The Great War and Memory in Central and South-Eastern Europe

Balkan Studies Library

Editor-in-Chief

Zoran Milutinovic (University College London)

Editorial Board

Gordon N. Bardos (Columbia University)

Alex Drace-Francis (University of Amsterdam)
Jasna Dragovic-Soso (Goldsmiths, University of London)
Christian Voss (Humboldt University, Berlin)
Marie-Janine Calic (University of Munich)
Lenard J. Cohen (Simon Fraser University)
Radmila Gorup (Columbia University)
Robert M. Hayden (University of Pittsburgh)
Robert Hodel (Hamburg University)
Anna Krasteva (New Bulgarian University)
Galin Tihanov (Queen Mary, University of London)
Maria Todorova (University of Illinois)
Andrew Wachtel (Northwestern University)

VOLUME 17

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 The Great War and Memory in
Central and South-Eastern Europe

Edited by

Oto Luthar

LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: A Croatian Prisoner, 1916, by Anselmo Bucci (1887–1955). Oil on canvas, 100 × 31 cm,
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Contents

Acknowledgements vii
Notes on Contributors viii

Introduction: Beyond a Western-Centric Historical Interpretation of the

Great War 1
Oto Luthar and Nikolai Vukov

1 The Man Who Marched Away: WWI in the Memories of Slovenian

Soldiers 18
Oto Luthar

2 War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 38

Ignác Romsics

3 Between Reality and Imagination: Changing Memories of the Serbian

Theatre of War 55
Daniela Schanes

4 “An Ugly Black Night”: Remembering the Austro-Hungarian Occupation

of Serbia 1915–1918 71
Olga Manojlović Pintar and Vera Gudac Dodić

5 Bosniaks in WWI: Loyal, Obedient, Different 85

Ahmed Pašić

6 Caring for the Wounded: Zagreb Military Hospitals in WWI 97

Vijoleta Herman Kaurić

7 Internment in WWI: The Case of Thalerhof 111

Katharina Wesener

8 War and Memory: The Fascist Instrumentalization of the Italian

Front 123
Fabio Todero
vi contents

9 War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania: Cultural Politics and

Social Context 137
Silviu Hariton

10 Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting:

Post-mortem Interpretations of WWI in Bulgaria 162
Nikolai Vukov

Index 189
Acknowledgements

It has been a long journey from the time the idea for this book was first dis-
cussed in a late summer day of 2008. It was in Kobarid/Caporetto, just after
the final panel of the first conference on the changing memory of the Great
War. Everything seemed so clear and simple: Sure, let’s write a book! But then
the fall came and with it the usual work routine and responsibilities. And soon
enough it was winter . . .
Seven oddly short years and a series of meetings in Ljubljana and Zagreb
later, we have nevertheless managed to elaborate on our contributions and
even invite some new contributors to our project. I would like to thank all
of them for their patience and dedication to the project of relating different
stories and different views . . . from Sofia to Budapest and Bucharest, from
Belgrade to Zagreb, Ljubljana and Jesenice and Graz.
I am also grateful to my colleagues at the Research Centre of the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences and Arts, particularly to Martin Pogačar from the
Institute of Culture and Memory Studies and Petra Svoljšak from the Milko
Kos Institute of History. Their help was invaluable at the time when I thought
the work would never be finished.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the colleagues at ZRC
Administration for securing me the precious time for the work on the final
version of the manuscript. Marko Jevnikar was most efficient and helpful in
helping me get about the everyday routine that usually hinders the finalization
of the project like this.
Not least, I would like to thank Erica Johnson Debeljak and Tadej Turnšek,
who did a remarkable job proofreading and copyediting the manuscript.
Thank you all for this enlightening adventure. It has been great fun and a
precious experience.

Oto Luthar
Notes on Contributors

Vera Gudac Dodić, PhD

is employed at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia in Belgrade, as Senior
Research Fellow. She is the author of several monographs and academic arti-
cles and studies, including: Žena u socijalizmu (2006) [Woman in Socialism].

Silviu-Radian Hariton, PhD

in Comparative History. His research focuses on the politics of identity build-
ing/dissemination in the nineteenth century and its impact on the policies
of commemorations before and after the First World War. His publications
include “Nationalism, Heroism and War Monuments in Romania, 1900s–1930s”
in New Europe Yearbook 2011.

Vijoleta Herman Kaurić, PhD

is research associate at the Croatian Institute of History. She has published
a monograph about Pakrac and several articles relating to social history in
Croatia during the First World War.

Oto Luthar, PhD

researcher and Professor at the Research Centre of SAZU. His research focuses
on the history of historiography, the cultural history of the twentieth century,
Great War and memory studies. He is editor of The Land Between: A History of
Slovenia. Frankfurt am Main, Peter Lang, 2013.

Olga Manojlović Pintar, PhD

is employed at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia in Belgrade, as Senior
Research Fellow. She is the author of numerous academic articles and of
the monograph Arheologija sećanja, Spomenici i identiteti u Srbiji 1918–1989
[Archaeology of Memory, Monuments and Identities in Serbia 1918–1989].

Ahmed Pašić, PhD

worked in the muslim community in Slovenia and coordinated the work at the
Muslim Cultural Center. His publications include Islam i muslimani v Sloveniji
[Islam and Muslims in Slovenia] (2003) and Bošnjaki na soški fronti (2007)
[Bosniaks on the Isonzo Front].
Notes On Contributors ix

Ignác Romsics, PhD

is member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is interested in the his-
tory of the twentieth century and acted as visiting Professor at the Department
of Hungarian Studies in Indiana University (1993–1998). Currently, he is a full-
time lecturer at the Institute of History of the Eszterházy Károly College. His
publications include 20th-Century Hungary and the Great Powers.

Daniela Schanes, PhD

is a researcher at the Austrian Historikerkanzlei in Graz and mainly interested
in genealogy. Her publications include (with Harald Heppner) “The Impact
of the Treaty of Passarowitz on the Habsburg Monarchy”, in Charles Ingrao,
Nikola Samardžić, and Jovan Pešalj’s The Peace of Passarowitz 1718, Purdue
University Press, 2011.

Fabio Todero, PhD

PhD in Italian Studies, is teacher and researcher at the Italian National Institute
for the History of the Liberation Movement. He focuses on the history of the
Great War and memory and has published, among others, Morire per la Patria.
I volontari del Litorale Austriaco nella Grande Guerra, and Orizzonti di guerra:
Carso 1915-1917 [Dying for Homeland, Volunteers from the Austro-Hungarian
Litoral during the Great War Horizons of war: Karst 1915–1917].

Nikolai Vukov, PhD

researcher at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. His research interests include
identities, mobility and transformations, cultural policies and practices in
Southeast Europe, oral history and methodologies of history. His recent publi-
cations include: “The Unmemorable and the Unforgettable: Museumizing the
Socialist Past in post-1989 Bulgaria”. In: Sarkisova, O., and P. Apor (eds.) Visions
after the Fall: Museums and Cinema in the Reshaping of Popular Perceptions of
the Socialist Past, Budapest, CEU Press, 2007.

Katharina Wesener, MA
Karl-Franzens-Universität Graz. She currently teaches at a public school and
is involved with research on the Great War. Her research topics include Styria
and the different refugee camps on Styrian territory, especially Wagna and
Thalerhof (1914–1918).
Introduction: Beyond a Western-Centric Historical
Interpretation of the Great War

Oto Luthar and Nikolai Vukov

“. . . the whole landscape behind us, which had been dead still,
cracked into sound. The cannon broke out on every side of us—fire
and flashes and coloured lights and noise as though the sky, made
of china had broken into a million pieces and fallen—a magnificent
unforgettable spectacle.”
Hugh Walpole, The Russian Front, Galicia1

…
The primary purpose of this monograph is to reveal memories of the Great
War, now known as World War I (WWI), in the Balkans and other parts of
Central Europe. The contributors focus on the hitherto neglected memories
of soldiers fighting in trenches from the Dolomites to the Julian Alps, from
the Karst to the Isonzo River (the Southwestern Front), from Galicia to the
Carpathian Mountains (the Eastern Front), on the Kolubara, Morava, and
Drina Rivers, in the Vardar Valley, on the slopes of the Cer and Kajmakčalan
Mountain in Serbia and Macedonia, and all the way to Dobruja which saddles
today’s Bulgaria and Romania (the Southeastern Front). In addition to wartime
experiences, the authors also provide a glimpse of the everyday lives of the
families of the soldiers fighting and dying in these many theatres of war.
In comparison to the battlefields of France, Belgium, and Turkey, the land-
scapes of the Eastern, Balkan and Isonzo Fronts, as well as the stories of the peo-
ple who fought and died there, remain vague and sometimes entirely invisible.
Many authors and experts who have been extremely specific when represent-
ing the drama at Verdun, Somme, and Gallipoli often chose not to concentrate
on the Balkans or the British Dominions. The standard excuses for the over-
representation of the Western Front and the neglect of other theatres in the
same war, particularly those in Southeastern Europe, were lack of space and
high translation costs. Sometimes an addendum might be included about
the equally horrible but more fluid Eastern Front but, even in such cases, it

1  Vansittart, Voices from the Great War, 74.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_002

2 Luthar and Vukov

­ sually ended with a section on General Alexei Brusilov and his campaign that
u
resulted in the capture of more than half a million Austro-Hungarian ­prisoners.
There might also be some mention of August von Mackensen and Erich von
Falkenhayn and their successful counterattack that drove the Russians back
and caused immense casualties. Sometimes there is a mention of Giuseppe
Ungaretti and his moving poem “Veglia” (“Vigil”), but there would be no
description of the soldiers against whom Mackensen and Falkenhayn’s armies
were fighting, no explanation about how to find the place where Ungaretti,
“crouched close/to one of our men/butchered/with his clenched/mouth/grin-
ning at the full moon,” wrote “letters filled with love.”2 But such omissions
seem almost innocent compared to the egregious mistakes usually made in
describing the twelve Italian offensives on the Austro-Hungarian trenches
that lay between Duino and the Julian Alps, or the lack of knowledge about
the Senegalese soldiers fighting side by side with French, British, and Serbian
troops in Greek Macedonia.3
There are indeed very few presentations that illustrate how the experiences
of the soldiers on the Eastern and Western Fronts were “worlds apart.”4 In the
scholarship on WWI, the Eastern, Balkan, and Italian Fronts “remained to a
great extent an ‘Unknown War’.” As stressed by Vejas G. Liulevicius, the major-
ity of “standard works on the conflict have concentrated on western events,
casting only occasional glance at developments”5 on the other fronts. In addi-
tion to Norman Stones’ The Eastern Front, 1914–1917, Fritz Fischer’s Griff nach der
Weltmacht (published in English as Germany’s Aims in the First World War), and
Liulevicius’s War Land on the Eastern Front, one finds only fragments that fail to
cohere still less to provide a clear view on the significance of the war in the East
and Southeast. Despite the contribution made by this monograph, we never-
theless believe that the historical record has yet to be completed, namely that a
single book cannot possibly fill the striking gap in the historical representation

2  “Vigil by Giuseppe Ungaretti,” Discover War Poets, accessed May 14, 2015, http://warpoets.org
.uk/worldwar1/blog/poem/vigil.
3  In his valuable and informative anthology of poems, letters, and parts of diaries, Peter
Vansittart nevertheless forgets to mention the southern reaches of the Western Front.
For him the trench war started at the North Sea and ended at the Alps. The part that this book
leaves out is where ours begins. It is the part of the war that extended from Tyrol down to the
Adriatic Sea and the Balkans.
4  One of the few presentations of the war in the east can be found in Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius’s
excellent book War Land on the Eastern Front. The book provides a well-researched case of
the German occupation of northern Poland and the Baltic region, which the German soldiers
considered terra incognita.
5  Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front.
Introduction 3

of WWI in the East and the West. This shortfall seems even greater when com-
pared to the volume of historiography on the Eastern Front in World War II,
because “the Second World War in the East, marked by fierce ideological
combat, harsh German occupation policies, and the events of the Holocaust
in particular, has been studied in great depth.”6 The theatres of war in the
Southeast in WWI (and WWII) are even more underrepresented, and this does
not even take into consideration the fact that there was no Kulturprogramm
in the Southeast aimed at “forming the native peoples and creating culture
for them.”7 As stressed in the chapter written by Daniela Schanes, WWI in
Southeast Europe was alternatively seen as “a revenge campaign,” a war against
barbarians, and an effort aimed at “the cultural degradation of Serbia.”8
The second aim of the monograph is to provide a venue for the work of
the largely overlooked work of a younger generation of historians from Sofia,
Belgrade, Zagreb, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, Nova Gorica, Trieste, and Graz. Here we
are referring to both independent discussions by these scholars, which are
the methodological equals of those of their colleagues from Great Britain and
France, but also to works that have been produced within the framework of
projects carried out in Birmingham, London, and Péronne. Namely, a grow-
ing number of PhD students and junior PhDs from the Balkans and Central
Europe are currently participating in these centers as visiting associates, gath-
ering materials or contributing individual chapters to major syntheses coordi-
nated by established researchers.
In the process of filling the historical gap and providing a venue for the work
of overlooked scholars from the region, we also wanted to draw attention to
instances when so-called Orientalization or Balkanization occurred during the
thematization of WWI in Southeastern Europe and the Balkans. This applies
in particular to the reconstruction of developments that took place in Serbia,
especially in 1914 and 1915. Even detailed studies by authors who have largely
succeeded in emancipating themselves from stereotypical depictions—such
as the characterization of the Balkans being the powder keg of Europe—reveal
a tendency to offer an overgeneralized image of the Balkans as, for example,
the border between East and West, a cultural fracture zone, a space in which a
culture of violence and conflicts persists.9 This tendency is most often detected
in descriptions of Serbian chetniks and komiti at the onset of the war, in

