Encountering ‘the Most Remarkable Army of All Times’: Inter-Allied Relations and Military Hierarchies in Macedonia During the First World War

Introduction

On 9 September 1917, a British officer, Captain Arthur Donovan Young, reflected on how much the northern Greek city of Salonika had changed since he had first marched through in October 1915. He had arrived at the inception of the theatre of war in Macedonia as a reinforcement for the 10th (Irish) Division, which, after a brief yet gruelling experience at Gallipoli, had spearheaded an ultimately unsuccessful effort to assist Serbia alongside French troops. ¹ Although compelled to retire after a brief foray into Serbia, with the country overrun by a far larger Bulgarian, German and Austro-Hungarian force, the British and French had remained and built up their own forces, joined subsequently by those of the other Allies. ² As his unit made its way across the Aegean Sea, Captain Young explained how Salonika had since become ‘a base for the most remarkable army of all times’. He wrote of British, French, Italian, Russian, Serbian, Greek and Montenegrin troops ‘fighting shoulder to shoulder’, all part of the multinational Armées Alliées en Orient (Allied Armies in the East) under the French commander General Maurice Sarrail. ³

Although certainly an impressive collection of armies, Captain Young appreciated that conducting the war in such a diverse coalition presented significant challenges. His attention centred on those encountered by his superiors, remarking that the ‘difficulties of commanding such an Army must be staggering’. ⁴ His former Commander-in-Chief, Sir George Francis Milne, expressed the same view in a lecture given in 1939 at the Uruguayan Ministry of War, where he noted that ‘[s]uch a medley did not conduce to cooperation’, a state of affairs he considered exacerbated by the unpopularity of Sarrail. ⁵ Sarrail, for his part, sought to defend his record in his memoir, unsurprisingly so given France's allies had secured his removal in December 1917, and characterised the British, Italians and Greeks as obstacles to his command. ⁶ Sir William Robertson, the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff between 1916 and 1918 and a vehement wartime critic of deploying British forces away from the Western Front, wrote even more strongly of the difficulties of coalition warfare, disregarding the Allied force as a ‘[m]ilitary salad’, an undoubted pun on the French word ‘Macédoine’. He felt political decision-makers had failed to appreciate that ‘the employment of troops of different armies in the same operation is attended with many difficulties and complications’, all of which reduced ‘the aggregate fighting value of the force’. ⁷

Undoubtedly guided by such post-war criticisms, historians have largely explored the coalition dimensions of the Macedonian campaign only in relation to military and political decision-making. The British Official Historian, Cyril Falls, considered writing an account of the campaign required placing ‘the military history in a political framework and to trace all events from their political sources’ for two reasons. Firstly, that the campaign was conducted in coalition, to which he drew attention to the impact of Anglo-French relations on its prosecution. Secondly, he noted the centrality of relations between the Allies and the Greek government. ⁸ Both the former, in the work of David Dutton and Roy Prete, as well as the latter, above all in George B. Leon's two volume study, have received considerable attention. ⁹ Further disputes also arose beyond those identified by the British Official History. The Italian Official History published in 1983, some fifty years after Falls, lamented that interallied relations were often ‘polluted by discordant political calculations’. ¹⁰ Historians have shown how Italian imperial ambitions created friction with their allies, not least the Serbians and the Greeks, who had their own territorial expansion in mind, as well as the French. ¹¹

Only belatedly have the experiences of coalition warfare amongst soldiers on the ground in Macedonia received any attention. In this regard, the literature reflects the broader field of First World War studies, which has remained firmly centred on the generals and politicians in the case of both warring alliances. ¹² With regard to the Western Front, Elizabeth Greenhalgh and Chris Kempshall looked below this level to consider how alliances ‘actually functioned as a social, cultural and military organism’. ¹³ Studies of Macedonia have provided snapshots of how the different armies viewed one another, particularly the influence of cultural and racial stereotypes on the attitudes of extra-regional expeditionary forces towards their Balkan allies, that is, the Greek and Serbian armies for the British and French and the Bulgarians for German soldiers. ¹⁴ Focusing largely on Western attitudes towards their regional partners, however, has ensured considerations of inter-allied relations remain one-sided, with the untold number of international encounters in Macedonia treated as moments of observation rather than interaction. Such studies, moreover, are narrowly focused and do not attempt to draw broader conclusions applicable throughout the Allied ranks.

