Books: Victors Without Laurels

THE GARDENERS OF SALONIKA by Alan Palmer. 285 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.50. Late in September 1918, the Kaiser was bluntly told by his generals that Germany had lost World War I. Why? “As a result,” Field Marshal von Hindenburg explained, “of the collapse of the Macedonian front.” He was stunned. He had been scarcely aware that there was a Macedonian front, let alone that it mattered. And, like the Kaiser, historians have largely ignored the mixed army of British, French, Serbs, Greeks and Italians that broke through the Macedonian mountains, forced Bulgaria’s surrender, and was sweeping northward toward the Danube as the Kaiser heard the fateful words. No Paris street names recall Macedonian victories, no heroes’ welcome awaited the returning veterans. Vainly did the Times of London plead that “justice be done to those men who have had the dust and toil, without the laurel of victory.” In this masterful and highly readable book, British Historian Alan Palmer sets out to do justice to this unsung campaign. From the first landings of the French and British at Salonika in 1915, the Macedonian theater was treated as an unwanted stepchild of the Allied high command and the dumping ground for cashiered generals. As Sir William Robertson, the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, saw it, the Macedonian expedition “had no military justification.” Rent by bitter rivalries among the national contingents, the Salonika army for months did little except dig trenches, winning Georges Clemenceau’s scorn as “the gardeners of Salonika.” Commander in Chief Maurice Sarrail of France was a political general who spent far more time intriguing to unseat Greece’s King Constantine (who was married to the Kaiser’s sister) than in mounting offensives. Sarrail did have one triumph: by wheeling up the French fleet before Piraeus, he forced Constantine’s abdication.

The Scapegoat. It was not until 1918 that the military stalemate ended. That spring the German army in France had launched its “victory offensive,” and April in Paris meant shells from Big Bertha dropping in the Tuileries Gardens. The French needed a scapegoat for their setback and chose General Franchet d’Esperey (the British called him “Desperate Frankie”), then commander of the northern armies in France. He was exiled to Macedonia. An egotistical but forceful general, D’Esperey promptly got the 350,000-man force out of its lice-ridden trenches. He struck boldly at the heart of Germany through Belgrade, Budapest and Vienna.

On Sept. 14, the Serbs began the breakthrough in the mountains west of the Vardar River. Backed by the French, they punched a gaping 20-mile hole in the Bulgarian defenses. The Bulgarian retreat turned to a rout under strafing by R.A.F. machine gunners. Blue-turbaned Moroccan cavalry, under French officers, carried out what was perhaps the last great cavalry march of European warfare, advancing 57 miles in six days across craggy, wild Balkan mountains to seize the chief enemy bastion of Skoplje. In Paris, Winston Churchill later recalled, “it was recognized at once that the end had come.” Six weeks after Bulgaria’s surrender, German plenipotentiaries capitulated in the railroad car in the Compiègne Forest.

The Bleeding Ulcer. The Macedonian campaign, which started as a seemingly minor ulcer, ultimately bled Kaiser Wilhelm’s Germany to death. But, speculates Author Palmer, “if the breakthrough was possible in 1918, would not a determined offensive earlier in the war have had the same result?” And if it had, how many fewer Allied and German soldiers would lie buried beneath the red poppies of Flanders’ fields?