The Sleepwalkers (45 page)

While the Bulgarians pushed into Thrace, the Serbian 1st Army advanced south into northern Macedonia with around 132,000 men. On 22 October, earlier than they expected, they encountered an Ottoman force encamped around the town of Kumanovo. On the following day, a battle broke out along a ten-mile front under cold driving rain. After two days of fighting the Serbs inflicted a crushing defeat on the Ottomans. There was no immediate follow-up, but the Serbian army drove on southwards and in three days of sporadic but heavy fighting around the town of Prilep, again under the autumn rain, the Serbs once more drove the Ottoman troops from their positions. At the request of their Bulgarian allies, who were anxious to secure Salonika before the Greeks got their hands on it and had no further troops to spare, the Serbian command ordered the 1st Army on 8 November to advance on Bitola, a picturesque town on the river Dragor in south-western Macedonia. Here the Ottomans had halted and consolidated their position, placing their artillery on the Oblakov heights overlooking the main approach from the north. Heavy artillery fire from the heights initially held the Serbs back. Only after the Oblakov ridge was stormed and taken on 17 November did the tide of the battle turn decisively in the Serbs' favour. Firing with impressive skill from high ground, the Serbian artillery destroyed the Ottoman batteries defending the town, opening the way for an infantry assault that would turn the Ottoman flank. This was the last stand of the Ottomans in Macedonia. And in the meanwhile, the Serbian 3rd Army had advanced westwards into northern Albania, where they supported the Montenegrin army in besieging the fortified city of Scutari.

From the beginning of the conflict, the Greeks had focused their attention single-mindedly on securing Salonika, the largest city of Macedonia and the key strategic port of the region. Leaving the Macedonian strongholds on their left flank to the Serbs and Bulgarians, the Greek Army of Thessaly marched to the north-east, overrunning Ottoman positions on the Sarantaporos pass and Yannitsa on 22 October and 2 November. The road to Salonika was now open. An almost comical interlude followed. During the first week of November, Greek units began surrounding the city. The Bulgarians, realizing that the Greeks were about to take this coveted prize, ordered their own 7th Rila Division to race southwards in the hope of pre-empting a Greek occupation, a deployment that forced them to leave Bitola to the Serbs. As they approached the city, messengers were sent ahead urging the Ottoman commander to surrender to the Bulgarian army under favourable terms. From the commander came the forlorn reply: ‘I have only one Thessaloniki, which I have already surrendered' – the Greeks had got there first. Having initially refused the Bulgarians entry, the Greek command eventually agreed to let 15,000 Bulgarians co-occupy the city with 25,000 Greek troops. In a parallel campaign waged in the Epirus, or southern Albania, the Greeks became bogged down in a siege of the well-fortified Ottoman positions around Yanina. The fighting dragged on in some areas, but the scale of the allies' success was extraordinary: in only six weeks, they had conquered nearly half of all European Turkey. By 3 December 1912, when an armistice was signed, the only points of continuing Ottoman resistance west of the Chataldja line were Adrianople, Yanina and Scutari, all of which were still under siege.

The Balkans: In 1912

The Balkans: Ceasefire Lines After the First Balkan War

The Balkans: After the Second Balkan War

As the squabbling over Salonika suggests, the First Balkan War contained the seeds of a second conflict over the territorial spoils from the first. In the treaty founding their alliance in March 1912, Serbia and Bulgaria had agreed a clear plan of partition: the Bulgarians were to get southern Macedonia, including the towns of Ohrid, Prilep and Bitola. Serbia was assigned Kosovo – heartland of the Serbian mythscape – and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar. Northern Macedonia, including the important town of Skopje, was assigned to a ‘disputed zone' – if the two parties failed to reach an agreement, they both undertook to accept the arbitration of the Russian Tsar. The Bulgarians were pleased with this agreement – especially as they expected the Russians to rule in their favour.
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The Serbs, by contrast, were far from happy. Many in the political elite felt that the March alliance, which had been negotiated by the moderate prime minister Milovan Milovanović, had given too much away. Among the critics were the chief of the General Staff Radomir Putnik and the Radical Party leader Nikola Pašić. ‘In my opinion,' Pašić later commented, ‘we conceded too much, or better said, we abandoned some Serbian areas which we should never have dared to abandon, even if we were left without an agreement.'
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A few months later, in July 1912, Milovanović died unexpectedly, removing one of the chief exponents of moderation in Serbian foreign policy. Six weeks after his death, the ardent nationalist Pašić took office as prime minister and minister for foreign affairs.