This article builds on the existing scholarship by bringing accounts written by soldiers throughout the ranks of the Allied Armies in the East into conversation with one another, treating inter-allied relations as an inherently two-way process, as well as shedding light on the similarities and differences in how each national contingent experienced coalition warfare. It explores how serving in such a diverse multinational force led soldiers to construct military hierarchies, furthering the argument made by Kempshall that a ‘hierarchy of nations’ existed on the Western Front which shaped soldiers’ wartime experiences. ¹⁵ The tendency towards hierarchisation manifested even more strongly in Macedonia and determined the character of interallied encounters in the rear and at the front. This article first considers how urban encounters offered soldiers an opportunity to visually assess their comrades in arms amidst the military pageantry of Salonika. It then considers the encounters which took place at the front, focussing on the centrality of reliefs as an opportunity to formulate military hierarchies. Finally, it examines how soldiers navigated fighting alongside one another on the battlefield and responded to serving under the command of their allies. Studying interallied relations in Macedonia does not simply shed light on the coalition dimension of the campaign or even the broader First World War: understanding how soldiers coexisted with their allies and fought alongside one another has broader insights for how alliances function on the ground, an aspect which has remained thus far curiously neglected. ¹⁶

Urban Encounters

For the duration of the Macedonian campaign, Salonika served as the base for the Allied expeditionary forces. The city had only become part of Greece in 1912 after being conquered from the Ottoman Empire during the First Balkan War and boasted a diverse multi-ethnic population, comprised primarily of Jews, Muslims and Greeks, which totalled around 170,000 in 1916. ¹⁷ The arrival of Allied troops transformed Salonika as camps, depots and hospitals sprung up on its outskirts, while soldiers wandered the streets and frequented its cafes, restaurants, concert halls and brothels. ¹⁸ The visual pageantry of the Allied armies captivated men throughout its different contingents. Similar descriptions of the multitude of uniforms in wartime correspondence and personal diaries, as well as post-war memoirs and interwar histories, underlines how serving in a diverse multinational force came to define the campaign as much as the hardships often highlighted by historians. ¹⁹ The sight of British, French, Russian, Serbian, Italian and Greek soldiers and frequently colonial forces from across the British and French empires as well, was variously described as ‘an extraordinary and fun animation’ by an Italian second lieutenant, a ‘motley character of uniform quite unique’ by a British captain and a ‘a true human mosaic’ by a semi-official French history published in 1932. ²⁰

Observing the kaleidoscope of armies led soldiers instinctively to assess their comrades in arms. Unsurprisingly, this rested primarily on their perceived military qualities. Greenhalgh and Kempshall have demonstrated that ‘proximity’ and ‘success’ provided the foundations of interallied relations on the Western Front. Being physically close to one's allies allowed soldiers to form verifiable first-hand impressions, while their success in battle ensured attitudes were positive given emerging victorious was the fundamental rationale underpinning the wartime alliances. ²¹ Away from the battlefield, in the urban spaces of Salonika, soldiers had to assess their allies’ capacity for success rather than rely on concrete achievements. Uniforms, equipment, drill and discipline all provided clues into how one's allies would perform in combat. Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, for instance, who served with the Russian contingent, felt the French troops ‘rather poor’. ‘The men were grumpy’, he recalled, ‘and gave more the impression of being radical factory workers about to go on strike than a disciplined army’. ²² Attitudes commonly rested on a self-assured belief in one's own military qualities, cultivating imagined military hierarchies where men positioned their own expeditionary force at the summit and highlighted the comparative inadequacies of their allies. The British Major C.E. Norton, for instance, considered the French to be ‘the most slovenly and dirty collection of men’ and the Serbians, Russians and Italians as ‘all right’, but praised the British as ‘the really smart troops’. ²³

It is notable that the colonial troops deployed as part of the British and French contingents occupied an ambiguous position within this constructed military hierarchy. At least in Salonika, most commented on their unusual appearance amidst the crowds rather than assess their military contribution. ²⁴ French Indochinese troops, two battalions of which had arrived in 1916 as part of a force of colonial troops requested by General Sarrail, fascinated the British. ²⁵ Considered curious looking, what stood out, above all, were their ‘conical shaped hats’, which one later compared to those worn by Chinese coolies. ²⁶ Even if the Indochinese troops escaped the characterisation as ‘childish, bad, mean and dirty’, as Guoqi Xu has written of British perceptions of Chinese labourers on the Western Front, comparing combatant troops to non-combatants nevertheless belied a pejorative assessment of their military potential on racial grounds. ²⁷ Such an attitude emerged strongly from the memoir of Captain Malcolm Burr, who condescendingly praised French Indochinese troops for having constructed sun screens at the Cercle des Officiers, the French officers’ club in Salonika: ‘if they did nothing else in the war, these strange, black-toothed auxiliaries of the French justified their existence by the refreshing shade which they provided for the sun-weary’. ²⁸