6  Ibid.
7  Ibid., 113.
8  See Chapter 3 by Daniela Schanes.
9  Angelow, “Einleitung,” 8–9. A similar popular position is even found in Australian authors.
See, among others, also Carthew, Voices From the Trenches. Letters to Home, 3, in which the
4 Luthar and Vukov

c­ haracterizations of Bosnian soldiers, and in thematizations of the differences

between German and Bulgarian soldiers.10 With regard to the first example, a
significant part of Austrian historiography embraced the interpretation that
the violence perpetrated by the Austro-Hungarian soldiers in Western Serbia
was a response to the violence committed by Serbian komiti, who allegedly
tortured and killed prisoners of war, bombarded Red Cross dressing stations,
and violated the conditions of temporary truces.11
These and many other topics were explored during our conference and
series of bilateral meetings that took place Kobarid, Ljubljana, Vienna, Zagreb,
Belgrade, and Sofia. The first conference took place in Kobarid in 2007 and
our last meeting in Ljubljana in the spring of 2012. All in all, more than fif-
teen scholars from seven countries interested in what is known as empirical
comparative history, as practiced with reflections on the trauma of 1914–1918,
were involved in the project. Like Stefan Goebel in his recent book on WWI
and Medieval Memory, we too were interested in the study of a sustained mass
experience that left dense, but as yet not fully discovered, traces of memory.
To use Goebel’s phrasing, however, does not mean focusing exclusively on the
enormous community of suffering created by human losses in the WWI. What
also matters is how the accumulated presence of death triggered new ways of
mourning in the wider society. Finally, not only we were interested in correct-
ing the imbalance in the one-sided topography of violent death from the era,
but we also wanted to show the ways WWI enabled the final stage of modern
nationalism in the nations in this region.
In terms of process, the contributors emphasized the personal over the
political, reacting to an older strain of historiography that neglected to take
seriously the blunt reality fact that their contemporaries were overcome by
grief. Here we were interested in what Jay Winter might have described as the
“grief school”: a rather new historiographical movement that assesses the cost

author assigns one of the protagonists the belief that the “Balkans [. . .] a smouldering
powder keg [. . .] waiting for the spark [. . .].”
10  Stein, “ ‘Wer das nicht mitgemacht hat, glaubt es nicht,’ ” 271–288.
11  Here, reference is made in particular to the work of Christian Ortner. See Ortner,
“Die Feldzüge gegen Serbien in den Jahren 1914 und 1915,” 123–142. The authors of such
interpretations refer to sources such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in particular
to Sammlung von Nachweisen für die Verletzung des Völkerrechtes durch die mit Österreich-
Ungarn kriegführenden Staaten Abgeschlossen mit 31.Jänner 1915, but tend to overlook the
fact that, even before they set out for Bosnia and Serbia, Austro-Hungarian soldiers were
warned about the uncivilized gangs they would encounter in the Balkans. They also fail to
take into consideration the reports and materials collected over thirty years by the edito-
rial board of the trilingual Ratni album, 1914–1918, edited by Andra Popović.
Introduction 5

of war at more intimate levels than historians who have focused exclusively on
nationalism and identity politics. Moreover, emphasizing the personal over the
political enables us to avoid the so-called functionalist school, which conceptu-
alizes memory as a source of symbolic power. As Reinhart Koselleck expressed
it his groundbreaking article “Kriegsdenkmale als Identitätsstiftungen der
Überlebenden” (War memorials as builders of identity for those who survived),
we have become aware that the meaning of death is no longer only attached
to the hereafter. War memorials thus became a political tool that endowed
the remembering of the deaths of soldiers with an earthly function directed
towards the future of those who are still living.
We also opted for a cross-national approach, which we hope allows us to
avoid the trap of selective treatment of the past. We drew on a massive amount
of archival records and secondary literature in an attempt to collect the testi-
monies of unknown eyewitnesses, and the memoirs and reflections of anony-
mous participants in WWI in Central and Southeastern Europe. In doing so,
we were particularly interested in lesser known material and memories, our
goal being to reveal the unseen kaleidoscope of the killing and suffering of
people for whom the kind of fraternizing that took place on the Western Front
was simply unimaginable. In our search for a human figure in the armies fight-
ing on the battlefields of Central and Southeastern European, and in giving
voice to the soldiers whose war tales recount actions that history has mostly
ignored, we concentrated on two main issues: first, the question of European
convergences and national peculiarities, and, second, a reflection on the status
of memory and remembrance.
The first issue is rather straightforward. Namely, despite being a transna-
tional event, the commemoration of WWI was, on the whole, cast within the
confines of national cultures. Even though in some ways the battlefields anni-
hilated national borders, the nation state remained the preferred analytical
unit of history. The second issue is more complex. We are confronted with vari-
ous kind of memories: collective memory, communicative memory, cultural
memory, public memory, and social memory. As Goebel argues: “the common
ground seems to be the assumption that memory constitutes a discursive con-
struct or a cultural representation rather than a mirror or a storehouse of past
‘reality.’ ”12 Such “representations of social worlds themselves are the constitu-
ents of social reality” since “no facts can exist outside the language in which
they are encoded.”13 Like Daniel Sherman, the author of The Construction of
Memory in Interwar France, we, too, believe that commemoration mobilizes

12  Goebel, The Great War and Medieval Memory, 14.

13  Chartier, “Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories,” 41.
6 Luthar and Vukov

a variety of discourses and practices into a representation of an event or an

epoch. This means that any representation contains a social and cultural vision
inherent in the memory of the commemorated event. Discourse, on the other
hand, may be defined as a group of statements linked by their object, and rep-
resentation is an operation, and the artifacts of that operation, that cause signs
to stand for an absent referent.
Connecting this to Jan Assmann’s two types of memories—communicative
and cultural, where the duration of communicative memory is the duration
of the group producing it—we may arrive at an insight as to how memory
in different national and/or transnational cases is transformed into cultural
memory.

Memory Furrows

Despite the abundant memorial initiatives to fallen soldiers, memory of the

Great War in Central and Southeastern Europe was marked by controversies,
disagreements, and even collective forgetting during the interwar years, the
period after WWII, and, in many cases, up until today. It has also been in a con-
dition of constant change, reflecting national and ideological reinscriptions,
and enshrining varying movements during the course the last century. At the
threshold of commemorating the war’s centennial, the curving lines of these
memory furrows call for the attention of present day societies. These are even
more useful for historians, who, in the words of E. Wyschogrod, “must make
the dead Other remember, speak through the literary and artifactual remains
that constitute the historical record or, in their absence, through the burial
places, which encrypt the memories of the dead Others.”14
Countless human beings were left hideously and permanently disfigured,
shattered in mind and body during WWI. The majority of soldiers killed on the
Eastern Front, the Balkans, Southern Tyrol and the Isonzo Valley were never
found or even identified because their bodies were blown apart by shellfire,
sucked into the mud, or buried under tons of falling earth. Thus a significant
number of the soldiers who died had no known grave. Many of those who
survived returned home as war invalids, many of them dying within a decade
of their return. Individual tragedies—the physical, emotional, and men-
tal trauma of the encounter with the horrors of war coupled with long-term
effects of poison gas, shell shock, and other physical injuries, and limitations

14  Wyschogrod, An Ethics of Remembering, 172.

Introduction 7

on the ability to adapt to post-war realities—often found expression only in

silence and speechless resignation.
Of course, the Great War also gave rise to significant political transforma-
tions. Four centuries-old empires and their reigning dynasties—the Prussian,
Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Ottoman—were abolished. New or reborn
countries declared independence from the crumbling empires and the colo-
nial system was set on a path to virtual collapse. In Central and Southeastern
Europe, the Bolshevik Revolution, along with its dynamics of mobilization and
novel aspiration to become a totally controlling state entity, emerged amidst
the vast stretches of territory devastated by war and the newly emerged nation
states each with their own territorial and political claims. Thus, the great
military campaigns that crossed the continent not only shook the existing
political and social order, but completely transfigured state formations, social
organizations, and not least, the overall human perspective on life and death.
In this first industrial war, death both lost and gained in individuality. On the
one hand, it became a common, non-exceptional, almost normal condition,
and, on the other, it was bureaucratically individualized by form letters sent to
each of the dead soldier’s families. This individualization also became part of
the post-war memorial landscape in which every fallen soldier became part
of an official register or memorial site, the names of the dead being put on
monuments or registered in special records. There was also the individual-
ization of grief that became a part of the everyday life of the civilian popula-
tion. Individual letters and packages had been sent to the soldiers at the front,
diaries had been composed, and special services in the churches organized.
Nearly every third Catholic priest close to the Isonzo Front, for example, kept
records that describe the disasters, diseases, and epidemics, and the general
misery. Despite censorship, it became evident that the carnage in civilian life
was in many respects comparable to the horror of trench warfare. The mass
death of soldiers in Galicia, the Carpathian Mountains, Dobrudza, and the
Morava and Isonzo Valleys also became a part of the everyday memory of
the civilian population.
On the political level, memories of WWI slowly became unified and nation-
alized. Moreover, the post-war peace treaties led to a division of memory
among involved countries. Citizens of defeated countries were unable to visit
the frontlines where their soldiers had met their death. Therefore, the kind
of battlefield tourism that developed among victorious countries in Europe
was absent among the defeated ones. Moreover, for defeated countries, the
Armistice did not have the same meaning as it had for countries that had
emerged victorious from the war. The anniversary was not elevated to the sta-
tus of a day of remembrance, and instead other days were chosen from the
8 Luthar and Vukov

national or religious calendars—All Saints Day or a day for national heroes—

to serve a similar purpose.
Decades later, the profusion of commemorative activities related to WWII
in countries on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain led to the further diminish-
ment of Armistice Day and, in general, commemorations of WWI were eclipsed
by celebrations aimed at maintaining memories of the anti-fascist resistance
movements. Solemn ceremonies on November 11 were sometimes rescheduled
for other days marked for the remembrance of either heroes who fought for
national unification prior to the Great War, or those who died for social and
political rights during the interwar period. It is hardly surprising that in some
states, it took years to adopt the practice of entombing unknown soldiers—
a tradition that was widespread in the majority of the victorious nations soon
after the war. In the defeated states, the red poppy did not turn into a symbol
of war remembrance. In some states, such as Bulgaria, it evolved instead into
an emblem of the socialist movement.
In the territories of the dissolved empires, nine new European states were
established, and, in each of them, the politics of commemorating WWI was
accompanied by a diverse set of contextualizing moments and considerations.
Even at the moment of their creation, the meanings of the war and its end
vacillated between the poles of national regeneration and national collapse,
between a reference point for celebration and an episode that was a cause
of national mourning. Within this spectrum, the experiences of Bulgaria,
northeastern Italy, Yugoslavia, Austria, and Hungary varied considerably, but
in all of them, one motif recurred throughout the years: the imperative not
to forget the heavy human price paid or divert attention to other matters
for the sake of the nation. The motif about the importance of remembering
and the search for the direct implications of remembrance would later con-
tribute to some of the circumstances that in turn led to WWII, and would also
determine the form of commemorative procedures in the second half of the
twentieth century. No less important is that during the interwar period, nation-
alism in many of the newly formed states became fervent and aggressive—
particularly in regions with an inextricable mixture of nationalities, languages,
religions, and cultures—for example, the northern Adriatic coast, Macedonia,
the border regions of Hungary and Romania, and the zones of contact between
Russia and the new states formed on the territory of the former Tzarist empire.
In the interwar period, such border regions were particularly vulnerable to
the aspirations of various nations and this was often reflected in the compli-
cated policies of local and regional remembrance of WWI and the projection of
these policies onto subsequent memory practices. Resonances of these multi-
faceted projections on commemoration can still be found in the celebration of
Introduction 9

important anniversaries of WWI, and in the disharmony between Italian and

Yugoslav, Hungarian and Romanian, Bulgarian and Turkish memory c­ ultures.
Even when combined into joint commemorations or avoided altogether as
a topic in political discussions of shared history, the memory of WWI still
raises controversies. Interpretations about its symbolic heritage are contested
and what might be called lines of forgetting that have developed in different
countries during the course of the century after it ended are often revealed in
the process.
The realms of forgetting about WWI were particularly noticeable after WWII
when new postwar generations focused on a fresh set of appalling statistics
of human destruction and were mobilized within new ideological horizons to
arrive at an accounting and understanding of mass death. After 1945, the divid-
ing line, in terms of appropriating the memory of the new world catastrophe,
was not so much between victors and vanquished, but rather, between two ide-
ological blocs that gradually consolidated along each side of the Iron Curtain.
Within this new framework, the memory of WWI was appropriated for differ-
ent purposes, depending on its advantages in terms of highlighting, avoiding,
or suppressing memories about the experience of WWII. While for some coun-
tries (for example, Great Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia),
the second great war was an occasion to build upon previous involvement
in global military combat thus providing a long-term continuous narrative of
war endeavor and national dignity, for many other countries on the European
continent (France being a notable example), the emphasis on the carnage
of WWI had as its inherent purpose the avoidance of remembering France’s
problematic participation in WWII, and reminding citizens and government
alike of their complicity in crimes perpetrated during the war.15 The compli-
cated relationship between remembering heroic moments and obliterating
uneasy memories about what happened during WWII retroactively affected
the remembrance of the WWI by reviving the politics of national affirmation
and celebration, deepening discourses of national victimhood, or simply by
ignoring it because of its seeming irrelevance for the new paradigm of nation-
ally significant events.
Soviet Russia provides a noteworthy case of bracketing of the memory
of WWI. Public memorials to WWI dead were not built until well after the

15  About the memory of WWI having to compete with the politics of commemoration in
post-1945 Europe, see Judt, “The Past is Another Country,” 83–118; Mosse, “Two World Wars
and the Myth of the War Experience,” 491–513; Lebow, Kansteiner and Fogu, The Politics
of Memory in Post-war Europe; Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France
since 1944.
10 Luthar and Vukov

d­ issolution of the Soviet Union in the late twentieth century. Likewise, for more
than seven decades, there was total neglect of the memory of those who gave
their lives on the perceived wrong side of the October Revolution.16 Indicative
of the veil of forgetting around WWI, this example also illustrates the con-
figurations that the memory of the war received in countries that fell within
the Soviet sphere of influence after 1945. Not only were commemorations to
WWI marginalized by the overwhelming celebrations of the victory over Nazi
Germany, but, in some countries, references to it were used as grounds for
accusations of nationalism and chauvinism—the elimination of which com-
munist ideology defined as a major goal. Whereas for the West (to use the ter-
minology of the Iron Curtain division), the legacy of the war has been a regular
cause of disagreement among war veterans, veteran organizations, and mili-
tary elites,17 for the East the symbolic heritage of WWI that had been accumu-
lating during the interwar period was eclipsed by the dominant narrative of
anti-fascist resistance and made only the most fleeting appearances in political
celebrations after 1945. Not only was WWI not the war to end all wars, but also
the memory of this extraordinary trial of nations did not prove firm enough to
transcend political appropriations. Having emerged from beneath the cloak of
war exploits, communism in its Bolshevik-state version imposed a symbolic
defeat on the memory of WWI. Although it was not completely destroyed, it
was permanently regarded as subordinate to the revolution’s sacred chronolo-
gies. From such a perspective, it is hardly surprising that with the end of the
communist regimes in Eastern Europe, there was a sudden reawakening of
WWI memorials. Sometimes, however, these commemorative acts were sym-
bolically appropriated by nationalist groups and right-wing organizations.
Beyond political utilizations of memories of WWI (a topic that, despite the
noticeable surge in publications about the war and its consequences over
the last two decades, still awaits a detailed exploration), there are also a num-
ber of other perspectives that merit further investigation: international rela-
tions and political history, everyday experiences on the frontlines, and the
lives of civilians in the midst of wartime. A range of new studies on the politi-
cal, social, and cultural history of WWI have appeared in recent years18 with

16  About the place WWI occupied in the public memory after the October Revolution, and
particularly under the influence of the Great Patriotic War, see Merridale, Nights in Stone;
Scherrer, “Russia—In Search of a Useful Past,” 90–108.
17  About the construction of veterans’ memorials in France, see Prost, Les Anciens
Combattants et la Société Francaise.
18  Bobič, War and Faith: The Catholic Church in Slovenia, 1914–1918; Angelow, Der Erste
Weltkrieg auf dem Balkan; Meteling, “Neue Forschungen zum Ersten Weltkrieg,” 614–648;
Introduction 11

new accounts of mass killings and the general war experience,19 innovative
research on population movement and forced migration,20 as well as the lives
of women during the war and feminist activism.21 New studies with a politi-
cal slant tackle the question of how the war ended and the influence of WWI
on the rise of fascism and communism.22 Those research projects that lean
toward cultural studies look at class and gender issues during the war23 as well
as the cultural demobilization and remobilization that occurred after the war.24
Understandably, the largest emphasis in recent WWI research has remained on
the social response to the unimaginable scale of death and the emergence of
new mourning practices for the dead worldwide.25 Studies of war monuments
and memorial representations of death,26 on how the war dead are remem-
bered, and the cultural representation and the politics of commemoration27
all offer a fertile field for contemporary investigations.