The first unequivocal sign that the Serbian government intended to breach the terms of the treaty with Bulgaria came even before the First Balkan War had broken out. On 15 September 1912, Pašić had dispatched a confidential circular to the Serbian delegations to the European powers, in which he referred to ‘Old Serbia' and defined this area as encompassing Prilep, Kičevo and Ohrid, areas that had been promised in March to Bulgaria. As the war got underway, Serbian designs on Macedonia were temporarily overshadowed by the advance into northern Albania, which distracted the leadership with the bewitching prospect of a port on the Adriatic. This was the old problem of Serbian national ‘unification': that it could potentially involve expansion in a number of different directions, forcing decision-makers to choose between options. As soon as it became clear, however, that Austria-Hungary had no intention of allowing the Serbs to acquire a swathe of Albania and the prospect of an Adriatic port receded from view, the leaders in Belgrade began to broach publicly the idea of revising the terms of the treaty with Bulgaria in Serbia's favour. A particular fetish was Monastir, which the Serbs had taken, after repeated charges and heavy losses, ‘with the bayonet'.
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Alarmed, the Bulgarians sent requests for clarification, which Pašić handled with his usual evasiveness; ‘all differences could and would be settled easily', he assured the Bulgarians, yet at the same time there was talk behind the scenes of annexing not just Prilep and Bitola from the Bulgarian zone but also the hotly coveted city of Skopje in the ‘disputed zone'.
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Tempers were raised further by news of Serbian mistreatment of Bulgars in the ‘liberated lands'. It didn't help that the heir to the throne, Prince Alexandar, had walked about various Macedonian towns during a tour of the conquered areas engaging local Bulgars in the following formulaic dialogue:

‘What are you?'

‘Bulgarian.'

‘You are not Bulgarian. Fuck your father.'
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It looked for some months as if a conflict might be avoided, because both Belgrade and Sofia agreed at the end of April 1913 to submit the Macedonian dispute to Russian arbitration. Anxious to bring the issue to a resolution, Sofia sent Dimitar Rizov, the Bulgarian diplomat who had assisted at the birth of the Serbian-Bulgarian Treaty of Alliance in 1904 (see
chapter 2
), to Belgrade to lay out the basis for an amicable settlement.
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Known as an exponent of Serbo-Bulgarian collaboration, Rizov was the right man to secure a deal, if any was to be had. But his conversations with the Serbian government convinced him that Belgrade had absolutely no intention of relinquishing any of the lands and strongholds that it currently held within the ‘Bulgarian zone'. He was particularly shocked at the influence wielded by the Russian minister. Hartwig's weight in Serbian affairs was such, he reported to the Bulgarian prime minister, ‘that his [diplomatic] colleagues privately call him “the Regent”, for, in reality, he fulfils the functions of the ailing Serbian king'.
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On 28 May, one day after Rizov's departure from Belgrade, Pašić at last went public with his annexation policy, declaring before the Skupština that Serbia would keep all the lands it had fought so hard to acquire.

Further conflict over Macedonia was now inevitable. In the last week of May 1913, large contingents of Serbian troops were moved to forward positions along the Bulgarian frontier and the railways were temporarily closed to civilian traffic.
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On 30 June, Pašić was once again before the Skupština, defending his Macedonia policy against extreme nationalist deputies who argued that Serbia should simply have seized the captured provinces outright. Just as the debate was warming up, a messenger arrived to inform the prime minister that Bulgarian forces had attacked Serbian positions in the contested areas at two o'clock that morning. There had been no declaration of war. The Skupština erupted in uproar and Pašić left the session to coordinate the government's preparations for a counter-offensive.

In the Inter-Allied War that followed, Serbia, Greece, Turkey and Romania joined forces to tear chunks of territory out of the flanks of Bulgaria. Bulgarian forces entering Macedonia were checked by the Serbs on the river Bregalnica in early July. Then well dug-in Bulgarian troops around Kalimantsi in north-eastern Macedonia repelled a Serbian counter-attack on 15–18 July and prevented the Serbs from invading western Bulgaria. While the Serbian front stagnated, the Greeks attacked from the south in a campaign that culminated in the bloody but inconclusive Battle of Kresna Gorge. At the same time, a Romanian assault in the east, which brought Romanian troops to within seven miles of Sofia, forced the Bulgarian government to sue for an armistice. In the Peace of Bucharest concluded on 10 August 1913, Bulgaria, after stupendous bloodletting, lost most of the territories it had acquired in the first war.

Russian policy on the Balkan events evolved in the shadow of the Bosnian annexation crisis of 1908–9. The Russians forgot (or never learned of) the role Izvolsky had played in proposing the exchange of Bosnia-Herzegovina for Austrian diplomatic support on the Straits question. The broader international context – the refusal of Britain, for example, to support the Russian bid for access to the Turkish Straits – was likewise elided from memory. Stripped down to serve the ends of nationalist and pan-Slavist propaganda, the Bosnian annexation was remembered as an infamous chapter in the history of Austrian perfidy, made worse by Germany's intervention in defence of its ally in March 1909. It was a ‘humiliation' the like of which Russia must never again be made to endure. But the Bosnian débâcle also revealed the extent of Russia's isolation in Balkan matters, for neither Britain nor France had shown much zeal in helping St Petersburg to extricate itself from the mess that Izvolsky had helped to create. In future, it was clear, a way would have to be found of applying pressure in the region without alienating Russia's western partners.