Parades through the streets of Salonika afforded one of the most prominent opportunities for assessing other armies. ²⁹ Of particular significance was the arrival of Russian and Italian troops in August 1916, both of which stemmed for long-standing requests for troops on the part of their allies combined with a recognition that defending their interests in the Balkans necessitated a military presence in Macedonia. ³⁰ Both the Russian 2nd Brigade and Italian 35th Division marched through Salonika upon disembarking, observed by assembled representatives of the different national contingents. Standing in the crowd afforded an opportunity to immediately come to an initial assessment of the new arrivals. While prevailing British societal attitudes towards neither Italy nor Russia were positive, initial impressions of the Italians were far from negative and those of the Russians overwhelmingly positive. ³¹ Of the Italians, Captain F.W. Twort, for instance, wrote of ‘short sturdy men with a swinging stride’ and recalled that their ‘torn and tattered’ flags made it ‘at once evident that we were not dealing with raw troops but with real veterans’. ³² Because the Russian and Italian contingents arrived in quick succession, the tendency towards hierarchisation emerged especially strongly as some compared the two expeditionary forces. With his battalion forming the Guard of Honour for both, Private G.H. Wilson later contrasted the ‘tall and broad shouldered’ Russians with the Italians, who he described as ‘of small statute and slovenly’. Unsurprisingly, if the Russians appeared higher than the Italians in this internalised military hierarchy, Wilson positioned the British as superior to both. Marching past the Russian and Italian camps two days later, his battalion ‘put on a special show of smartness’ to show each ‘what smartness in the British Army is like’. ³³

On the other hand, recently arrived troops in Macedonia were not only the subjects of scrutiny but also took their arrival as an opportunity to themselves assess their new allies. In the formulation of military hierarchies in Macedonia, parades were a two-way process, with each side simultaneously observer and observed. For the men of the Italian 35th Division, who until this point had only seen action in the Italian theatre of war, fighting on both the Isonzo and Trentino fronts, serving alongside allies was a novel experience. ³⁴ Unlike their British counterparts, Italian troops reacted largely positively. The initial assessments of Lieutenant Colonel Mario Pecchio reveal the same preoccupation evident throughout the allied ranks with the potential military capabilities of each army. Like the British, the ‘towering’ Russian troops impressed Pecchio. Besides their physical stature, he considered that they were ‘equipped well’, as well as noted the ‘unlikely number’ of decorations on their uniforms. According to Pecchio, the ‘tall, lean, healthy and carefully shaved’ British troops, with their ‘impeccable’ uniforms and excellent drill, exuded ‘a feeling of strength’. Of the French, he felt their ‘gaze and gestures’ demonstrated a ‘marked martialism’, which he likened to d’Artagnan, the central character in Alexandre Dumas's novel The Three Musketeers. ³⁵

Even having only just arrived in the theatre of war, Pecchio could not avoid beginning to formulate military hierarchies. While he did not subordinate any contingent to his own, he did compare the physical characteristics of Russian and Serbian troops. ‘Though Slavic like the Russians’, he wrote, ‘they are mostly of medium stature and dark brown’, the reference to their smaller stature particularly notable given the emphasis placed by Allied troops on the height of their Russian counterparts. ³⁶ The racial and cultural denigration which characterised Italian attitudes towards other Southern Slavs, principally the Slovene inhabitants of territories occupied during and after the war, remained notably absent from his views. ³⁷ The Serbs, moreover, elicited sympathy rather than lavish praise. In attributing their ‘emaciated and serious face’ to ‘the sad odyssey of moral hardships and suffering’, it is possible to discern an awareness of the travails which had followed the invasion of Serbia by the Central Powers. ³⁸ With their country overrun, the Serbian army and a sizeable civilian contingent had endured the freezing cold and Albanian attacks as they marched over the mountains to reach the Adriatic coast. Evacuated by Entente warships, a short period of recuperation in Corfu had followed, before being transported to Salonika. ³⁹

How each army behaved in Salonika proved equally influential for the formation of interallied military hierarchies. For men serving up-country in the desolate countryside, rare chances to visit the city, whether on leave or while on duty, afforded the only chance to seek mental respite from the hardships of soldiering. According to Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, the result was that ‘when they came down to the city many just let themselves go and acted like wild beasts’. ⁴⁰ Under these circumstances, inter-allied friendships often transcended differences in language and culture. ⁴¹ In the White Tower, in particular, drunken soldiers joined together ‘shrieking, shouting and singing ribald songs at the top of their voices in half a dozen languages, half-drunk, lecherous as baboons’. ⁴² That said, political disputes could filter down and act as a barrier to inter-allied comradeship. The French liaison officer Jean-José Frappa recalled a ‘coldness’ on the part of Italian officers towards their French counterparts following the January 1917 Rome Conference. Interestingly, while he attributed this to a perception of the French having sought to block their regional aspirations, Alexander S. Mitrakos has suggested the conference, in fact, brought about increased Allied recognition of Italian interests in the Balkans. ⁴³