Luthar and Grdina, “ ‘Naj se konča’: vsakdanji spomin in podoba ‘drugega’ v (popularnih)
interpretacijah I. svetovne vojne,” 13–26.
19  See Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing; Capdevila and Voldman, War Dead; Luthar,
O žalosti niti besede; Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction; Watson, Fighting Different Wars;
Winter, The Experience of World War I; Ziemann, War Experiences in Rural Germany,
1914–1923.
20  See Hagemann and Schüler-Springorum, Home/Front: The Military, War and Gender in
Twentieth-Century Germany; Stibbe, Captivity, Forced Labour and Forced Migration during
the First World War; Thom, Nice Girls and Rude Girls; Svoljšak, Soča, sveta reka.
21  Verginella, Ženska obrobja; Darrow, French Women and the First World War; Fell and Sharp,
The Women’s Movement in Wartime; Grayzel, Women and the First World War; Ouditt,
Fighting Forces, Writing Women; Sharp and Stibbe, Aftermaths of War.
22  Gehmacher, Harvey, and Kemlein, Zwischen Kriegen; Leidinger and Moritz, Gefangenschaft,
Revolution, Heimkehr; MacMillan, Paris 1919; Verginella, Suha pašta, pesek in bombe.
23  Štepec, Vojne fotografije 1914–1918; Dudink, Hagemann, and Tosh, Masculinities in Politics
and War; Melman, Borderlines; Meyer, Men of War; Wingfield and Bucur, Gender and War
in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe.
24  See Hoffman-Holter, ‘Abreisendmachung’: Jüdische Kriegsflüchtlinge in Wien 1914–1923;
Horne, “Kulturelle Demobilmachung 1919–1939: Ein sinnvoller historischer Begriff?,”
129–150; Nicolson, The Great Silence, 1918–1920.
25  Acton, Grief in Wartime; Cannadine, “War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern
Britain,” 233–234; Sherman, “Monuments, Mourning and Masculinity in France after
World War I,” 82–107.
26  Koselleck, “Les monuments aux morts, lieux de l’identité des survivants,” 131–160; Moriarty,
“The Absent Dead and Figurative First World War Memorials,” 7–40; Prost, “Monuments
to the Dead,” 307–330; Luthar, “ ‘Dokler nas smrt ne loči’: Moderna spominska pokrajina in
nacionalizacija kolektivnega spomina.”
27  See Ashplant, Dawson, and Roper, The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration; Evans
and Lunn, War and Memory in the Twentieth Century; Fussell, The Great War and Modern
12 Luthar and Vukov

This new surge of historical interest not only addresses the undeniable dif-
ference in the absolute number of studies dealing with the war in Western
Front countries and in Eastern Europe and other parts of the world, it also
raises a range of empirical and conceptual challenges that—despite the pleth-
ora of recent research work—have yet to be entirely overcome and many of
which have still not found a proper response. First and foremost, there is the
issue of statistical uncertainty about the war dead, the contradiction of data,
and the reduction of human beings to digital and depersonalized categories.
How should the dead be counted and represented in the dynamic whirlpool
of mass destruction? How should the soldiers who died in combat be counted
and represented taking into account that, with the exception of the genocide
of Ottoman Armenians where civilians comprised the bulk of casualties, sol-
dier represented the vast majority of the dead? Another question is how should
historians deal with the question of the missing—those for whom there was
some hope during the war but who never reappeared after the war ended. How
did post-war societies respond to the ultimate impossibility of this process of
individuation—to the doomed effort to count and name each and every one
of the dead? How did they address the issue of “democracy in death” and did
the “democratization of memory” also occur as a consequence of the WWI?28
A second set of important issues responds to the framework of the nation as
the only entity inclusive and encompassing enough to represent the dead and
somehow accommodate the multitude of crushed lives. It was symptomatic
that during the war the emphasis fell mainly on enemy casualties, whereas
after the war, it fell on a nation’s own dead. Even in the cases of defeated
nations, WWI often became instrumental in the invention of a national tra-
dition and was embellished with symbols and practices, thus ensuring con-
tinuity throughout the years. Constructed in individual countries, these
traditions involved the symbolic reappropriation of the dead, in a sense bring-
ing them back under the authority of nation states during the post-war period.
As A. Lerner remarks, the mystical body of the nation was thus “created
through the triumphant return of the hero.”29 The latter became the object
of enhanced public attention during the post-war years, playing a crucial role

Memory; Ulrich and Ziemann, Krieg im Frieden: Die umkämpfte Erinnerung an den Ersten
Weltkrieg; Winter and Sivan, War and Remembrance in the Twentieth Century; Winter,
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning.
28  For a theoretical elaboration of these issues, see Laqueur, “The Naming of the Dead,”
150–167; Laqueur, “Memory and Naming in the Great War.”
29  See Lerner, “The Nineteenth-Century Monument and the Embodiment of the National
Time,” 191; Gillis, Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity; Kantorowicz,
Introduction 13

in shaping the patriotism of the modern nation, and, one which, despite the
selective forgetting applied to WWI, resonates in commemorations and mili-
tary ceremonies even today. Although there was a shift in this appropriation of
death from the national to the patrimonial during the decades after the war,30
the process is nevertheless indicative of the long-lasting effect of the ways in
which the nation is imagined and has become representative of a community
uniting the living and the dead.
Nevertheless, despite the wider impulse to include the perished soldiers
within the collective body of the nation, the process was also marked by cases
of exclusion and marginalization. Members of minority groups were excluded
from the lists of the dead (minorities being frequently regarded as enemies) as
were soldiers who were members of collaborating armies (the maintenance
of whose memory was relegated to their respective nation states) and those
who belonged to other marginalized groups in society (women, medical offi-
cers, social democrats, etc.) who were also generally neglected during national
commemorations. The need for cohesion was particularly sharp in ethnically
mixed regions where even instances of strong symbolic significance, such
as the Unknown Soldier, aroused controversy about citizenship and debates
about ethnic and religious identity. With the passage of time, some of these
debates have subsided in the name of simply honoring all of the dead, but nev-
ertheless lines of inclusion and exclusion are indicative of the general process
of public appropriation and consolidation of war memories around a nation-
ally relevant set of reference points.

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 CHAPTER 1

Men Who Marched Away: WWI in the Memories of

Slovenian Soldiers

Oto Luthar

In drawing on the title of Thomas Hardy’s poem “Men Who March Away,”1 this
chapter hopes to capture the multifaceted involvement of Slovenian soldiers in
the theatres of WWI in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. As Austro-Hungarian
subjects, the majority of Slovenian men were drafted into the Imperial and
Royal Army (kaiserlich und königliche Armee or k.u.k.), but there was also a
small group of Slovenian intellectuals, mostly comprised of students, medi-
cal doctors, and clerks who were members of the pro-Yugoslav organization
Revival (Preporod), who joined the Serbian Army at the very beginning of the
war. They were known as prostovoljci, the Slovenian word for volunteers. Finally,
some two thousand Slovenian soldiers who had been sent to the Eastern Front
and captured by Russians joined either the Russian Army or the so-called
dobrovoljska divizija, the Volunteer Corps of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, and
were known as dobrovoljci, the Serbian word for volunteers.
During the Great War, Slovenian soldiers thus served in three armies and
were present on almost every front in Central and Southeastern Europe.
In Serbia, they even fought against each other: as k.u.k. soldiers they invaded
Serbia, and as volunteers from the Revival movement who had joined
the Serbian Army, they tried to repel the attack.2 After Italy entered the war in

1  Hardy, “Men Who March Away (Songs of the Soldier),” 5.

2  For some, this was already the second involvement on the Serbian side. A number of them,
particularly medical doctors, had already joined the Serbian forces during the Balkan Wars.
Upon the urgent request of the Serbian Red Cross, at least eleven of them (Dr. Otmar Kranjec,
Dr. Edo Šlajmer, Dr. Jernej Demšar, Dr. Ivan Premrov, Dr. Franc Šabec, Dr. Josip Tavčar,
Dr. Oražem, Dr. Črnič, Dr. Lavrič, Dr. Bačar, and Dr. Tajnšek) mostly from Ljubljana, Vrhnika,
and Litija, joined the Serbian Army and at least two (Dr. Mavricij Rus and Dr. Gaber Hočevar)
joined the Serbian allies in Bulgaria. Beside these, we should mention a man who fought
with the Serbian četniki in uprisings against the Turks in the second part of the nineteenth
century. In 1875, to be more precise, at least ten Slovenians joined the unit of Petar Mrkonjić
in an uprising against the Turks in Herzegovina and later in Bosnia. The best known among
them was Miroslav Hubmajer, a printer and non-commissioned officer in the Austro-

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_003

Men Who Marched Away 19

1915, most Slovenian men were transferred from Serbia and the Eastern Front
to the Isonzo River, where they fought in all twelve Italian offensives between
1915 and 1917, including the breakthrough at Caporetto. Three years later,
Slovenian volunteers in the Serbian Army, prostovoljci, once again regrouped
at Salonica to participate in battles against the Germans and Bulgarians on the
Greek—Macedonian border.
For the majority of Slovenian men, however, the war started in Ljubljana,
Maribor, Celje and other recruiting centers of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
Like many young men in other parts of Europe and Australia, they got caught
up in the “infectious mood of euphoria.” Similar to conscripts the world over,
from Glasgow to Melbourne and from Paris to Berlin, they had not the “slight-
est inkling of the horrors and tragedy that were to follow.”3 Army officials,
church representatives, and especially local newspapers played a leading role
in stirring up heroic and patriotic sentiments, endeavoring to make young men
believe that the war would be over by Christmas. All those who failed to express
confidence in the euphoric statements of various dignitaries were accused
of being “reluctant to confront the enemy [. . .] [and of] not [being] loyal.”4
The conservative daily newspaper, Slovenec, was particularly keen to report
the “enthusiasm of the Slovenian people” and their commitment “to heed the
call of our Emperor [. . .] [and] regardless of all circumstances fulfil the duty
which has been imposed on us by our great homeland Austria.” According to
the author of the editorial, this sentiment was shared or expressed not only
by “young men [but] also graceful girls [. . .] asking for instructions to avenge
the death of the heir to the throne and defend the glory of Austria.”5 When
the euphoric support for the invasion of Serbia was at its peak, Slovenec often
made use of aggressive populist narratives inciting revenge. One of the best
examples is provided by the following lyrics:

Hungarian Army, who joined the četniki at the age of twenty-four. After a year of fighting
in Herzegovina, Bosnia, and Montenegro, he even became the leader of Mrkonjić’s unit.
Later, when General Černjajev and his volunteers from Russia joined the uprising, Hubmajer
obtained the rank of Second Lieutenant in the newly united forces against the Turks.
3  Carthew, Voices from the Trenches: Letters to Home, 6–8.
4  “He who heeds someone other than Him [the Emperor], who holds the right under the law
of God and man to put the weapon in his hands, is not worthy of carrying it” is just one of the
typical forms of warmongering that appeared in Slovenec in the summer of 1914.
5  Slovenec, 42/1914, no. 169, 28 June 1914.
20 Luthar

Do you hear our cannons salute

You, Serbs?
We’ll lay you to the ground as food
For herbs!

God will send our mighty army

To your gate,
To see all that is barmy
In Belgrade.

We’ll place your bodies under grass

In order.
And seal, for many years to pass
Your border.

Righteous debts from foul past

Will be squared.
And our victory will last
Uncompared.

Barely a few months into the war, this initial thrill and excitement was already
a distant memory. According to the letters and diaries of Slovenian soldiers,
the situation on the battlefield existed in sharp contrast to what had been
promised in farewell speeches. Upon reaching the front lines, soldiers of both
armies fighting on the Cer Mountain and along the banks of the Kolubara and
Ljig Rivers in Serbia were immediately faced with lice, hunger, and cold, with
innocent civilian victims, and “bullets and shrapnel flying in all directions.”
In short, what awaited them was “a pure hell” which by December 1914 had
already led many to believe that “death was not the worst of fates to suffer,
but the salvation from the seething hell of the world war.”6 The diary of Josip
Prelesnik, from which the above quotes are taken, also includes the statement
that “amidst all the booming, rumbling, wailing, cracking, hissing, whistling
[and] shrieking” around the trenches “it seemed as if hell itself had been
thrown open.” In the diaries of soldiers, such depictions were usually followed
by a necessary explanation, if not apology, that no words could describe what
they had experienced. Or, as Prelesnik put it: “The anguish, [. . .] the horror [. . .]
and the suffering—I cannot describe it well enough to convey the slightest
hint of how it actually felt.”

