
liqueur, usually plum brandy, from the home-made store which every Serbian home
keeps. It is a sort of good-fellowship pledge and charming in its simplicity.
Now the lady of the house was observing the honored rights of the slatko to
this foreigner who late the evening before had deposited a very muddy automobile
in her courtyard.
There was till a good half hour before M. Todolich would be ready,
so I determined to take the children riding, my ulterior motive being to win
over Milka. They had never been in an automobile before. We rolled the car out
of the court, and started the engine. No sooner had the automobile appeared in
the street than the neighborhood became alive with children, all running toward
us, the traces of half-finished breakfasts showing on many of their faces. I
piled them all in, on top of each other…Milka had deigned to come to the
sidewalk, where I pretended not to notice her, but took my seat at the wheel.
If you had never, never had a ride in an automobile, and would like to very,
very much, and if your were to see one just about to go away with everyone else
in it and you left behind, what would you do?
Milka did not set up a yell or smash anything. No, at five she
knew a better way than that. Calmly, but very quickly, before the automobile
could possibly get away, she stepped upon the running-board, pushed two
youngsters out of her way, bobbed up between me and the wheel, climbed upon my
knee, and gave me, quite as if it had been for love alone, a resounding kiss on
the cheek. I am sure she might have had a thousand Fords if she could have got
in one such coup with the great Detroit manufacturer. So on that cloudless
August morning we had a “joy ride” through the streets of Belgrade, and the
noise we made could, I know, be heard in the enemy-lines. This was only a few
short weeks before the sixth of October, 1915.
Of
course, war is war, but let us get a picture. Suppose on a perfect day in
Indian summer you sat in that tiny, flower-filled court with the hospitable
mother, Mitar, the handsome, Dushan, the cautious, and Milka, the coquettish.
As you romp with the children, you hear distantly a dull clap of thunder, just
as if a summer shower were brewing. A second, a third clap, and you walk out to
the entrance to scan the sky. It is deep blue and cloudless, but away over the
northern part of the city, while you look, as if by magic, beautiful, shiny
white cloudlets appear far up in the crystal sky, tiny, soft, fluffy things
that look like a baby’s powder-puff, and every time one appears a dull bit of
thunder comes to you. For twelve months off and on you have seen this sight.
You think of it as a periodic reminder that your nation and the one across the
way are at war. You know that heretofore those powder-puffs have been directed
at your own guns on the hills behind the city and at the entrenchments down by
the river. But there are many things you do not know. You do not know, for
instance, that Mackensen is just across the river now with a great Teutonic
army outnumbering your own forces five or six to one. You do not know that for
weeks the Austrian railways have been piling up mountains of potential
powder-puffs behind Semlin, and bringing thousands of ponderous machines
designed to throw said puffs not only at the forts and trenches, but at your
flower-filled court and its counterparts throughout the city. You do not know
that aeroplanes are parked by fifties beyond Semlin, and loaded to capacity
with puffs that drop a long, long way and blossom in fire and death wherever
they strike. You do not know that from a busy group of men in Berlin an order
has gone out to take your city and your nation at any cost, and if you knew
these things, it would now be too late. For as you look, in a few brief
moments, the thunderstorm rolls up and covers the city, such a thunderstorm as
nature, with all her vaunted strength, has never dared to manufacture. Mitar
and Dushan and Milka stop their play. Worried, the woman comes out and stands
with you. You say the firing is uncommonly heavy today, but it will mean
nothing, and as you say this, you notice the powder puffs on the slopes of the
hills far short of the forts and over the town itself. High above you to of
them suddenly appear, and the storm begins in your region, in the street in
front of you, on the homes of your neighbors. With increasing rapidity the rain
falls now, five to the minute, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five every sixty
seconds, and every drop is from fifty pounds to a quarter of a ton of whirling
steel, and in the hollow heart of each are new and strange explosives that,
when they strike, shake the windows out of your house.
Looking toward Semlin, you see the aeroplanes rising in fleets.