Tensions, moreover, between the different nations often reached boiling point. ‘Riots and quarrels among the Allies were continuous’, continued Prince Andrei Lobanov-Rostovsky, ‘and the military police were kept busy’. ⁴⁴ One flashpoint was the city's brothels. ⁴⁵ Another, interestingly, were the military hierarchies constructed by one's allies. Paul Kennedy has written that ‘military alliances were and are not, the same as friendships’, something which ultimately remained true even amongst soldiers on the ground. ⁴⁶ The belief that their counterparts in other armies claimed excessive credit for wartime successes could lead to violent interruptions in inter-allied friendships in defence of one's own army, as Gunner Illtyd Davies recalled. Confronted by ‘several Greek and Italian soldiers, who gave us to understand that it was them and not the British, winning the war’, he and his comrades ‘undertook to fight the lot for the honour of Britain’, joined by other Britons on leave. ⁴⁷ Italian officers, by contrast, remained convinced that their troops were uninvolved. ‘It is a shame to see how the officers of all the allied nations get drunk with the exception of the Italians’, as Second Lieutenant Gelasio Caetani lamented. ⁴⁸ Accordingly, discipline, and perhaps the perception amongst some in Liberal Italy of drunkenness as a social ‘disease’, served to position their own expeditionary force above their allies. ⁴⁹

The Great Fire of Salonika, above all, proved especially significant. Breaking out in the northwest part of the city on 18 August 1917, the fire spread throughout the cramped wooden houses of the city, fanned by the strong Vardar wind. By the time it had been extinguished, almost a third of the city had been destroyed and 79,000 of its inhabitants left homeless. ⁵⁰ In its aftermath, men compared their own national response to that of their allies and, through criticising each to differing degrees for looting, positioned their own contingent as paradigms of selfless virtue. Amand Gélibert, a French medical officer, felt ‘proud to be a little comrade of these great Poilus of the East’. Each army had shown ‘the same ardour, the same courage, the same contempt for danger’, but he believed French soldiers and sailors alone had ‘returned loaded with children, on their shoulders and in their arms’ and ‘transported helpless women, old people and the sick’ while their allies had focused on rescuing material valuables from the flames. ⁵¹

Soldiers of other armies reached an entirely different conclusion. While Luigi Villari did not identify those who had joined with ‘local hooligans’ to loot the city, he took great pride in the fact that ‘no Italian soldiers took part in these operations and the same may be said of the British’. Both, instead, had helped salvage valuable stores from the flames. ⁵² Amongst the British, however, no ally escaped censure, with both the French and Italians severely criticised. ⁵³ The strongest condemnations were reserved for the Russian troops, hundreds of whom ‘rushed into the town … getting drunk in the quickest possible time at the doomed restaurants’. Amongst several officers sent down to the city in charge of large groups of men to keep the alcohol out of Russian hands was Lieutenant Arthur Rowan, who recalled how they had to shoot several ‘while they were raping girls in the streets’. ⁵⁴ Ultimately, wherever the culpability did, in fact, lie did not matter, as the perception of wrongdoing served as a dividing line between one's own discipline and the indiscipline of others.

Military Encounters

Although the urban spaces of Salonika afforded frequent opportunities for assessing the military capabilities of one's allies, interallied encounters took place less commonly beyond the city, with Allied troops deployed over an extensive front stretching across the Balkan Peninsula. By August 1916, the Allied position in Macedonia ran for 170 miles, which, as the British Official Historian observed, was twice as long as the length of front held by the British Expeditionary Force on the Western Front at its greatest extent. ⁵⁵ Naturally, stretches of the front fell under the responsibility of single nation units, often, although not exclusively, grouped together under the auspices of larger national formations. The British Salonika Force (BSF) occupied the easternmost sector for much of the campaign, which ran through four distinct sectors between the mouth of the Struma Valley at the Gulf of Orfano in the east to the Vardar River in the west. ⁵⁶ Elsewhere and, indeed, in other periods, however, the front was less nationally defined. On the eve of the Allied offensive launched in September 1918, which would ultimately rupture the Balkan front, for instance, Allied troops were grouped into four multinational formations: the BSF, with four British and five Greek divisions; the French 1^st Group of Divisions, with one French and two Greek divisions; the Serbian Armies, with six Serbian and two French divisions; and the Armée Française d’Orient (French Army of the Orient or AFO), with five French, one Italian and one Greek division. ⁵⁷

Where different national sectors adjoined, soldiers could occasionally interact with their allies. The Italian 35th Division, shortly after arriving, relieved the French 57th Division in the Krusha Balkan sector in late August 1916 and took up a position between the British XII and XVI Corps. ⁵⁸ Evidence for British views on this period is lacking but Italian accounts wrote of ‘intimate’ relations between the two armies. ⁵⁹ Second Lieutenant Gelasio Caetani, entrusted with constructing a road connecting British and Italian positions, ‘opened cordial relations’ with the officers of a nearby British unit. ⁶⁰ Comradery aside, proximity spurred assessments of their military qualities. Compared to Salonika, Italian soldiers were surer of their superiority over their allies. Caetani noted that British trenches appeared ‘rather primitive and uninteresting’, while observing their football pitch and riding school elicited the comment that ‘no one labours on the works of war’. ⁶¹ Later, around Monastir, the same dynamics of interaction and comradeship alongside military evaluation shaped how Italian troops related to their French counterparts, principally the artillerymen attached to the 35^th Division. Although mixed, attitudes were more positive than those towards the British. If Caetani criticised their attitude to conducting the war and another, Renzo Perotti, highlighted their lackadaisical attitude to maintaining their positions, the latter conversely praised several officers as well as the ‘ready and admirable fighting spirit’ of one battery and its ‘truly edifying’ counter-battery work. ⁶²