6  From the diary of Josip Prelesnik, “1914–1918”. Here quoted from Luthar, “O žalosti niti
besede,” 133.
Men Who Marched Away 21

Even writers, Prelesnik claimed, might find themselves at a loss for words.
It was if as he had already read the future works of Ernest Hemingway that
would echo this statement years later. In his novel on the subject, A Farewell
to Arms, Hemingway resorted to similar metaphors when he compared shell-
ing with a huge blast furnace, white and red roar, and rushing wind. He also
rejected notions of glory, courage, and honor as obscene, stating “that all the
people [. . .] who stand to profit by a war, [. . .] should be shot on the first day
it starts.” In the end, he added that he “would be very glad to take charge of
this shooting,” and stated that he “would see that it would be performed as
humanely and correctly as possible.”7 A similar sentiment was expressed by
other less renowned authors, such as an Italian lieutenant in the Karst who,
in the winter of 1916, wrote: “It is not dying that is the demoralizing thing, the
thing that grinds you down. It is dying for the stupidity of specific orders and
the cowardice of specific commanding officers.”8
In the writings of other public figures from this period, however, we
are often confronted with stirring patriotic ardor. For the Italian poet,
Giuseppe Ungaretti, “Honor [was] the most sacred gift; [and] to serve the
Fatherland the highest duty”: “This is the Isonzo/ And here I best/ Recognize
myself . . .” The sentiment was shared by the Serbian Colonel Andra Popović,
who in 1926 published The Album of the War of 1914–1918, and was convinced
that “to die for the Fatherland [was] the greatest honor [. . .].”9
The heroic interpretation prevailed in war narratives that came out during
the 1920s and 1930s. The shift in rhetoric, as well as the discovery of the afore-
mentioned soldier poets and writers, came about in the 1960s with the publi-
cation of works, such as The Real War, 1914–1918 by Basil Lidell Hart (1960), The
Donkeys by Alan Clark (1961), Lions led by Donkeys by E.P. Thompson (1962),
that is with a somewhat different popularization of war. Here we might draw
attention to the musical Oh! What a Lovely War (1963) and the twenty-six-
hour long documentary show of Richard Attenborough, The Great War (1969).
This sort of literature did not make its way into Slovenian historiography
until the 1980s and 1990s, with the works of Petra Svoljšak, Marta Verginella,
Janez Povše, and Oto Luthar, as well as with popular books by Vasja Klavora.
In fact, the whole thematization of the WWI in Slovenia, and also in other
parts of the former Yugoslavia, was overshadowed by the unrelenting interpre-
tation of WWII. Before WWII, during the 1920s and 1930s, despite the fact that

7  Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, IX–X.

8  Hastings, “A Farewell to Arms,” 48–51.
9  Popović, Ratni Album 1914–1918. Popović’s war album is one of the rare documents that illus-
trate the atrocities committed by the Austro-Hungarian occupying forces in Serbia, which
were described for the first time by John Reed in his War in Eastern Europe.
22 Luthar

Serbia played a crucial role in the WWI, it was uncomfortable to dwell on a

conflict in which people from different parts of the newly established kingdom
had fought against one another. Although King Alexander, in an effort to for-
mulate a common culture of memory in honor of the victims of WWI, erected
the Unknown Soldier Memorial on Avala Hill south of Belgrade, it never really
took root in the consciousness of all Yugoslavs. Like many other Yugoslav poli-
cies attempting to raise national (or trans-ethnic) sentiment, this one, too, was
destined to face either disregard or the clash of different memory cultures. The
only genuine supporters of a united Yugoslav memoryscape of WWI were the
prostovoljci and dobrovoljci. For this reason alone, we believe that they ought to
be presented in greater detail.

Prostovoljci and Dobrovoljci: Volunteers and Volunteers

Prostovoljci and dobrovoljci are two different terms, one Slovenian and the
other Serbian, that, although not describing the same group of people, mean
the same thing: volunteer. As mentioned above, prostovoljci were organized
or unorganized proponents of the Yugoslav idea who mostly joined the
Serbian Army and fought with Serbian soldiers since the onset of the war. The
most famous prostovoljec was undoubtedly Avgust Jenko, who co-founded
the secret organization Revival in 1912, regarded by his comrades and fellow
thinkers as the “first revolutionary Yugoslav movement of state-political and
cultural revival among the Slovenians.”10 The ultimate goal of the United Club
of Slovenian Academicians, which embodied Revival’s ideas, was “the unifi-
cation of all Yugoslavs as one nation in an independent Yugoslav state.” This
was also the most important topic of the Club’s newspaper Preporod (Revival),
which was later banned and renamed Glas Juga (The Voice of the South).
At the helm of the organization was the “supreme command of ‘Kladivarji’ ”
or “the secret circle of five”—composed of Avgust Jenko, France Fabijančič,
Vladislav Fabijančič, Lovro Klemenčič, Dr. Josip Berce, and later the writer Juš
Kozak. They also regarded as “honorable confidants” two of the most impor-
tant Slovenian authors of the period: the poet Oton Župančič and the novelist
Ivan Cankar. The indisputable leader of the Revival movement was Jenko, who,
despite his youth and appearance (a Serbian author once described him as

10  Paulin, “Jenko Avgust – Kladivar besede in dejanja,” 131. The most important biographies
of the prostovoljci and dobrovoljci are to be found in this 825-page collection of accounts,
autobiographies, war reports, photographs, and illustrations published in Ljubljana and
Maribor on the twentieth anniversary of the volunteer movement.
Men Who Marched Away 23

pretty as a girl and as young as morning dew), tried to “awaken the dormant
energy of the Slavs” and called for the unification of the three nations into “one
national body.”11 Therefore, it is little surprise that he was among the first to set
out for Serbia in the summer of 1914 and also among the first to lose his life: he
died on the night of August 16 or in the early morning hours of the next day in
the Battle of Cer.
Dobrovoljci, most of them students, farmers, and professionals, but also
teachers, medical doctors, a bank clerk, a notary, and even a school director,
were recruited from among Slovenian deserters in Russia. More precisely,
while in Odessa, they voluntarily joined other Slavic prisoners of war to fight
in the Serbian Army. Around that time, the Command of the Serbian Army
realized that by recruiting Slovenian, Croatian, and Bosnian prisoners of war
in Russian camps, they could significantly strengthen the decimated Serbian
military, which was preparing to break through the so-called Southern Front
near Salonica. Prisoners of war from various Russian and Ukrainian military
camps had already begun to gather in Odessa and its environs even before the
Serbian government formally made this decision in September 1916. As already
mentioned, the decision for reactivation within the framework of the Serbian
Army effected Slovenians, Croats, Vojvodinians, and Bosnians, but there were
also a few Czechs and Slovaks on the volunteer roster.
Heeding the call that reached the majority of military camps across Ukraine
and Russia, the first volunteers began to trickle into Odessa in the early summer
days, forming so-called “additional battalions” under the leadership of a spe-
cial group of Serbian officers. These battalions gradually grew into Volunteer
Divisions I and II, consisting of some twenty thousand and eleven thousand
men respectively. Not long after its inception, Volunteer Division I already
achieved notable successes. Russia reached an agreement with Romania
to deploy a special Russian—Serbian army corps, the 47th Special Corps, to
the region of Dobruja. This occurred after Romania declared war on Austria-
Hungary on August 27, 1916 and, more importantly, after Bulgaria declared war
on Romania on September 1, 1916, and Romania suffered a series of defeats
against the joint German—Bulgarian forces.12 The 47th Special Corps filled
the gap that was created after the Romanian defeat and quickly stabilized the
front near the Romanian-Bulgarian border. Even though the war exacted a

11  Ibid., 132–134.

12  Following the declaration of war, the Bulgarian Army crossed the southeastern
Romanian-Bulgarian border, seized the town of Turtucaia, and captured twenty-eight
thousand Romanian soldiers. See Turk, “Zgodovinski oris pokreta Jugoslovanskih vojnih
dobrovoljcev v svetovni vojni,” 58.
24 Luthar

devastating toll on the corps, claiming as many as 245 officers and 8,036 soldiers
(including at least eleven Slovenians), the Volunteer Division accomplished a
“tactical victory by retaining [. . .] its posts after the defeat of the Russian and
Romanian flank [and] destroying the Bulgarian center.”13
Regardless of this victory and all the commendations and decorations that
came with it, the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917 brought a series of set-
backs and complications. As a result of their unregulated status and the feel-
ing of being somehow second-rate, some forty percent of old volunteers left
the Volunteer Division and new ones were not motivated to join up. Tensions
were further exacerbated by differing conceptions of the project as a whole.
Non-Serbian volunteers saw it as a Yugoslav project, “whereas certain Serbian
officers took the Yugoslav tendency as opposition and antipathy towards the
Serbian name.”14 Rumors at the outbreak of the February Revolution that
the corps was to intervene on the side of the “old regime” only fanned the
flames. Because of this, a group of “volunteer officers [. . .] demanded in a
special memorandum [that] the title ‘Serbian Volunteer Corps’ [. . .] should
be replaced with the name ‘Yugoslav Corps’ [. . .], [and that] the Corps should
serve its specific purpose, the liberation of its own areas.” They called for the
“regulation of the legal and material situation of volunteer officers and sol-
diers” and, finally, proposed to appoint “a special committee of volunteer offi-
cers” in the “Corps Command” that would remedy the “corps’ political, legal
and material situation” under the leadership of General Živković.15 The success
of the petition surpassed all expectations, and the Serbian government was
compelled to regulate the legal and material position of volunteer officers who
accepted Serbian citizenship, and to rename the corps the Volunteer Corps of
Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.
Nevertheless, a significant number of the protesters left the corps, even
though the tri-unity of the Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian nations had
already been integrated into everyday life by September 1916. This is evident in
the welcoming speech of Mihajlo Živković, Supreme Commander of Volunteer
Divisions I and II, who in mid-September 1916 addressed his troops as mem-
bers of all three branches of “our Serbian-Croatian-Slovenian nation.” Any
so-called dissidents asked for a transfer to Russian units and continued their
military service on various battlefields until the Peace Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
was signed, some remaining in Odessa. After Russia withdrew from the war,

13  Ibid., 63.

14  Ibid., 69.
15  Ibid., 69–70.
Men Who Marched Away 25

some of these soldiers rejoined the volunteer corps while others awaited the
end of the war in other parts of Russia.
Among the dissidents, one could probably find a few Revivalists, though the
main actors persisted until the end, including Janko Kos, the first president of
the Revival movement. After being convicted for high treason at a Ljubljana
trial against the members of Revival in the summer of 1914, Kos was sent to
prison and later to the Isonzo Front where he was captured by the Italians.
Later, he left the Italian camp for Salonica and afterwards the battlefield, where
he took part in the breakthrough at Kaimakčalan. From there to Sarajevo, his
company engaged in a series of battles at Mitrovica, Raška, Kraljevo, and Čačak
in what is now southeastern Serbia and Kosovo.
As might be gathered from this account of Janko Kos’s activities, the volun-
teers’ ultimate destination was the Salonica battlefield and the first volunteers
reached it in 1917. Their camp was a component part of the Allied camp on
the outskirts of Salonica, which extended “along the horizon into infinity.”16
There the volunteers were assigned to various units, as is described in the
narrative of the teacher Edvard Prinčič, an account which incorporates
the narratives of several hundred Slovenian soldiers who enlisted in volunteer
units after coming from the Eastern Front. Prinčič set out from Ljubljana in
mid-March 1915 as a member of the 27th Austrian Alpine Regiment and found
himself in the Carpathians seven days later, where he and a crew of other “zeal-
ous Yugoslavs . . . surrendered [to the Russians] without a fight.”17 From Galicia,
he was sent into a prisoner of war camp in Tashkent, from which he set out for
Odessa when the first call for volunteers came. Being one of the first Slovenian
volunteers, he participated in the battles at Dobruja, after which he was trans-
ferred to somewhere near Odessa. In mid-August, he was put on one of the
first transports to Salonica. The following is a description of how his journey
unfolded:

On August 17, 1917, the regiment set out [from Odessa] on the long jour-
ney to Salonica. We travelled for five days through Tula, Moscow, Jaroslava
[. . .] There we stayed until September 1 [. . .] reaching Arkhangelsk by
September 7 [. . .] Steamboats stopped at the confluence of the Dvina
River on the morning of September 10, and by afternoon, headed out to

16  Mazower, Salonica: City of Ghosts, 312. In the chapter on WWI (305–317), Mazower
describes the army camp: “wooden barracks and yellow-brown canvas tents” in which
“the unprecedented traffic was controlled by a British military policeman,” in short, “an
entire city of wood and canvas” (312).
17  Prinčič, “Moji vojni spomini,” 559.
26 Luthar

open sea. The next day we stopped [. . .] in a small bay near Murmansk
and then continued our voyage in the Northern Sea [. . .] On September 17,
we saw five English torpedo boats that came to protect us against a pos-
sible attack from German submarines [. . .] Passing the Orkney Islands,
we reached the northern Scottish port of Inverness in the late hours
of the night [. . .] We were received by crowds of people and a company of
military troops with a band on the shore [. . .] Soon after our arrival [. . .]
we boarded train cars [and] passing through Perth, Carlisle, Birmingham
[. . .] reached Winchester, where we disembarked and went to a major
English camp [. . .]After thirteen-day’s rest [. . .] we set out for the port
of Southampton, where we boarded the English ship Lidia [. . .] After a
six-hour crossing of La Manche, [we] safely reached the French coast
near the town of Cherbourg. After disembarking, we headed for the train
station and onwards to the small town of Ornage [. . .] On November 1,
[we] travelled through Marseille and Toulon, along the French Riviera,
passing Nice, to Genoa along the Italian coast and from there contin-
ued to Livorno [. . .] At around that time, the Italians suffered the great-
est defeat near Caporetto and the Allied Army was coming to their aid.
. . . They must have thought that we were coming to their rescue as well
and greeted us enthusiastically, until they saw our train turn southward.
On November 5 at the stroke of midnight, we stopped at the train sta-
tion in Rome. The next day we continued to Caserta, where we turned
eastward, passed Bari and reached Taranto on November 7. We crossed
the city and at 13:00 boarded Chateau Renauld, an old French man-
of-war, which left the port at 15:00 and [. . .] sailed toward the Taranto Gulf
[. . .] In the morning hours, we reached Itea, the Allied port in the Gulf
of Corinth. On November 11, we rode busses along the steep serpentines
northward, towards the train station at Bralos [. . .] Passing the majestic
Olympus, we reached Salonica on November 15 at 7:00. After we were
gathered up in front of the Salonica train station, we marched through
the city to our enormous camp at Mikra [. . .] The next day they rounded
us up at the training ground and the King Regent Alexander came to wel-
come us [. . .] A few days after our arrival in Mikra, war volunteers were
distributed into several companies, and we set out towards our destina-
tion, the battlefield in Salonica. We took a train to Sorovič, from where
every company continued on foot towards its designated regiment. My
company was assigned to the 8th Danube Infantry Regiment [. . .] After
a three-and-a-half-month journey, we reached the Headquarters of the
8th Infantry Regiment on December 1, 1917, where our company was clas-
sified as the 2nd Company of the 1st Battalion under the command of
Men Who Marched Away 27

then Lieutenant-Colonel Elezović. I was happy to reunite with my old

acquaintances, volunteers who came from Russia and joined the regi-
ment in the spring of 1917 [. . .] There were two of my old friends from
Ljubljana . . . [and] other Slovenian officers . . . and our battalion doctor.
Altogether eleven officers. But there were also a number of Slovenian
enlisted soldiers.18