Some are already over the city, directing the fire of the guns across the
river, and others are dropping explosive bombs, incendiary bombs, and darts. In
a dozen places already the city is blazing terribly. A thin, shrill, distant
sound comes to you and the waiting woman, almost inaudible at first, but
quivering like a high violin note. It rises swiftly in a crescendo, and you
hear it now tearing down the street on your left, a deafening roar that yet is
sharp, snarling, wailing. Two hundred yards away a three story residence is
lifted into the air, where it trembles like jelly, and drops, a heap of debris,
into the street. Your friend lives there. His wife, his children, are there, or
were, until that huge shell came. Milka, Dushan, and Mitar have come in time to
see their playmates’ home blown to atoms. Without waiting for anything, you and
the quiet, frightened woman seize the children and start out of the city. As
you come to the road that winds tortuously to the hills behind the town, you
see that it is black with thousands and thousands of men and women dragging
along screaming Mitars and Dushans and Milkas. Hovering above this road, which
winds interminably on the exposed hillside before it reaches the sheltering
crest, flit enemy aeroplanes, and on the dark stream below they are dropping
bombs.
There is no other road. You know you must pass along beneath
those aeroplanes. You look at the woman and the children, and wonder who will
pay the price. Oh, for a conveyance now! If only the American were here with
his automobile, how greatly would he increase the children’s chances! Carriages
are passing, but you have no carriage. Railway-trains are still trying to leave
the city, but there is literally no room to hang on the trains, and the line is
exposed to heavy fire. Only slowly can you go with the children down the street
already clogged with debris. Now in front you see a friend with his family, the
mother and four children. They are in a coupe, drawn by good horses. How
fortunate! The children recognize one another. Milka shouts a greeting. She is
frightened, but of course does not realize the danger. Even as she is answered
by her playmate in the carriage, all of you are stunned by a terrible blast,
and there is no family or carriage or horses any more. There is scarcely any
trace of them. The fierce hunger of a ten-inch shell sent to wreck great forts
is scarcely appeased by one little family, and, to end its fury, blows a crater
many feet across in the street beyond. Along with you, Mitar has realized what
is going on, and not the least of the trouble that overwhelms you is to see the
knowledge of years drop in a minute on his childish face when those comrades
are murdered before his eyes. If he gets out of this inferno and lives a
hundred years, he will never shake off that moment. The shell has blown a
crater in his soul, and because he is a Serb, that crater will smoke and
smolder and blaze until the Southern Slav is free from all which unloosed that
shell or until he himself is blown beyond the sway even of Teutonic arms. He
grasps his mother’s hand and drags her on.
Now you are in the outskirts of the city. No word can be spoken
because of the constant roar of your own and the enemy’s guns—a roar
unfaltering and massive, such as in forty-eight hours sixty thousand huge
projectiles alone could spread over the little city. On the road you pass
frequently those irregular splotches of murder characteristic of bomb-dropping.
Here only one man was blown to pieces by a precious bomb, yonder two women and
a child, farther along eight people, men, women, and children lie heaped. Here
again only a child was crippled, both feet or a hand gone. It is hard to be
accurate when sailing high in the air, hard even for those ‘fearless’ men who
with shrapnel bursting around their frail machines calmly drop death upon women
and children…
Two loyal subjects of the Kaiser were dexterously dropping bombs
on Kragujevats one morning. They pitched some at the arsenal, which they
missed, and some at the English women’s hospital camp, which they hit, one bomb
completely destroying all the unit’s store of jam. A nurse was a few feet away,
unaware that anything was threatening until orange marmalade showered her. Then
she and all her colleagues went out into the open to watch the brave Germans.
They were sailing about nicely enough until a stray piece of shrapnel hit their
gas tank. Then the eagle became a meteor, which by the time it lighted in the
middle of the camp, was burned out. The two obedient subjects of the German
emperor were incoherent bits of black toast, and the women came and picked
souvenirs off the aeroplane. They showed them to me.
So you passed with the mother and children by these
patches of horror that mark the trail of the newest warfare.