Of particular note are the interactions with colonial forces at the front. The Italian Renzo Perotti, for instance, encountered ‘Tonkinese’ from French Indochina around Florina, as well as French Senegalese troops around Monastir, who he believed specialised in night-time raiding. His post-war comments on the latter are remarkable not only for his consideration of their military qualities and contribution to Allied operations but also for how racial stereotyping coloured his assessment of his comrades in arms. Indeed, his description of ‘the horror of the nocturnal assaults carried out by those screaming semi-barbarians, drunk and black as ebony, launched like unleashed furies to satisfy their atavistic and inexhaustible thirst for blood’ echoed the accusations of savage atrocities made by German propagandists towards French colonial troops. Perotti similarly attributed their skills as soldiers to their primitive civilisational origins, much as in Italian attitudes towards the ascari troops employed in their colonial empire, who were considered militarily superior to their white racial superiors as a result. As troops ‘born for war’, the Senegalese were ‘raised in a barbaric country’ and then brought to Macedonia, where, plied with alcohol, ‘they did wonderful things’, he declared. ⁶³

The greatest opportunity for personally assessing one's allies came when sectors of the front changed hands and troops of one nation relieved those of another. In November 1916, the Italian troops in the Krusha Balkans, which by this time comprised of the Ivrea and Sicilia Brigades, were replaced by the British 65th and 83rd Brigades. ⁶⁴ Although historians have highlighted Italian materiel deficiencies, one Briton, Charles Packer, praised their equipment, recalling how they ‘wore smart dark grey uniforms with tiny silver stars on their stiff collars’ along with the same Adrian model of steel helmet as the French and even went as far as considering their individual rations ‘far superior’ to those of the British. ⁶⁵ Conversely, Italian assessments of their allies were again more mixed. ‘Marvellously equipped’ was how Lieutenant Colonel Mario Pecchio later described the British. Led by Highland troops playing the bagpipes, ‘English soldiers pass by, quick and nimble and with a smiling face’, he wrote, ‘They are robust, serene, calm: they have signs of resolve on their face’. ⁶⁶ Renzo Perotti, however, conversely believed Italian troops considered the British failed to meet expected military standards. He considered the poor march discipline of the arriving British, which he blamed on fatigue and drunkenness, a sight ‘from a disciplinary point of view…anything but edifying’. He suggested this even led to ridicule from the Italians, unbeknownst to the British given the language barrier between the two armies. ⁶⁷

Such a poor reputation could prove difficult to overcome. Renzo Perotti found the shambolic British arrival in the Krusha Balkans shaped how he later viewed the Indian troops under their command. Indeed, race did not necessarily predetermine the position of colonial forces compared to their European counterparts. Amazed by their ‘bronze complexion, sparkling eyes, elegantly aquiline noses, raven and curly beards, encased in elegant khaki uniforms’, he found the martial qualities of the Indians further highlighted the inadequacies of their colonial overlords. That the military hierarchy in Macedonia subverted imperial power dynamics was not lost on Perotti, who recalled how he ‘ironically compared them – they, the colonised – with their colonisers: the scattered English drinkers of the Brigade from Lake Doiran’. ⁶⁸

One of the most important measurements of an ally's military effectiveness was the quality of the defensive positions they had left behind. It is notable that the French often failed to meet the standards expected by their allies. That they had built sangars rather than excavate trenches drew criticism from the men of the British 10th (Irish) Division in Serbia in late 1915, notwithstanding the difficulties of digging into the rocky ground and the British themselves constructing similar defences. ⁶⁹ When the British relieved the French 17th Colonial Division around Doiran in the summer of 1916, complaints again concerned the inadequate defensive positions which they had inherited. Lieutenant Melville J. Rattray later highlighted the lack of a ‘continuous trench line’, with only groups of shallow trenches and no communication trenches dug at all, meaning ‘one had to dodge across the open to the few trenches already dug’. He considered the conditions found by the British to have been ‘presumably satisfactory while the French Colonials held the line’, based on the implicit belief that they tended to avoid harassing the Bulgarians outside of major operations, while the British ‘were, however, not so considerate’. ⁷⁰ By implication, the French not only fell short of British standards of military engineering but also, more significantly, of the aggression necessary to bring the fight to the enemy. By contrast, British troops praised the accommodation constructed by Italian troops behind the trenches in the Krusha Balkans sector, which one officer considered testified to their ‘world-wide’ renown for engineering. ⁷¹