The journey was even more arduous for men who set off from Russia after the
revolution had started or got caught up with them on the way. Lev Trotsky,
the then war commissioner, sent them to Greece through Siberia for strategic
reasons.19 Rajko Paulin, who became a bank clerk in his later life, described
the journey from Odessa to Salonica—which, in his case, went from Odessa
through Voznesensk, Kremenchug, Poltava, Kharkov, Kursk, Tula, Moscow,
Yaroslavl, Perm, Omsk, Irkutsk, Chita, Harbin, Manchuria, Port Arthur,
Singapore, Ceylon, Aden, the Suez Canal, Alexandria, and finally to Salonika—
as being suspended “between heaven and earth,” a 135-day long journey full of
surprises, hunger, and in the final section “great danger posed by German sub-
marines across the Mediterranean.”20 Similar to other such voyages, the jour-
ney took him and his comrades first to Mikra and from there to the battlefront,
where he was assigned to the Šumadija Division.21
This particular unit would later make history as one of the most success-
ful divisions, its members earning acclaim and admiration from far and wide.
According to Milan Kolar, a member of the Timok Division, who was watching
the “blood dance going on day and night,” the attack became an instant suc-
cess for the Šumadija Division because “as natural born mountaineers, they
masterfully approached the heavily fortified Bulgarian dugouts” and “with

18  Ibid., 566–567.

19  Trotsky stopped the transports of troops through Arkhangelsk for fear that, in order to
support the counter-revolutionary forces, the Western powers would use the volunteers
to block the ports along the White Sea. This is precisely what happened. One camp was on
the Kola Peninsula, where prisoners of war were building a railway line from Zvanka near
Saint Petersburg to Murmansk. Among them there were some thousand dobrovoljci, who
participated, along with the English, Americans, French, Italians and the White Army, in
the occupation of the Arkhangelsk governorate in the spring of 1918. For more on this, see
Meršol Valentin, “V težkih urah,” 534–546.
20  Pavlin, “Bosanec Vinko,” 317–318.
21  Before that Paulin, like other dobrovoljci, was a member of the Volunteer Division under
the command of Colonel Hadžić. The division had eighteen thousand men “the compo-
sition roughly ninety percent was Serbian,” with the remaining part being “Croats and
Slovenes and a few Czecho-Slovaks.” See Popović, Ratni album, 1914–1918, 409.
28 Luthar

marvelous self-assertiveness and scorn for the Bulgarian’s pitiful attempts to

defend themselves,” took over the control of “the entire Bulgarian frontline”
before sunset. What’s more: “having completed their task, the Šumadija troops
went on to help the Senegalese.”22 It was only after that first breakthrough of
enemy lines that “the time was ripe for the second Yugoslav front, the Yugoslav
and Timok divisions,” which never allowed the Bulgarians to “recover from the
first blow.”23
This breakthrough turned out to be the decisive one, pushing the
Bulgarians from one withdrawal to the next on the central section of the front.
“Thenceforth we would be sending the Bulgarians on one speedy march after
another—forty kilometers each day.”24 Neither the English nor the Greeks on
the eastern flank, nor the Italians and the French on the western flank were
nearly as successful. When the Šumadija, Timok, and Yugoslav Divisions
reached Vardar and seized control of the Gevgelija—Veles railway, they split
the German—Bulgarian line into two parts: the Vardar and Bitola sections. The
former, predominantly manned by Bulgarian soldiers, was destroyed in battles
between September 21 and 27. One day later, a truce was signed. A similar fate
was shared by the German and Austrian divisions that replaced the Bulgarian
ones. The onslaught of the Second Serbian Army was simply too strong, and
forty days after the breakthrough on the Salonika Front, the entire Serbian
Army, including the volunteers, pushed its way through to the confluence of
the Danube and Sava Rivers. Two weeks later Germany and Austria capitulated
as well, and the Slovenian volunteers gradually began to return to their homes
in Slovenia. However, the war ended only for some, as many others joined the
Jezersko Detachment, which, in collaboration with the Ljubljana Regiment,
seized Klagenfurt on June 6 after seven days of fighting in the Carinthian
offensive. For them, the war had lasted five long years, and they were the ones
who later made the greatest effort to maintain the memory of Dobruja, Kozjek,
Topolac and many other battle sites where volunteers played a central role.

22  Some dobrovoljci distinguished themselves in the fighting between Kaimakčalan and Niš,
for which many received decorations. Sergeant Jaka Koželj, for instance, was awarded the
fourth class Order of the White Eagle with swords. With the exception of the Order of
Karadjordjević Star, this was the highest decoration for non-commissioned officers. After
the war, Koželj also received Order of St. Sava, 4th type.
23  Kolar, “V bojnem pohodu od Soluna do Knina,” 645.
24  Ibid., 646.
Men Who Marched Away 29

A Different War

Reading the biographies and autobiographies of the dobrovoljci and prosto-

voljci, it becomes clear once again that the Great War in the Balkans was a
different war from that in other parts of Europe. There are many reasons for
this. One was their multifaceted participation in the war itself. It was not so
simple for the prostovoljci to leave Austria-Hungary at the peak of anti-Serbian
propaganda and enlist in the Serbian Army. The same holds true for the dobro-
voljci, who deserted the Austro-Hungarian Army to join the Russians or the
Serbs. Regardless of the fact that Slovenia emerged for the first time in its his-
tory as a more or less independent administrative unit largely owing to the
Serbian victory in WWI, many Slovenians could not bring themselves to accept
the decisions of the prostovoljci and dobrovoljci even after the war was over.
This is evident from the reports of returnees. According to a narrative of an
ordinary farmer and miller from Krška vas who returned from the volunteer
services in mid-1919, some “old friends of Austria and denunciators [still called]
volunteers breakers of the faith.”25
Another peculiarity had to do with the fact that the Austro-Hungarian and
German invasion on Serbia was more or less a punitive expedition. According
to the report of a Slovenian volunteer,26 this was true not only at the begin-
ning of the war but throughout its duration. Valentin Kejžar, who learned from
Serbian farmers about the massacre in southern Serbia a month before the end
of the war, also wrote about the killing of civilians in 1918.27 Identical reports
can be found in John Reed’s War in Eastern Europe: Travels through the Balkans
in 1915 and can be seen in the images published in War Album edited by Andra
Popović. Looking at the pictures that Popović published of the gallows set up
by the Austro-Hungarian soldiers, from which women and children were hung,
one can vividly imagine the scenes described by Reed and the others.

25  Kovačič, “Pota dobrovoljca-kmeta,” 576.

26  As reported by Josip Jeras, co-editor of the Dobrovljci volume and volunteer in the Serbian
Army from the beginning of the war, Hungarians in one of their punitive expeditions
“slaughtered everything that moved. They didn’t even spare old people, women, or chil-
dren.” See Jeras, “V komitskem odredu vojvode Vuka,” 151.
27  According to Kejžar’s account of the incident that took place near Niš, Germans killed
civilians, including innocent elderly people and children, using machine guns. “They
lined them up and shot them with two machine guns; those who were not killed
instantly, were shot with revolvers and slain with swords.” See Kejžar, “Ne ‘jungšic’ pač pa
dobrovoljec!,” 597.
30 Luthar

These impressions of the war and enemy undoubtedly reinforced various

stereotypes about the Balkans and its people. Although this theme is also dealt
with in Ahmed Pašić’s article, the next section shall present the Slovenians’
attitude towards the Bosnians and some of the other peoples of the Balkans
and Southeastern Europe. These attitudes were often expressed in the reports
of Slovenian soldiers, regardless of which army and battlefield in which they
served.

Us and Them

The longer the war dragged on, the fewer human actions seemed to rely on
some popular or pre-existing image of the enemy or on previous impressions of
the country enemy soldiers came from. The hatred and suspicions of Slovenian
soldiers was directed not only at their German, Austro-Hungarian, or Italian
counterparts (Švabe for the Germans, Lahi for the Italians), but also against dif-
ferent peoples in the nearer region. In addition to the typical dichotomy of we
are good, they are evil or our cause is just, theirs is not, the dichotomy between
civilized and uncivilized also became a part of everyday life at the front. As
emphasized by many observers, never before had belligerent sides been so
consistently divided into “ ‘us’ on one side [and] ‘the enemy’ on the other; into
‘us’ individuals with names and personal identities [and] ‘him’ as primarily a
collective figure. We are visible; he is not. We are normal; he is grotesque. Our
demands are natural; his are bizarre. He is not as good as we are [. . .]. Because
he threatens us, we must destroy [. . .], disarm, and incapacitate him.”
This is one of the reasons that the Austro-Hungarian soldiers marched into
Bosnia and Serbia filled with preconceptions about primitive savages who lived
in an entirely different world and had entirely different customs. Interestingly
enough, Serbian allies held similar preconceptions about the other Balkan peo-
ples. They, too, perceived them as a bloodthirsty and dangerous crew, to para-
phrase the words British Prime Minister Asquith used to describe the Serbs to
the Archbishop of Canterbury.28 Therefore, it is not surprising that when Oskar
Potiorek, Austro-Hungarian Governor of Bosnia and Herzegovina, ordered his
troops to cross Serbia’s borders, he warned them that they were entering a land
of people who harbored fanatic hatred for them and who hailed the assassina-
tion of their heir to the throne as an act of heroism. Potiorek also commanded
them to show no “humanity or heartfelt compassion” for the people of Serbia.29

28  Strachan, The First World War, 16.

29  Ibid., 26.
Men Who Marched Away 31

Stereotypes held by the majority of Slovenian soldiers differed little from

those generated by the Austrians or Germans. Many of them, for instance, per-
ceived Bosnian soldiers as a prototype of “the other,” much like the Turks or
Bulgarians,30 but there was a certain ambivalence in the stereotypes of the
soldiers. There were the Jews, for whom some Slovenian soldiers seemed to
feel empathy. According to their diaries, the mutilated bodies of Jewish rabbis
and women were the usual part of the scenery in destroyed villages close to
the Eastern Front.31 The same compassion could sometimes be discerned in
their descriptions of “inferior” Tatars, Georgians,32 and sometimes also Serbs.33
When speaking of the armed forces, however, the role of second-rate, partic-
ularly in terms of different ethnic soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian Army, was
reserved for Bosnians. And yet the Slovenian soldiers’ attitude towards their
Bosnian counterparts ran the gamut from compassion to hatred. Sometimes
they pitied them (“A crying shame, how they treat the poor Bosnians. They
are always sent into the fiercest action [. . .]”). Sometimes there were grudg-
ingly admired for being steadfast and obedient: “Let’s send the Bosnians there,
the dogs will endure.” At other times, “the Bosnians” were characterized as
“lazy,” or cowardly, only wanting to “surrender or run.” For others, this was “no
wonder” as “they’re always put in the worst situation. Whenever the Hungarians
fail, they send in our Bosnians.”34 On one occasion, Ivan Primožič, one of the
Slovenian officers who portrayed the Bosnians as brave, also painted them as
artful liars: “They’d rather let themselves be killed than tell the truth.” For this

30  For more on this, see also a report published by the Carnegie Peace Foundation. Here
quoted from Gordon and Gordon, American Chronicle, 137.
31  We use the diary of Ciril Prestor (Ko sem nosil vojaško suknjo). In the entry for June 21, 1915,
he writes: “Found a young Jewish woman hanging in the backhouse, her breasts cut off
and lying on the floor.” See also Luthar, “O žalosti niti besede,” 124.
32  Southern Russia was undoubtedly the site of the most atrocious acts of violence that the
Germans unleashed against the Georgians. One such case was described by a Slovenian
soldier, Jože Brgoč:
 “We were riding through a desolate country with an endless pasture where the
Georgians drove their cattle. Every now and then a soldier from the German detach-
ment would ride up to a shepherd and shoot him. I asked the lieutenant to put an end
to the killings of innocent shepherds. His intervention was effective, but it was clear that
they all looked at these shepherds wearing sheep-skin as some kind of animals.” Cvetka
Petelinšek, transcript of the memoirs of Dr. Jože Bergoč, 12.
33  In a scanty description of events at the very beginning of the war (August 14, 1914), Prestor
reports on unnecessary killings of Serbian civilians: “An old Serb enters the kitchen with
a bowl. Shot on the spot by a young officer of the 73rd Regiment.”
34  Primožič, Vojni dnevnik 1916–1917, 2, 4.
32 Luthar

reason, he tended to consider them the obvious suspects behind occasional

thefts. And yet, regardless of these implications, he and a majority of other
Slovenian officers saw Bosnians as examples of indomitable valor.
However, all of the soldiers—Austrians, Slovenes, Czechs, Hungarians,
Croats, and Bosnians—held the same low opinion of the Italians, for whom
only a few diary keepers could find a good word. The general opinion was that
“the Italians have [. . .] no courage whatsoever. . .” and that “Italy walks away
from their agreements whenever something better comes along.”35 These prej-
udices consistently perpetuated the general perception of the Italians as the
greatest cowards of all.
Under the strain of war circumstances, interpretations of everything for-
eign or unknown were, understandably, rather simplistic, one-sided, and drew
heavily on stereotypes. Consequently, the construction of a positive or negative
attitude towards enemy or ally achieved the greatest expression in situations
that demanded a change in conception. One such example was the evolution
of the general conception of the Serbs. Before the war their national emancipa-
tion and the struggle for independence from the Turks won the sympathies of
the West, albeit descriptions in texts and comments of the time often exposed
a typically Orientalist view of the Balkans. When, however, wartime conditions
turned the Serbs into allies, the British were quick to rewrite several chapters
of Serbian history during the decades before the war. In describing Serbia’s
infamous attack on Bulgaria in 1885, they even went so far as to view it as part
of a dignified struggle of emancipation against Austro-Hungarian and German
expansion in the Balkans. Following victories in the battles of Kolubara and
Cer, the “proud Serbs” were instantly transformed into the bedrock of defense
against German aggression for the entire Middle East and even distant India.36
What’s more, the British started to place an increasing emphasis on the
number of victims, which by the end of the war rose to horrific thirty-seven
percent of all Serbian soldiers. The significance of this number can only be
fully grasped by comparing it to that of France, which ranked first among the
Western European countries in terms of its death toll which stood at sixteen
percent of all enlisted men.37

35  Prelesnik, 1914–1918, 6a, 8, 9.

36  Price, Serbia’s Part in the War, 6.
37  The comparison of mortality rates between forces from Eastern and Western countries
is also interesting. Eastern mortality rates (Turkey 27%, Romania 25%, Bulgaria 22%)
maintain a strong lead over the Western rates, which saw an average of around 15%
(Germany 15.4%).
Men Who Marched Away 33

Something similar was true of the Bosnians, but with the difference that
neither their image nor their history was ever subject to such drastic rein-
terpretation. On the one hand, they were universally recognized as the brav-
est soldiers (especially after having breached the enemy line at Kobarid
on the Isonzo Front), while on the other hand, they were always be allocated
the worst food, the most meager supply of firewood, the most faulty equip-
ment. Only a few fellow combatants and military doctors were truly able to
appreciate the gravity of their situation. Seeing that the Bosnian soldiers were
in no shape to “carry out any operation,”38 the doctors would occasionally
keep a few men in the “marodezimmer.”39 Little wonder, then, that Bosnians
or the daily suffering in the trenches they shared with other soldiers from all
over the Balkans, were hardly ever mentioned in major interpretations of WWI.
In the subsequent section, we shall discuss all those soldiers who, after serving
one year at the front, wanted one thing and one thing only that the whole affair
would end as soon as possible.