Or perhaps you lingered in the city until the second evening,
when no one any longer dared to linger even in the scattered sheltered spots.
Perhaps with the mother, Mitar, Dushan, and Milka, you came out at dusk of the
second day, when the remnant of the population was leaving, when the enemy had
effected their crossing, and hand-to-hand combat raged down by the river, when
the guns were being dragged away to new positions, and the troops were falling
hurriedly back. If you did, you left in a final spurt of the bombardment, and
on the crest of the hills behind Belgrade you stopped to look back for the last
time on that city. The city that in future years you may come back to will have
nothing in common with the one you are leaving except location. Major Elliot,
of the British marines, stopped at this time to look back. A few days later he
told me what he saw. There was a dump-heap, an ash pile, several miles in
extent, lying along the Sava and the Danube. In hundreds of spots great beds of
live coals glowed, in hundreds of others roaring flames leaped high into the
sky, and over the remaining dark spaces of the heap, where as yet no
conflagration raged, aeroplanes, sailing about, were dropping bombs that fell
and burst in wide sprays of liquid fire, sprinkling the city with terrible
beauty. Thirty or forty to the minute huge shells were bursting in the town.
You may get away with the family, or you may not. You and the
mother may be killed, and Mitar left to lead the younger ones. All three may be
blown to pieces, and only you two left with the memory of it. More than seven
thousand just like you and yours, hundreds of Mitars with bright dreams and
curling hairs, hundreds of little, freckled pug-nosed Dushans, hundreds of
dainty, laughing Milkas, reddened the rough paving stones of Belgrade or
smoldered beneath the glowing ruins of homes such as M. Todolich had proudly
shown me.
[Aleksandra's Note: in the following
text Mr. Jones goes back to an earlier time in 1915, before the above
described assault by the Central Powers on October 6.]
[…]
Another trip which I made from Nish to Zajechar along the valley
of the Timok further revealed to me the vast, potential resources of Serbia. We
saw little armies on this trip, because we were along the Bulgarian frontier,
and it was then too early for Serbia to have heavy forces massed there.
Everywhere the peasants pointed to the eastward and told us: ‘There lies the
Bulgarian frontier. There it is, just on top of that mountain. From here it is
only half an hour’s walk.’ They spoke of it as if it were a thing alive, which
was being held back by them by main strength and awkwardness, and they spoke of
it with awe. How well, in that peaceful summer, they realized what a move on
the Bulgarian frontier would mean to them.
During this year of peace in war there was no anxiety on the
part of the Serbs as to their Austrian frontiers. I spoke to scores of officers
and soldiers, and not once was anything but confidence expressed. But their
frontier to the east they almost without exception distrusted. I do not think
that there was one Serbian in Serbia who did not firmly believe that Bulgaria
would attack when fully prepared. It was a thing that called for no more
discussion, a thing so patent to all observers of affairs in the Balkans that
only allied diplomacy was too stupid to see. I know now that while I was
talking to the captain about it, there in Bosnia, the English papers were full
of an entente cordiale with Bulgaria, but also as we talked that afternoon, an
orderly rode up, handing his superior a note. The captain glanced at it and
turned to me. ‘At last,’ he said in French. ‘The blue order has come. We must
be ready to go in half an hour.’ [Aleksandra's Note: This is the same Serbian captain
that Mr. Jones describes at the beginning of the chapter, in the first few
paragraphs.]
And this for me was the bell that rang up the curtain on what
is, without doubt, one of the greatest tragedies our century will see. It came
on a nation almost as much at peace as Belgium was, a country much larger than
Belgium, with no good roads, with no France, no England to offer refuge,
nothing but wild mountains devoid of food. It came not in the days of summer,
when shelter is a habit and not a necessity, but at the beginning of the savage
Balkan winter, when a roof very frequently means life, and it lasted not three
or four weeks, but ten.
Fortier Jones
With Serbia into Exile, 1916
*****
If you would like to get in touch with me, Aleksandra, please feel free to contact me at heroesofserbia@yahoo.com
*****