Although Kempshall has shown that French trenches commonly drew the ire of the British on the Western Front, this was not a uniquely British complaint in Macedonia. ⁷² Even more virulent criticisms came from the Italian soldiers who relieved French colonial troops in December 1916 on Quota 1050, a foreboding rocky hilltop east of Monastir overrun by Serbian troops that November, who had then lost the crest to a Bulgarian counterattack. It would later see such bitter fighting that the Italian Official History declared the position symbolic of the entire Italian effort in Macedonia. ⁷³ According to Captain Mario Apicella, the defences taken over from the French were in a ‘deplorable’ condition. Scattered unconnected positions amidst the rocks reflected where the Serbian assault had ground to a halt rather than a conscious choice and, as a result, were overlooked by the enemy, rendering both defensive and offensive operations a challenge. ⁷⁴ Strengthening their position required an immense effort on the part of Italian troops, with 110 kilometres of trenches eventually constructed, along with around 500 caverns excavated from the rock and 130 kilometres of barbed wire laid. ⁷⁵

If defensive positions constituted a universal influence on the construction of military hierarchies, British accounts reveal an obsession with sanitation that further shaped how soldiers assessed their allies. Disease posed a serious challenge in Macedonia, with those in the Allied ranks far more likely to fall victim to sickness than suffer from death or injury in combat. According to one estimate, the numbers of sick in the Italian 35th Division totalled 107,200 compared to 3490 dead and 6809 wounded. ⁷⁶ The BSF similarly suffered 481,262 non-battle casualties compared to 23,762 battle casualties, a ratio of 20.3:1 across all ranks. ⁷⁷ Addressing such an immense medical challenge necessitated an immense effort on the part of all the Allies, yet, when it came to sanitation, British disgust towards the squalor of Macedonia extended to encompass their allies, with men convinced that their standards of cleanliness exceeded those of other armies. ⁷⁸ ‘I don’t think any army practises as we do’, wrote Major F. St. J. Steadman, an officer serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps, ‘The French are filthy, so are the Germans, Bulgarians, Serbians, Russians and Italians’. He wrote how a British battalion relieving Italian troops in the Krusha Balkan sector had found their ‘lines were in a filthy condition’. ⁷⁹ Once more, however, the French appeared the greatest culprits, above all when British units replaced French troops around Doiran and in the Struma Valley in the summer of 1916, but also again in 1918 when relieving French troops west of the Vardar River. ⁸⁰

Conducting Operations

Soldiers did not just encounter other armies in the trenches of Macedonia but rather had to cooperate with their allies on the battlefield and often serve under their command. Fighting alongside troops of another nation, whether on the defensive or the offensive, increased the significance of whether one's allies met the expected standard of military proficiency, with assessments quickly made under often urgent circumstances.

The factors of ‘proximity’ and ‘success’ identified by Greenhalgh and Kempshall strongly influenced how different armies interacted and positioned one another in the military hierarchy, but the distinction between success and failure often proved more subjective than thus far appreciated. This manifested particularly during Anglo-French operations in Serbia between October and December 1915, which marked the beginning of interallied battlefield cooperation in Macedonia. Although previously studied from a British perspective, the centrality of the campaign to many French accounts, in fact, affords a unique and thus far unrecognised opportunity to compare each perspective side-by-side. ⁸¹ The advance into Serbia came in the wake of the third invasion suffered by the country since the outbreak of the war, which opened with the Austro-German bombardment of Belgrade on 6 October and was followed shortly after by the Bulgarian invasion of south-eastern Serbia on 14 October. While the French pushed north up the Vardar River shortly after arriving at Salonika, engaging the Bulgarian Second Army and drawing pressure off Serbian forces, the British commander, Lieutenant General Sir Bryon Mahon, belatedly received permission to send troops across the Greek frontier into Serbia and the 10th (Irish) Division eventually took over French positions just north of the border between Kosturino and Lake Doiran. The Serbian retirement over the Albanian mountains, however, saw the Bulgarian Second Army turn its attention to the Anglo-French forces in the country, which began to retire south on 20 November, pursued by the Bulgarians. The defeat of the 10th (Irish) Division at the Battle of Kosturino on 6 December increased the urgency of the withdrawal but both the British and French nevertheless escaped largely unscathed to Greece by 12 December. ⁸²

Although by any measure this period was one of failure for the Allies, with the Anglo-French force unable to prevent Serbia from being overrun as well as being themselves compelled to retreat by far superior Bulgarian forces, interallied relations did not necessarily reflect this outcome. Two different relationships began during this period. Firstly, British and French troops encountered Serbian troops for the first time. Amongst Britons, this required casting off pre-war societal attitudes towards the country, which had possessed an ever declining reputation, arrested only by the victorious outcome of the two Balkan Wars (1912–1913). ⁸³ In France, by contrast, Aleksandra Kolaković has argued these conflicts spurred effusive praise of the Serbian army. ⁸⁴ Although fertile ground for the formation of a positive military relationship accordingly existed to a greater extent in the minds of French soldiers, both armies had to overcome the cultural barriers arising from cooperating with an army from a region often stereotyped as primitive, uncivilised and even barbaric. ⁸⁵ First-hand encounters with Serbian troops, while far from common, nevertheless cultivated generally positive assessments of their military capabilities based on the same visual markers relied on in Salonika. ⁸⁶ One Briton, Captain Noel Edmund Drury, was ‘surprised to see such fine looking men, smartly dressed and in such good form’, a reaction which implicitly reflected the gulf between pre-war preconceptions and the reality of personal encounters with his ally. ⁸⁷ Of a Serbian company he encountered during the retreat, the Frenchman Henri Liberman wrote similarly, yet notably without surprise, of how ‘[t]he young, beardless men have a truly martial air with their light khaki costume’. ⁸⁸