“O God, It Shall End”40

Like other war poets around Europe, some Slovenian writers and poets of
that period struggled to describe the suffering and “mechanized abattoir”
of the First World War. Petuškin, for example, referred to it as a “war report” on
“death reaping his cold harvest,” with “no end to the dying/Slaughter, a thou-
sand voices crying.”41
Similar to nearly all intimate diary entries and uncensored letters, artistic
reflections on life in the trenches captured the sobering moments that had
dispelled any initial enthusiasm about the war. Cold, hungry, hopeless, and
infested with lice, the entrenched soldiers immediately forgot all lofty notions
of honor and glory, and had to rack their brain to figure out “what the devil
people even meant by them.”42
By mid-1915, or even before that, a sense of helpless despair over “the utter
carnage” pervaded the most intimate correspondence of the time. Soldiers
were becoming increasingly aware of their fellow combatants being either
“killed or buried alive.” They were beginning to realize all too well the effect of

38  Primožič, Vojni dnevnik 1916–1917, 15, 45.

39  A term used in the Austro-Hungarian Army denoting a sickroom (transl. note).
40  Rueh, Moj dnevnik 1915–1918, 197.
41  Petuškin, “Vojno poročilo, 141.
42  Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 21.
34 Luthar

shrapnel slicing through soft tissue, had seen pieces of their friends collected
into sandbags far too often.
The longer the war dragged on, the more sick, weary, and wounded soldiers
it produced. Moreover, as can be gathered from the war diaries of Slovenian
soldiers (even those on more or less static sections of the front, for instance
in Galicia or the Isonzo River), the entire battlefield was littered with putrid
and rotting corpses, and dugouts were made intolerable by the dreadful stench
of decaying human flesh and the excrement of past and present occupants.
Descriptions such as this may also be found in the candid reports of the
Slovenian Ciril Prestor, an Austro-Hungarian liaison non-commissioned offi-
cer, and the author of one of the most exhaustive descriptions of the war at the
four fronts of Central Europe and the Balkans.43 In the following citation, he
describes the night he spent in a cemetery near Lvov.

My comrade and I [lay] on the ground and sensed a strange smell

beneath our heads. I lit my lamp and saw a dead Russian with a long
beard beneath us. Pushed the Russian one meter and dozed off
like babies . . .

Almost exactly one year later and some thousand kilometers to the west, it
would be snowstorms, lice, and bombshells that disturbed his sleep. Just
before the summer of 1916, he found himself hunkering down in trenches two
thousand meters above the Friulia lowlands. It was at this point that he first
mentioned the thought of committing suicide. “I’d do myself in if I didn’t love
my life so much,”44 he confided in his diary. He recalled “wading in snow up to
his waist.”45
Italian soldiers on the other side of the front recounted similar stories. As
Mark Thompson reminds his readers, they, too, had shells smashing into their
trenches, felt “legs, arms, bits of brain fly through the air, hitting their faces like
shrapnel.”46 They, too, lived in “mortal anxiety,” their enthusiasm and patrio-
tism no longer relevant. “Sweat, dust, mud, rain and sun turned the men’s [. . .]
uniforms into something like parchment. [. . .] They slept in holes and pits,
wrapped in their coats, packed together for warmth.”47 They spent summer

43  Luthar, “O žalosti niti besede,” 103–201.

44  Ibid., 162.
45  Ibid., 153.
46  Thompson, The White War, 148.
47  Ibid.
Men Who Marched Away 35

days in the company of “dangerous scorpions” and “long, thick snakes,”48 of

constant shortages and memories of fallen comrades. The latter, in particular,
made it hard for those who survived to openly admit that what happened (what
they saw and what they did). They had to keep it secret because it seemed
beyond the boundaries of normal human behavior. The men who fought had
been forced to live in a world that no one back home could understand or
possibly imagine. For them, it was no longer war but an exploration of to what
extent a person could be degraded, an exploration of annihilation on a scale
nobody had previously imagined.
The only authority that seemed to remain was God who might end their suf-
fering, and even this authority was heavily questioned as the war continued,
for it was God who should have prevented the officers from sending their men
into this hurricane, and it was God who was punishing them for all the terrible
things they had done.
Was it also God, we must wonder, whom they consulted when they decided
whether to be recruited into the Austro-Hungarian Army, or to go help their
“brothers” in Serbia? Was it through God’s intervention that they decided to
stay in the Austro-Hungarian Army or desert and join the volunteers? We will
probably never know. What we can imagine, though, is “the faith and fire” in
the “men who marched away,” and that “though some may not see” these men,
as Thomas Hardy put it, they saw quite well what they had done in the long
years of war.49

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———. Men at War 1914–1918: National Sentiment and Trench Journalism in France
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Bergoč, Jože. “Spomini.” Unpublished manuscript. Private collection.
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Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press,
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48  Luthar, “O žalosti niti besede,” 152.

49  Hardy, “Men Who March Away (Song of the Soldiers).”
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Gordon, Lois, and Alan Gordon. American Chronicle. New York: Atheneum, 1987.
Hardy, Thomas. “Men Who March Away (Song of the Soldiers).” In First World War
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Kejžar, Valentin. “Ne ‘jungšic’ pač pa dobrovoljec!” In Dobrovoljci Kladivarji Jugoslavije
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Kolar, Milan. “V bojnem pohodu od Soluna do Knina.” In Dobrovoljci Kladivarji
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Kovačič, Anton. “Pota dobrovoljca-kmeta.” In Dobrovoljci Kladivarji Jugoslavije 1912–
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Sreske organizacije saveza ratnih dobrovoljaca Kraljevine Jugoslavije, 1936.
Luthar, Oto. “O žalosti niti besede”: Uvod v kulturno zgodovino vélike vojne. Ljubljana:
Založba ZRC, 2000.
Macdonald, Lyn. 1915: The Death of Innocence. London: Headline, 1993.
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Sreske organizacije saveza ratnih dobrovoljaca Kraljevine Jugoslavije, 1936.
Paulin, Rajko. “Jenko Avgust—Kladivar besede in dejanja.” In Dobrovoljci Kladivarji
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Pavlin, Vinko. “Bosanec Vinko.” In Dobrovoljci Kladivarji Jugoslavije 1912–1918, edited by
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 CHAPTER 2

War in Puszta: The Great War and

the Hungarian Peasantry

Ignác Romsics

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Hungary was an underdeveloped

or modestly developed agrarian-industrial country. Statistical records at the
turn of the century reveal that agriculture provided a living for 65.7 percent of
the total population in 1900, and 61.9 percent in 1910. If we exclude aristocratic
owners of large and medium-sized estates and the agrarian intelligentsia, and
take into account the intermediate groups fluctuating between agriculture and
other branches of economic life, we can assume that the proportion of the
peasantry in the total population during that period averaged between sixty-
two and sixty-six percent.
The various strata or classes within the peasantry, or agricultural class, were
primarily determined by the amount of land possessed. The absolute size of
the agricultural population and its size in relation to the total population of
the country in 1910 are set out in the table below:

Wealthy agricultural landowners: more than 50 yokes 134,000 0.7%

Middle-sized agricultural landowners: 20 to 50 yokes 823,000 4.4%
Small agricultural landowners: 5 to 20 yokes 3,511,000 19.2%
Dwarf holders: less than 5 yokes 2,437,000 13.4%
Other self-employed 31,000 0.2%
Laborers and estate servants 4,356,000 23.9%
Total 11,292,000 61.9%

The different levels of ownership were reflected in the peasants’ worldview

and the nature of the fledgling peasant parties of the time. The spirit of early
communist utopias inspired the agrarian socialist movements that emerged
in the 1890s and promoted equal distribution of wealth. Such ideas were
welcome among the landless and poor peasants, but agrarian socialism fright-
ened the owners of large and medium estates, including the aristocracy, the
traditional elite, and wealthy Hungarian farmers. The common interests of
wealthier farmers provided the impetus to organize the conservative Hungarian
Farmers Union in 1896, which defended the status quo. The Union came to

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_004

War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 39

control hundreds of local farmers’ associations and agricultural credit societ-

ies. The so-called Smallholders Party, created in 1908, struggled to organize the
middle strata of the peasantry ranging from those with dwarf-sized holdings
of a few yokes to the well-to-do owners of medium-sized plots. The backbone
of the party’s program was the expropriation of a certain part of large estates
with compensation paid by the state. Additional demands included the intro-
duction of universal suffrage and the secret ballot, universal health insurance
coverage, etc.1
However, it should be remembered that the majority of the peasantry was
not much engaged in politics. The illiteracy rate among peasants was over forty
percent in 1910, and most of them were concerned almost exclusively with the
small joys and sorrows of everyday life. Lajos Nagy, a Hungarian novelist with
a keen ear for social issues, described the life of his native village between the
Danube and the Tisza in the early 1910s as follows:

The village looks precisely as it did many years ago. Nothing has changed.
People live, work and complain. Those who die are replaced by those
who are born. The life in this village and the world seen from this vil-
lage seems everlasting. The nucleus of village life is the family and every-
day life is characterized by a network of intimate connections disturbed
sometimes by furious emotions in this or that family. The villagers know
almost nothing about the world and the country, nor are they disturbed
by political trends.2

Another eyewitness of the so-called pre-war Golden Years of Peace, a well-

to-do peasant of Kiskunhalas with seventy-three yokes, provided a similar
characterization of the peasants’ mentality in his memoirs written in the early
1950s. “We peasants,” he wrote, “did not care much about the political situa-
tion. We were not interested in it at all. We had what was necessary to make a
living. What else did we need? What did we care who became minister?”3
The Great War, however, put an end to this inertia, isolation, and politi-
cal disengagement. During the four years of the war, the Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy called up nine million men to the army, of which between 3.4 and
3.8 million came from Hungary and Croatia. This meant that seventeen per-
cent of the total population, or almost one-third of the total male population.

1  Romsics, Hungary in the Twentieth Century, 48–50, 62–64; Romsics, “The Hungarian Peasantry
and the Revolutions of 1918–19,” 196–199.
2  Nagy, “A lázadó ember,” 227–228.
3  Romsics, “A gazdagparasztság és a forradalmak kora,” 135.
40 Romsics

Nearly every man between eighteen and fifty years old had to leave their homes
and go abroad for some period of time.4 This was a radically new situation that
created entirely new attitudes in broad sections of society.
A large part of the Hungarian people identified with the declaration
of war against Serbia that was issued on July 28, 1914. “Faced with this set-
tling of accounts,” the opposition leader, Count Albert Apponyi, declared in
Parliament, “there is only one thing we can say—it is high time.” This kind of
support for the war was characteristic of broad sections of the elites, the middle
classes, and the overall urban population. To the contrary, the rural population,
particularly the peasantry, was considerably more reserved and pessimistic,
and at times outright critical of events.5 Although only a few would dare to
speak up against the pro-war fury instigated in part by the press, public and
private recollections of some peasants attest to the anti-war sentiment that
prevailed from the very beginning. In 1982, Ernőné Tóbiás, wife of a farmer
from Hódmezővásárhely, twenty-four years old at the time, recalled the mobi-
lization of July 1914: “When we saw the posters with the mobilization order on
that Sunday at around ten in the morning, the town turned into a beehive for
a few hours. Hundreds of people headed down to the main station where they
had been called to assemble. We walked down the Rárós Road in sadness.”6
In the Szekler part of Transylvania, the youth of the village Ditró (now Ditrău,
Romania) sang a sad and anxious song of being drafted into the military:

My time is almost up now,

I pack and to the station go.
From father, mother and brethren, I part.
My lover too I leave at home.7

A similar sentiment prevailed in and around Kiskunhalas in the Great Plains.

Mihály Csonka recalled in his autobiography not only his fear of what was to
come and the sadness he felt over his parting with his family, but also his mem-
ories of those who supported the war and his feelings about them:

Word reached the farm in the afternoon. It came on the day of the wheat
threshing. The laborers declared that they would no longer work—even
though it could have been finished that day—had they not stopped. But all

4  Pollmann, “Hungarians in World War I,” 361.

5  Galántai, “Magyarország az első világháborúban,” 1099.
6  Szenti, Vér és pezsgő, 101.
7  Csibi and Horváth, Pontot, vesszőt nem ismerek, de a szó mind igaz, 10.
War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 41

our pleas were in vain, they would not stay. They picked up their belongings
and off they ran, each to their own home. [. . .] On Monday they went to the
station, stocked with food and clothing. The station was swarming like an
anthill. Women and girls were sobbing and crying. Many men wept too,
though some did not, but in the end there were few who shed no tears. We
tried to be strong, but in vain. Saying goodbye was difficult for everyone.
We were not being taken to some wedding feast, but to the slaughter. We
had trouble finding a place on the train. Some had to travel on top of the
wagons. And there the singing began. Some tried to show their courage,
as if they had had no fear of bullets. Of course, bullets weren’t flying yet,
that would come later. When we reached Pest, it was so chaotic, as if we
entered the tower of Babel. One went left, the other right, each to where
he was called. [. . .] For a few days we lived on the food we had brought
from home, and then we were given bread and bacon. Lunch was given to
us in the City Park. That was quite far from our lodgings. In the meantime,
we strolled up and down the city, watching the demonstrations. ‘Long live
the war!’ we heard the cries of the good-for-nothing lazy mob. Because no
sane man would ever be happy with war.8

One of the reasons for the lack of enthusiasm among the peasantry was the
attachment of farmers to their plots of land, their traditional distrust of the
outside world, and their own nominal political community—in other words,
the centuries-old suspicion that “politics is the mischief of gentlemen” and
that wars never serve the interests of the peasants, only those of their masters.
Moreover, the end of July was the time of harvesting and threshing in the tra-
ditional calendar of farm labor, which meant reaping the benefits of the past
year of labor and securing one’s livelihood for the next one, as emphasized in
several peasant memoirs.
As they got closer to the frontlines, the already slim enthusiasm of the peas-
ant soldiers diminished even more. The men in marching companies were
horrified by the signs of previous battles in the landscape—carts and can-
nons dumped into grottos, horse cadavers, unburied or hastily buried human
corpses. Abandoned and burned villages with houses shelled to ruin further
added to their despondency. The crossing of rivers often required the con-
struction of makeshift bridges as the old ones had been destroyed in the fight-
ing, having been hit by artillery or blown up. For peasant soldiers, the sight
of unharvested crops—wheat, corn, and the like—was deeply offensive and
reminded them of their own plots of land.

