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Peoples of Austria-Hungary in 1914 from Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd. The empire's population included Germans, Magyars, Romanians, Italians, and Slavs including Croats, Serbians, Ruthenians, Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, and Slovenes.
Allied soldiers fortifying shell craters after an advance. From The Nations at War by Willis J. Abbot, 1918 Edition.
The Serb resurgent, a newly hatched eagle chick triumphant over the Hapsburg eagle. A bi-cephalic eagle was (and is again) the most prominent element on the Serbian coat of arms.
With Bulgaria joining the Central Powers in October 1915 assuring the defeat of Serbia by the end of November, the Balkanzug — the Balkan Railway, shown in red — connected Berlin and Constantinople. By the second week of November, Turkey received ammunition and weapons from its allies.
Postwar postcard map of the Balkans including Albania, newly-created Yugoslavia, expanded Romania, and diminished former Central Powers Bulgaria and Turkey. The first acquisitions of Greece in its war against Turkey are seen in Europe where it advanced almost to Constantinople, in the Aegean Islands from Samos to Rhodes, and on the Turkish mainland from its base in Smyrna. The Greco-Turkish war was fought from May 1919 to 1922. The positions shown held from the war's beginning to the summer of 1920 when Greece advanced eastward. Newly independent Hungary and Ukraine appear in the northwest and northeast.
". . . by the time Cadorna suspended the attack late on the 17th [September], Boroević's army was in tatters. As Italian production increased, the artillery gap had widened. The quality of Austrian rations was slipping. The draft was despatching middle-aged intakes to the front with little training. Ominously, combat performance was starting to fracture along ethnic lines." ((1), more)
"The width of Nomansland diminishes from 1400 yards on the right, where one can sit on the parapet in shirt-sleeves, to 250 yards on the left. There are rats everywhere in numbers hitherto unknown. The C.O. had won an Open Race at a 46th Divisional Horse Show, on Yates's mare, and then gone on leave. He had seen the arrival of another draft of 95, 'awful sights, enough to break one's heart. The others were getting quite good and smart, now this crowd will put us back.' de Miremont is Acting O.C. He joined from West Africa in time to make his only acquaintance with a trench during twenty-four wet hours in reserve at Montauban Alley. He then declared that 'trench warfare is a sort of drill.' To the bewilderment of those who have lived through a year or two of it he is trying to square the fact to that idea (an idea he never gave up)." ((2), more)
". . . it was in the early hours of September 19 [1916] that the Drina Division fought their way to the Bulgarian eyrie and sent back to Batachin fifty prisoners as testimony to their achievement. Below them the Serbs could see that the Bulgarians had not yet accepted the loss of the Kajmakcalan. Such a key bastion could never be lightly abandoned; but, for the moment, the Serbian flag flew once more over a few hundred yards of Serbian soil." ((3), more)
"Wednesday, September 20, 1916Hindenburg's plan is taking shape and in course of realization on the whole of the circular Rumanian front. Along the Danube and in the Dobrudja the region of Orsova and the defiles of the Carpathians, the German, Austrian, Bulgarian and Turkish forces are exercising sustained and converging pressure, under which the Rumanians are giving way at all points." ((4), more)
"As announced in the communiqués of September 20th and 21st, the battle now came to a standstill. . . .The results of Mackensen's victorious progress up to this point were important. Eight Rumanian divisions had been taken prisoner or terribly shattered; the Russian forces sent to aid Rumania had been so often defeated that their fighting power was badly shaken; and positions on the lower Danube flanking Wallachia and the national capital had been won. In addition, any invasion of the southern Dobrudja by the enemy had been rendered impossible, and his main army on the Transylvanian front had been weakened by the withdrawal of troops which it could ill spare. These were now shut up behind Trajan's wall. The Rumanians were compelled to wage war upon three fronts." ((5), more)
(1) In an attempt to build on the success of his Sixth Battle of the Isonzo, Italian Commander in Chief Luigi Cadorna launched the the success of his Seventh Battle on September 13, 1916. General Boroević's Austro-Hungarian troops were mimicking the defensive tactics of German troops, lightly defending a front line, though supporting it with machine gun nests, so that casualties would be relatively light during the standard bombardment that preceded an infantry assault. Cadorna thought the Austro-Hungarians had two defensive lines; they had four.
The White War: Life and Death on the Italian Front, 1915-1919 by Mark Thompson, page 220, copyright © 2008 Mark Thompson, publisher: Basic Books, publication date: 2009
(2) Extract from the entry for September 18, 1916 from the writings — diaries, letters, and memoirs — of Captain J.C. Dunn, Medical Officer of the Second Battalion His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, the Royal Welch Fusiliers, and fellow soldiers who served with him. The Battalion was then serving in the Somme sector.
The War the Infantry Knew 1914-1919 by Captain J.C. Dunn, page 259, copyright © The Royal Welch Fusiliers 1987, publisher: Abacus (Little, Brown and Company, UK), publication date: 1994
(3) Victorious but weakened by Austria-Hungary's invasions in 1914, decimated by typhus in 1915, and overwhelmed by the 1915 invasion by Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria, Serbia's government and the remains of its army fled to the Adriatic Sea and eventual transport by its allies to the island of Corfu to recuperate. In the spring and summer of 1916 it joined the Allied forces on the Salonika Front in Greece, forces that had originally deployed to Greece to aid Serbia. In their preemptive attack on August 17, the Bulgarians had struck primarily at the Serbian sector of the Allied line, and drove the Serbs back. The Serbian success on September 19 was a further step in taking their country back.
The Gardeners of Salonika by Alan Palmer, page 81, copyright © 1965 by A. W. Palmer, publisher: Simon and Schuster, publication date: 1965
(4) Entry from the memoirs of Maurice Paléologue, French Ambassador to Russia, for Saturday, September 20, 1916. A combined German and Austrian army under German General Erich von Falkenhayn, and a German, Bulgarian, and Turkish army under German General August von Mackensen attacked Romania, the former in Transylvania, Austria-Hungary, and the latter in from the south in Dobrudja, a region between the Danube River and the Black Sea. The Carpathian Mountains formed a significant natural barrier between Austria-Hungary and Romania.
An Ambassador's Memoirs Vol. III by Maurice Paléologue, page 32, publisher: George H. Doran Company
(5) Excerpt from an account by German General Wollman of the campaign against Romania which had entered the war on August 27, 1916 by invading Transylvania, an Austro-Hungarian region with a large ethnic-Romanian population, with three of its four armies. German General August von Mackensen led an allied German, Bulgarian, Turkish army on the south side of the Danube River facing Wallachia (southern Romania), and threatening the capital of Bucharest. The region of Dobrudja in eastern Romania had no natural protection to the south. Roman emperor Trajan had constructed earthen barriers there two millennia ago.
The Great Events of the Great War in Seven Volumes by Charles F. Horne, Vol. IV, 1916, pp. 351–352, copyright © 1920 by The National Alumnia, publisher: The National Alumni, publication date: 1920
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