Expressions of sympathy towards the desperate plight of their ally did not undermine perceptions of Serbian martial prowess. To be sure, neither the broader awareness of Bulgarian successes nor the pitiful columns of refugees encountered by the British and French were conducive to a positive assessment of their ally. ⁸⁹ Moreover, men also encountered exhausted Serbian troops, such as those seen by Captain Ricciotto Canudo of the French Foreign Legion at Strumnitza Station, who he described as ‘emaciated soldiers, in rags, whose faces expressed an incomparable mixture of fatigue, resignation and untamed pride’. ⁹⁰ But what nevertheless precluded defeat from detrimentally impacting assessments of the Serbians as soldiers was it was not attributed to any military failing on their part. Accounts of Serbian clashes with the invaders emphasised their bitter resistance against overwhelming odds. ⁹¹ Others shortly after praised ‘the gallant little Serbian Army … offering so stubborn a resistance to the invading Austro-German-Bulgar Forces’. ⁹² In all, soldiers’ attitudes appear remarkably congruent with the trope of ‘Gallant Serbia’ employed by British wartime propaganda, with Samuel Foster having argued that the Serbian victory at the Battle of Cer in August 1914 contributed to an ‘imaginative recalibration of the Serbian national image as a morally virtuous and capable wartime ally’ amongst Britons. ⁹³

At the same time as cooperating with the Serbians, British and French troops had to learn to fight alongside one another for the first time with the Balkans, replicating the same process of acclimatisation which had ensued when the British Expeditionary Force had first arrived in France in 1914. ⁹⁴ For the British, the French generally appeared a worthy ally. While men were prepared to criticise French trenches, their artillery, machine guns and equipment all appeared excellent. Retreating created tensions and moments of disorganised confusion but British soldiers valued French assistance during this period. Tactical victories won by combined rear-guard efforts ‘precluded any criticism of French performance on the battlefield by providing the means by which the British could interpret their experiences positively’. ⁹⁵ In French eyes, by contrast, defeat in Serbia reflected poorly on the British, to whom many attributed at least part of the blame. Even before the Battle of Kosturino, Bulgarian deserters reinforced impressions of their numerical weakness. ⁹⁶ Unsurprisingly, therefore, the French were not taken aback by news of a British retreat following their defeat. ⁹⁷ The British need for French assistance implicitly underlined their dependence on their ally, establishing French superiority in the Allied military hierarchy. ⁹⁸

Throughout the campaign, the formal command structure in Macedonia also shaped how soldiers on the ground experienced operations conducted alongside their allies. A succession of Frenchmen commanded the Allied forces. Firstly, Sarrail from January 1916 until his dismissal in December 1917. Secondly, Adolphe Guillaumat, from December 1917 until June 1918. Thirdly, and finally, Franchet d'Espèrey, who oversaw the decisive Allied offensive in September 1918. French operational supremacy reflected their considerable political commitment to the campaign, motivated by a mixture of short-term political imperatives and longer-term initiatives for economic and territorial expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. ⁹⁹ By contrast, Dutton has argued that the British reluctantly participated in an enterprise they considered of dubious military value but necessary to maintain the Entente Cordiale, a decision which left little freedom for manoeuvre. ¹⁰⁰ Tensions often flared between Sarrail and his subordinates, but improved relations under his successors followed his removal in December 1917 after a change in political leadership in France. ¹⁰¹

On the ground, ordinary soldiers had to come to terms with their nation's position in the formal interallied hierarchy. Unlike the military qualities of their allies, not all concerned themselves with the higher direction of the campaign, which naturally lay beyond the realm of their personal experience. Some British soldiers later admitted to ignorance not only of the disputes amongst decision-makers but also that their force ultimately came under French command. ¹⁰² While French soldiers later criticised their comrades in arms, above all the British, who they believed had failed to act in concert with their allies and contributed to the removal of Sarrail, whether this existed in wartime remains uncertain. ¹⁰³ On the other hand, many British soldiers appreciated that the French occupied the driving seat of the campaign. Being formally subordinated, however, often conflicted with their own self-assured belief in their rightful position within the military hierarchy. British troops resented the ‘self-interested and high-handed’ behaviour of the French in securing the logistical infrastructure necessary to support their expeditionary force upon first arriving at Salonika in late 1915, and complaints only grew stronger as the campaign wore on. ¹⁰⁴ Of a rumour that Milne had protested against the employment of British troops in a labouring capacity while French troops readied to engage the enemy, Major Christopher Wyndham Hughes recalled ‘it was rather degrading that we should be called on to make roads for the Black French troops’, a sense of racial superiority which belied the same attitudes responsible for the exclusion of non-white troops from the military hierarchy. ¹⁰⁵