8  Romsics, Csonka Mihály élete és világképe, 145–146.

42 Romsics

Soldiers were exhausted by the lengthy marches, which often extended over
several days, in mud or snow, through torched village. Many fell ill, because
of the cold and the strain on their legs, including Mihály Szűcs, an owner of
a medium-sized plot near Hódmezővásárhely, who was dispatched to the
Galician Front in the summer of 1915:

In the summer of 1915, we were loaded off the train in Cracow and then
marched off to the north. All the while, the Russians were ahead of us.
They evacuated and torched the villages, not leaving any food behind, lur-
ing us onward. And it kept raining, all the time, raining. We were walking
in grass and weeds up to our necks, and were wet through and through.
In the mountains, even the hussars marched on foot. At that time, tele-
phones were already being used, but food, we got that only once a day,
always at night. Water was scarce and tasted bad. Naturally, I caught a
mean cold, and was sent back to Cracow to rest. We travelled a road built
by civilians, which was made of four logs laid down next to each other.
So the cart was inching forward, shaking us, until finally we were loaded
onto a horse-drawn train.9

Those who made it to the frontlines were ordered to build bunkers and dig
trenches, or were assigned to relieve troops selected for reorganization. The
relieved soldiers were a sorry sight. “One looked shabbier than the next, clothes
worn out, many unshaven for months and unwashed too. Lice infested these
poor souls. They smelled of smoke, like gypsies,” one eyewitness stated.10 This
gave new arrivals an idea of how they would look all too soon. The wet soil
of the trenches and bunkers, the hardships of the weather and malnutrition
took a toll on many, destroying their health. The above-quoted Mihály Csonka
experienced this himself when he was assigned to the Russian Front in Galicia
in early 1915:

Here it was one platoon per bunker again. We put together the tent felts
to imitate an actual tent and sat there in the deep snow, while others
tried to sleep. We made fires, the smoke curling upward. We were like
wandering gypsies and looked no better than them. Wood was plentiful,
and we were allowed to make fires, because the fog prevented us from
seeing the Russians just as it prevented them from seeing us. We only
saw each other when the fog lifted for a few hours. [. . .] We needed the

9  Szenti, Parasztvallomások, 63.

10  Romsics, Csonka Mihály élete és világképe, 155.
War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 43

fires to keep warm, because our clothes were constantly made damp by
the fog. A number of us had a hard time because of dysentery, which
seemed to never go away. You could sign up for sick care daily, but it did
not make much sense, as everyone capable of moving was sent away from
the aid station. And so we just kept cooking the black coffee pastilles,
which were all we were getting. [. . .] Dinner was bacon one day, sausage
another, or the black coffee we brewed for ourselves. The bread was no
good. It was full of cumin, not everyone managed to force it down. I had
never been picky, but could not eat it myself. This I could not eat. And so
my health did not improve, if anything, it got worse.”11

These soldiers felt no hatred toward the enemy they faced. They considered the
Russians and Italians to be just as human as themselves. The Serbs, the Tatars,
and the Cossacks, on the other hand, were less respected due to their “savage”
nature and the atrocities they were said to commit. During the days, hardly a
round was fired, and at night, too, only a few random shots were attempted.
Fraternization in the trenches began sporadically as early as 1914 and 1915, but
had become frequent by 1916. Easter 1916 was celebrated together on most sec-
tions of the front. Soldiers offered food and drinks to each other, had joint pho-
tos taken, and expressed their hopes that the war would end soon. Initially,
the high command attempted to forbid fraternization, and known cases were
subject to court martial. In reality, however, only a few cases were brought as
frontline officers tended to turn a blind eye to the fraternization of the con-
scripts and even joined in occasionally.
However, when offensives were launched and orders arrived, there was
nothing to be done but obey. The same soldiers that fraternized shot and
hacked away at each other. Alcohol was regularly distributed prior to charges.
This helped to fire up the soldiers who otherwise were mostly just trying to
survive. Attacks were usually started with a barrage of artillery. This nailed the
defenders in their trenches and damaged barbwire obstacles. The infantry sol-
diers charging with bayonets were hindered by the machine guns that virtually
mowed down the first ranks. If the attackers did manage to cross the obstacles,
they usually threw various sorts of grenades into the trenches. In front of the
trenches and in the trenches themselves, men would often engage in hand-
to-hand combat where bayonets were the most important weapons. Mihály
Csonka recalled that during such battles “men became devoid of any feeling
and were as if intoxicated. When you came to, you felt like after a drunken
stupor. Only then would you start thinking clearly and say, aye, if that were me

11  Ibid., 157–158.

44 Romsics

lying dead on the field, would they be looking at me now as numbly as I am

looking at them?”12
During four years of fighting, 530,000 soldiers from Hungary died and
833,000 were taken as prisoners of war. Nearly two million were wounded.13 In
August 1917, István Paksi, a land-owning peasant from Hódmezővásárhely, was
wounded and taken prisoner on the Russian Front. Later, he described in the
event the following account:

When the breakthrough came, I wanted to report it to the company com-

mander but did not find him at his post. We pulled ourselves together, the
patrol commander and I, and fled. The third man on patrol duty had died
half an hour before. [. . .] Just at the moment when I was getting up, a gre-
nade exploded behind my back. A piece of shrapnel wounded me badly,
and I was unable to walk. The wound was severe, almost deadly. The piece
entered my body through the backside and exited through my stomach,
wounding the pancreas. I was unconscious for a few moments. Then I
asked the corporal to bandage me, but he did not even listen to me, and
ran off the same instant. I tried to gather my strength. I was feeling very
sick. I took the photos I had with me, there was a family photo among
them. I kissed everybody on the photo, said goodbye to my parents and
my brothers. I laid the photo down next to me and waited. Not much
later, maybe half an hour, a paramedic from our company walked by. He
recognized me and started talking to me and shook me. ‘What’s the mat-
ter, brother?’ he asked. ‘I’m wounded,’ I replied, ‘but don’t stay here, run,
or else the Russians will get you.’ But he said that he would first bandage
me, and then we would see what the future held. He dragged me to a shel-
tered place and tended to my wound. We shook hands and said goodbye,
wishing each other luck. He fled and I waited to see what would happen
next. I did not have to wait long. Soon three Russians arrived, making a lot
of noise, though I could not understand the words they spoke. Then one
of them took the letters and the photos from the left pocket of my vest,
and they left. After a moment, one of them came back, made a horrifying
face, ground his teeth, swore, and pointed his bayonet at me. This all hap-
pened so unexpectedly and quickly that I barely had time to think. But
I was lucky enough to see him from the outer edge of the trench, where
I had been, and could throw myself down into the trench, by the other
edge, so he could not thrust his bayonet through me, it wounded only

12  Ibid., 173.

13  Pollmann, “Hungarians in World War I,” 361.
War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 45

my arm and my side, maybe five or six centimeters deep. [. . .] With of all
of this happening, I had little choice but to go to the Russian aid station,
because grenades had started flying above us. I went with a heavy heart,
because I knew what I was doing and what was in store for me.14

Slightly wounded or sick soldiers were happy to be sent to hospital or home. In

fact, they would sometimes shoot or stab themselves, which, if found out, was
severely punished. After several months of frontline duty, soldiers were given
leave of a week or two, which meant the world to them. Those who owned land
were often granted harvest leave during the summer. This privilege was depen-
dent on the goodwill of authorities in the home village, such as the notary and
the sheriff. Young wives were often required to offer themselves in exchange
for such support.
All the same, leaving home and going to foreign countries or provinces
ranked as one of the biggest events in the life of a peasant soldier. During their
service in the field, they not only became familiar with techniques of killing
and survival, but they also saw other parts of Europe that they had never seen
or even heard of before. Galicia, Bukovina, Crain, and Görz, not to mention
countries like Russia, Serbia, and Italy that had been entirely unknown worlds
to peasants who usually died in the place where they had been born. Those
who came home on leave spoke of the peoples of the Russian plains and the
Dinaric Alps as naturally as they had once spoke of the weekly market in the
neighboring town or the county fair. Przemyśl, a fortress in Galicia that was
defended mostly by Hungarian soldiers, and Doberdo, Piave and Isonzo, battle-
fields along Isonzo Front, became the themes of popular Hungarian songs. In
village pubs, during weddings and on other special occasions where alcohol
is consumed, some of these songs are still sung today. The best known among
them reflects the sentiments of the soldiers fighting at Doberdo:

When I go to the battlefield of Doberdo,

I look upon the great starry sky,
Starry sky, where is my Hungarian homeland,
Where is my mother who cries for me?

Oh Lord, where is it that I will die,

Where will my red blood be spilled,
Far away in foreign lands my grave will be,
Sweet mother, do not cry for me.

14  Szenti, Parasztvallomások, 65–66.

46 Romsics

I send a letter with the post,

The house of my mother it will find
Read mother, my letter is written in blood,
At Doberdo I leave my life.

The largest section of Mihály Csonka’s memoir is devoted to his experiences on

different fronts and especially to his adventures as a prisoner of war in Russia.
He watched, took notes, and half a century later wrote down everything he
found strange. The high Carpathian Mountains covered by evergreen forests
seemed as exotic to a young man coming from the Hungarian Puszta as an
extraterrestrial landscape would be to us. He provided a detailed description
of the different climates, agricultural customs, work tools, clothing, behavior,
food, and eating habits. Peasant soldiers from the town of Hódmezővásárhely
and nearby farms also remembered these novelties. As for food and eating, they
were most astonished to learn that the Italians ate hedgehogs, the Germans
consumed dogs, and that the Russians prepared chicken broth in a most sav-
age way: with no vegetables, no paprika, and without cutting the chicken into
pieces before putting it into the boiling water. They simply put the chicken
into the water in one piece and then later crushed it with a wooden spoon in
the very same cooking pot. The different variations of dried fish, a staple on
the table of Russian peasants, struck the Hungarian peasants as inedible. The
stench of dried fish was repulsive to them.
The mobilized peasant masses also became acquainted with new tech-
niques of warfare: modern artillery, the principles of ballistics, the compass,
binoculars, Morse code, and driving cars. Previously they had been only famil-
iar with horses, the hoe, and the scythe, as modern equipment and machines
such as tractors and threshing machines only became widespread in Hungary
in the interwar period and after the WWII.
In cases where a former peasant happened to become a warrant officer
commanding a platoon of soldiers for several months, he would also acquire a
new kind of self-respect and self-awareness. Before the war, beating a drunken
or undisciplined peasant was standard procedure of the Hungarian gendar-
merie. After the war, however, such behavior became rare, and if it happened,
the beaten peasant often expressed his indignation. Coming home after the
war, former solders considered themselves able to fulfill public duties and
hold office. After the war, Hungary experienced two revolutions followed by a
counter-revolution. Peasants played an active role in these uprisings.
One of the lasting effects of the war on the mentality of the peasants was
the widening of their world-view and a higher level of self-respect. The other,
however, was their acquaintance with the modern techniques of killing and
War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 47

the consequent devaluation of human life. Neither the red terror practiced
by the communists in 1919 nor the white terror committed by Horthy’s para-
military units in 1919–1920 can be properly interpreted without this wartime
experience. Red and white terror both claimed several hundred lives. Before
the war, the peasants would probably have been incapable of committing such
acts of violence, of the plundering and lynching that took place in the months
immediately after the war. Mihály Csonka was also aware of this. “In the
invaded territory, he remembered, there is no mercy. Everything belongs to us
and everything is permitted, although this behavior is hardly glorious.”15 Imre
Csizmadia, a farmer from Hódmezővásárhely who saw service in the Serbia,
expresses a similar attitude in his recollections:

We lived off foraging alone. It did not matter if they were willing to give
it to us or not, we took anything we could find—wheat, maize, oat, pota-
toes, beans, cuts of meat, pigs, hens. If they denied having anything, we
looked for it, and made matters even worse for them. We often thought
that the poor were not responsible for the war, but we also remembered
that last year, when they broke through the line. They were not so gener-
ous as to pay for what they wanted, but plundered and burnt the villages,
raped the female farm hands, and mutilated the men who had not fled.
Altogether, forty-two villages in the Szörény area were plundered. We
were thus shown the crimes one can commit, but we were generous and
never cared for their wives the least bit, no matter what.16

The social and political differences among the recruited peasants were tempo-
rarily blurred by their common fate in the trenches. The various strata of the
peasantry marched to the front in 1914 and 1915 with a similar resignation and
fear, and those who survived returned to their homes sharing a common disil-
lusionment and despair. “Everybody who is in the Stellung [trench],” a wealthy
peasant from Galicia wrote to his mother in 1916, “must be prepared for death.
There is very little hope for survival. A single step can be fatal. Only God can
save us from death.”17 After 1917, this critical attitude was reflected in disobedi-
ence of orders, desertion, and unrest. The general yearning for peace and for
solutions to grave social problems were clearly among the motives for mass
desertions and mutinies, though they were not the only ones, considering the
fact that no belligerent country experienced desertions and defections on such

15  Romsics, Csonka Mihály élete és világképe, 169.

16  Szenti, Vér és pezsgő, 144.
17  Romsics, Dokumentumok, 88–89.
48 Romsics

a large scale as Austria-Hungary. It is quite evident that the multiethnic char-

acter of the Austro-Hungarian Army and Navy, and fledging nationalism and
separatism, played an important role as well.
At the same time, the egalitarian character of experiences on the frontline
had little effect in the hinterland. The social differences of those remaining
at home (women, children, and the elderly) not only persisted, but actually
increased during the war years.
The primary beneficiaries of the war were wealthy peasants, who generally
were not recruited into the army owing to their role in the national economy.
By taking advantage of the emerging shortage of foodstuffs, while disregard-
ing the fixed ceiling prices and decrees on requisitioning, this stratum of the
peasantry accumulated significant profits during the war years. Medium-sized
farmers also profited from the war albeit to a lesser extent. They hid fat, flour,
and grain in underground pits or in holes beneath their dung-heaps. They even
raised poultry and pigs in such hiding places and sold them on the black mar-
ket for fantastic prices as early as 1917. Townspeople would trade their most
precious belongings for these goods. During these years, pianos, Persian rugs,
and silver cutlery appeared in the cottages of well-to-do peasants. In 1915, a
local newspaper of Kiskunfélegyháza, a town between the Danube and the
Tisza, quoted a statement of a well-to-do local peasant as an instance of black
humor: “We are doing well; if only the war would continue for another twenty
years.”18 The same sort of testimony can be found in the manuscript of Mihály
Csonka, who in 1918 wrote the following upon his return from Russia: “Big
changes took place while I was away. My wife paid all of our debt. We were
now indebted to nobody. Everything could be sold at a good price, business
was flourishing, my wife had cash. She even had a one thousand crown note,
something we had never seen before.”19
But social differences also existed at the frontlines. One of the criteria for
forming small social groups was the number and content of packages received
from home. Some of the rich peasants, like Csonka himself, shared their food
from home with their close friends who were generally those recruited from
the same village or town. Others, however, adopted a more selfish attitude.
Those who wanted to eat their food alone had to develop special techniques
to cache it, but the hiding places were often discovered by fellow soldiers who
consumed the hidden food without any moral scruples. The holiness of pri-
vate property, highly respected by the peasantry before the war, was now over-
ruled by the instinct for survival. In order to avoid this undesirable outcome,