The French also provided an instinctive scapegoat for failed operations. British soldiers repeatedly suggested the French expended Allied troops in pursuit of their own objectives. While heavy fighting during the last four months of 1916 on the western sector of the front by French, Serbian, Italian and Russian troops in often atrocious weather conditions culminated in the capture of Monastir on 19 November, heavy Serbians losses nevertheless elicited criticism of the French. ¹⁰⁶ After the Second Battle of Doiran on 18–19 September 1918, where the BSF conducted a diversionary assault for the principal Franco–Serbian attack at Dobro Pole three days prior, heavy British losses led Major Christopher Wyndham Hughes to subsequently consider the battle ‘[a]nother instance of the French making use of their allies’ to achieve a ‘striking success’ themselves, despite the offensive ultimately knocking Bulgaria out of the war. ¹⁰⁷

Others resented the French for claiming credit for successes in fact achieved by their allies. Captain Noel Edmund Drury recorded the shooting down of the German Zeppelin LZ75 over Salonika in May 1916 had caused a row with the French, who ‘pinched all the kudos they can get out of it’ by exhibiting the wreckage when the British warship HMS Agamemnon had, in fact, shot it down. ¹⁰⁸ Captain Mario Apicella similarly resented the absence of the Italian flag in Monastir while the French had been welcomed after its capture. ¹⁰⁹ In all, while each contingent contributed to the prosecution of the same objective, soldiers sought to ensure their own national contribution was neither overlooked nor expropriated.

Conclusion

Ultimately, the Allied Armies in the East emerged victorious in Macedonia. Unable to halt the Allied advance which followed victory at Dobro Pole, Bulgaria sued for an armistice on 29 September 1918. In the decades that followed, those writing the first drafts of wartime history lauded the fruits of interallied cooperation. Captain A.J. Mann, a Briton who had served during the campaign with the Royal Flying Corps, examined the French, Russian, Italian, Serbian, Greek and British efforts in turn, ‘the final fusion of which’, he declared, ‘resulted in the victory of our arms’. ¹¹⁰ In his 1934 account of Italian involvement in the Balkans and on the Western Front, Colonel Ettore Graselli even more effusively attributed victory to ‘the good tactical conduct of the French, the valiant tenacity of the English, the ardent love of the fatherland and enthusiasm of the Serbs’ as well as the ‘valour and consistency’ of his own country's contingent. ¹¹¹

Within the ‘global turn’ of First World War studies, considering interallied relations in Macedonia highlights the centrality of alliances to experiences across the belligerent armies, as well as beyond the paradigmatic theatre of the Western Front. ¹¹² Examining a front with such military diversity centres the similarities and differences in how soldiers of different nations navigated coalition warfare. Each instinctively constructed military hierarchies, which reflected both a common preoccupation with the ability of others to contribute to their shared objective of victory but also their own national beliefs, values and interests. In doing so, this article points to how scholars should advance the study of the wartime alliances by exploring ground-level relations in other ‘sideshow’ theatres, such as at Gallipoli, to capture how wartime experiences were shaped by the globality of the conflict, both in terms of the belligerents involved and the geographical deployment of forces, as well as offer new perspectives on the well-trodden political and strategic disputes which affected their conduct at the highest-levels.

More broadly, this article has demonstrated how the rivalries that shape the conduct of coalition warfare manifest amongst those tasked with making alliances work on the ground as much as amongst the decision-makers responsible for their direction. Working towards the common objective of defeating the enemy can divide as much as unite when soldiers perceive a mismatch between their own capabilities and those they must fight alongside. Whether such rivalries shaped military outcomes is difficult to determine, but they undoubtedly further complicated the already challenging conduct of coalition operations. French distrust of British military capabilities could hardly have eased the precarity of retiring in contact with the enemy from Serbia, while believing their sacrifices came in pursuit of French objectives could not have improved the motivation of British troops, who already struggled to rationalise serving away from the Western Front. ¹¹³

Although relations were far from harmonious, the Allies nevertheless weathered the tribulations of coalition warfare far better than their adversaries on the other side of the wire. For Bulgarian troops, conflicting territorial ambitions with their allies and German economic domination of their country saw relations amongst the Central Powers become increasingly fraught, something which Richard Hall has suggested contributed to a collapse in Bulgarian morale during the summer of 1918. ¹¹⁴ By contrast, Allied comradeship symbolically persisted after the war at Zeitenlik Cemetery at Salonika, where, Milne declared, ‘British, French, Serbian, Greek and Russian lie, side by side in lasting memory of a great alliance’. ¹¹⁵