18  Félegyházi Hírlap, April 18, 1915.

19  Romsics, “A gazdagparasztság és a forradalmak kora,” 135.
War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 49

a wealthy peasant soldier from Hódmezővásárhely invented a highly original

storage method. He saved a large piece of bacon by putting it between his shirt
and jacket. The bacon was fixed by the usual leather waist-belt. Otherwise,
the soldier recounted, his comrades who mocked him as a “country bumpkin”
would have eaten it all.20
Unlike wealthy peasants, the families of small peasants, those with dwarf-
sized holdings, and agricultural laborers suffered greatly from the effects of
the war. The loss of men’s wages and payment-in-kind was only partially offset
by war relief. Already low living standards declined radically, contributing to
changes in the peasants’ views about the war, the world, and politics in gen-
eral. Judging from letters written by peasants in those years, the antagonism
between the rich and the poor, one of the deep-rooted aspects of peasant men-
tality, gradually came to the forefront among poor peasants as the war contin-
ued. Many of them believed that social differences, poverty, and suffering were
part of an ancient and unchangeable, almost divine rule. “There is no justice
for poor people and there never has been.” “The poor have always had to suf-
fer, nothing has changed.” “It looks like the Almighty will exterminate all of us
because He can no longer tolerate the sins of humanity.” The letters controlled
and confiscated by the office of military censors or those brought home by fel-
low soldiers were full of such sentences.21
In the second half of the war, however, many began to seek more profane
explanations for their misery. A poor Transylvanian peasant woman wrote
to his husband in August 1917: “Only the poor are taking part in the war, as
the rich buy their way out of it. The boys of rich families escape certain death
while the poor perish, leaving small children without their fathers.” German-
Hungarian woman from Budaörs expressed the same sentiment in her letter:
“Barons, princes, counts, kings, and the Emperor himself, never lived in poverty.
Otherwise they would have already put an end to this ruthless exploitation of
the people. These rich lords should try to do peasant jobs some day and to eat
at a poor peasant’s table.” The state and local representatives of the state and
military leadership were also held responsible for the misery. One peasant pre-
dicted that “the state that takes away the able-bodied people, will eventually go
hungry itself.” Much of the blame, of course, was also directed at the generals
“who, in cold blood, sent our husbands, fathers, and boys to death and even
decimating them if they resisted,” or at the heads of the local administrations
who confiscated the harvest and often molested young wives. The attitude of
poor people increasingly resembled the bitterness that motivated the peasant

20  Szenti, Parasztvallomások, 61.

21  Hanák, “Népi levelek az első világháborúból,” 62–87.
50 Romsics

revolts and agrarian socialist movements at the turn of the century. The lives
of war widows left on their own with three, four, or even more children were
especially difficult. After 1917, the majority of poor peasant families could no
longer afford clothing and fuel. The most poverty-stricken could only obtain
the food they needed each day with the greatest difficulty.22
In May 1917, a young woman from Mogyoród reported on these hardships in
a letter to her brother who was fighting in Italy:

If the war goes on for another year, we shall all die of hunger here at
home. Poverty has become so extreme that we are already on the verge
of starvation. We go for weeks without a grain of wheat, and all we hear
is that this year no one will be allowed to buy flour, that livestock will
be confiscated, and the harvest will be supervised by soldiers so that no
one can put anything aside for themselves. We have just now received
eight kilos of flour for three or four weeks, but you get only a glance at
it, because once you start eating, it is gone in a flash. And then we just
stare at the sun with nothing to eat. And we must be prepared for these
bad times to continue. These days, even if you have money, you can still
die of hunger. It is not like it used to be in the olden days when if you had
money, you had everything you needed. For a few years, it was bearable,
although prices had gone up, you could buy things. Now there is nothing
left to buy. You get everything with ration cards and you can spend all
day wandering up and down to get this or that. First you go to the town
hall for food coupons. There people stand and jostle from morning until
noon. When you finally get in, pressing through the crowd, and get your
coupons, you go off to the store where you stand and jostle from noon
until night in a doorway guarded by gendarmes with bayonets. And then
you finally get in, only to find out that there is no more flour to be had,
and you will have to wait a few weeks for the next shipment to arrive. This
is how it has been for a year now. The only time you saw such processions
before was when people were headed somewhere special. Now there is
a tide of hungry people walking up and down the street every day. They
cannot work; they have nothing to eat. These are terrible times. But let us
trust God. He may yet help us and turn the bad to good.”23

Rural discontent manifested itself in 1917 and even more markedly in the spring
and summer of 1918 in spontaneous food riots. Starving women repeatedly

22  Ibid.
23  Ibid., 67.
War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 51

prevented the transport of collected grain, broke into shops, and threatened
the wealthy and the local representatives of state power, such as the notaries
and the gendarmes. The spontaneous rural riots of 1917 and 1918 had two com-
mon characteristics. First, they broke out mainly in market towns and in big-
ger villages where a greater number of relatively educated families of poor
peasants lived together and where it was more difficult to obtain food than on
estates and in smaller villages. Second, riots usually occurred in the months of
July and August when the crops of the previous year had already been con-
sumed and new crops had not yet been distributed. Therefore, the chronology
of the rural food riots corresponded to their purpose, as there was no direct
political element in them, but rather served to express instinctive and seasonal
social demands.
The war also had some sexual consequences. Lasting separation frustrated
men and women alike. Some of them wrote openly about this abnormality. A
letter sent from Kiskunfélegyháza to Galicia in May 1916 gives us the following
account: “[T]he town and its outskirts are quiet everywhere. The young boys
are gone, all the girls are sad and humble, there is nobody to embrace and
entertain them. Therefore, they are awaiting the peace very much.”24
For the wives and husbands separation was even more painful and some-
times simply unbearable. Not surprisingly, human nature often took the better
of them. Hungarian soldiers considered Italian women to be the prettiest and
most generous partners. According to their diaries, letters, and memoirs, they
had pleasant experiences with them, although Italian women were sometimes
also used as bait. In some cases, an adventurous Hungarian private wound
up as a prisoner of war. This happened several times along the Piave and the
Isonzo Fronts.25 Russian women, however, were considered less attractive.
Some Hungarian soldiers were taken aback by their different code of personal
hygiene. Mihály Csonka was especially disgusted by the local habit of urinat-
ing. Unlike Hungarian women who were shy and did not urinate in the pres-
ence of men, Russian peasant women relieved themselves anywhere and in
front of anyone. Not wearing underwear, they would simply stop and spread
their legs. Such behavior struck Mihály Csonka as animalistic.26
Hungarian women, on the other hand, were less reserved, but they also had
less variety. Most prisoners of war in Hungary came from the Russian army.
Italians made up a negligible number. At the same time, the acculturation
of Russian prisoners of war took a while. At the beginning, they were unable

24  Romsics, Dokumentumok, 90–91.

25  Szenti, Parasztvallomások, 308–309.
26  Romsics, Csonka Mihály élete és világképe, 184.
52 Romsics

to use Hungarian agricultural tools correctly. They were known for not being
early risers and for wanting to finish working before sunset. True, they liked
drinking as much as the Hungarians did, or, according to some Hungarian tes-
timonies, even more, but drinking alcohol did not increase their wish to work.
Finally, Hungarian authorities forbade giving alcohol to Russian prisoners of
war. Where this decree was adopted, Russians ate hot red peppers as a sub-
stitute. It was as strong as pálinka, they said. However, necessity is the master
of invention. Step by step, the Russians learned to work the Hungarian way
and many were accepted as sexual partners. The offspring of such unions later
came to be known as “wartime children.” Sometimes they were accepted by
the returning husbands; sometimes divorce was the best solution. It also hap-
pened that Hungarian prisoners of war remained in Russia and Russian pris-
oners of war remained in Hungary. In Kiskunhalas, the hometown of Csonka,
with twenty thousand inhabitants at the time, there remained almost a dozen
Russian prisoners of war. They learnt Hungarian, married, and gave up their
former identity. “They speak Hungarian as fluently and correctly as if they had
been born here. They have taken to our habits and conditions perfectly, and
never went back to their homeland,” wrote Mihály Csonka in the 1950s.27 The
same happened to Hungarians remaining in Russia, except those generally
were attached not only to Russian women but also to Russian Bolshevism.
In this respect, the attitudes of well-off peasants differed from those of poor
peasants. The former, like Csonka, followed the developments of the Bolshevik
revolution in Russia with great reservations and no sign of enthusiasm. “Not a
grain of that idea appealed to us,” he wrote.28 The poor, however, were inspired
by Bolshevism, which was seen by many as holding the promise of a better
future. Corporal János Papp, a poor peasant of Hódmezővásárhely, who was
sent to the front in Italy after returning from Russian captivity in August 1918,
recalled the political atmosphere in the following words:

I made it to the training camp in Italy on August 15, 1918, disliking the
fact that I was being sent to the slaughter so soon after prison camp in
Russia. I had hoped that, after so much suffering, God would have mercy
on me. I had suffered so much, why would I be sent off to perish for these
mountainous lands? . . . They told us to re-establish discipline, because
without discipline a soldier is worth nothing. But we were thinking that if
someone started some revolution, we would join immediately.29

27  Ibid., 207.

28  Ibid., 192.
29  Szenti, Vér és pezsgő, 359.
War in Puszta: The Great War and the Hungarian Peasantry 53

Papp also had a coherent, if less convincing, explanation for the causes of the
revolutions that shook the country first in the autumn of 1918 and then again
in the summer of 1919:

Before and during the war, Hungary was a country of incredibly wealthy
landed aristocrats, bishops, and millionaire bankers. They held the larg-
est part of Hungarian lands and theirs was the most fertile, producing
the most abundant yield. An aristocrat, a bishop, or a new rich banker
had tens of thousands of yokes that others tilled for him, while hundreds
of thousands of honest Hungarian laborers had no hope of ever own-
ing land and lived like serfs in the service of the big landowners. Huge
estates encircled the people from all sides, not leaving them any room
to grow. While the landowners lived splendid lives without ever work-
ing, awash in wealth, the poor toiled in poverty, and thousands had to
leave for America in hopes of a better life. Everything in the country was
arranged so as to serve the desires and pleasures of the big landowners.
They passed a suffrage law that ensured their hold on power, honest poor
men had no say in the matters of the country, and most districts elected
representatives that supported the lords, most districts elected whom-
ever the lords wanted. And so all Hungarian politics served the interests
of the lords.”30

It followed naturally from the different worldviews and political attitudes

that the Hungarian peasantry reacted differently to the reform projects of the
revolutionary governments, especially to the intended land reform. While the
poor or landless peasants more or less supported the reforms, the main body
of the rural counter-revolutionary movements was recruited from among the
landed peasants. The relics of egalitarianism rooted in frontline experiences
were swept away by the new egalitarianism of the Hungarian Soviet Republic
established in 1919.

Bibliography

Csibi, Istvánné, and Arany Horváth. Pontot, vesszőt nem ismerek, de a szó mind igaz.
Csibi Istvánné Siklódi Márika önéletírása. Budapest: Európa, 1985.
Galántai, József. “Magyarország az első világháborúban.” In Magyarország története
7/2, edited by Péter Hanák, 1099. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado, 1978.

30  Ibid., 360–361.

54 Romsics

Hanák, Péter. “Népi levelek az első világháborúból.” Valóság vol. 3 (1973): 62–87.
Nagy, Lajos. “A lázadó ember.” In Válogatott művei, edited by Lajos Nagy, 227–228.
Budapest: Magveto, 1973.
Pollmann, Ferenc. “Hungarians in World War I.” In A Millennium of Hungarian Military
History, edited by László Veszprémy and Béla K. Király, 361. Boulder: Social Science
Monographs, 2002.
Romsics, Ignác. “A gazdagparasztság és a forradalmak kora. Két forrás a XX. századi
magyar parasztság politikai tudatához.” Történelmi Szemle 22 (1979): 135.
———. Hungary in the Twentieth Century. Budapest: Corvina Osiris, 1999.
———. “The Hungarian Peasantry and the Revolutions of 1918–19.” In Challenges of
Labour: Central and Western Europe 1917–1920, edited by Chris Wriegly, 196–199.
London, New York: Routledge, 1993.
Romsics, Ignác, ed. Csonka Mihály élete és világképe. Budapest: Osiris Kiadó, 2009.
———. Dokumentumok az 1918–19-es forradalmak Duna–Tisza közi történetéhez, 88–89.
Kecskemét: Pétöfi nyomda, 1976.
Szenti, Tibor. Parasztvallomások: Gazdák emlékezése Vásárhelyről. Budapest: Gondolat,
1985.
———. Vér és pezsgő: Harctéri naplók, visszaemlékezések, frontversek, tábori és családi
levelek az első világháborúból. Budapest: Magvető, 1988.
 CHAPTER 3

Between Reality and Imagination: Changing

Memories of the Serbian Theatre of War

Daniela Schanes

Our goal in this chapter is to unveil the relatively unknown records and report
the distinct and subjective points of views of Austro-Hungarian and Serbian
commanders. Our aim is to present an alternative view on the Serbian theatre
of war by emphasizing the human parameter of the topic.
Original quotations1 from memoirs and diaries of commanders deliver
not only insight into the individual structure of an individual, but also pro-
vide a visualization of the wider context of war. At the centre of the enquiry
are stereotypical cognitive patterns about Serbia and the Balkans in general.
The stereotypes and prejudices about the Balkans that can be found in ego-
documents written by western commanders were already established before
the onset of war. We will thus examine the changing opinions of Austro-
Hungarian and Serbian officers. The chosen statements are used to give
answers to the following questions: What views and impressions were stereo-
typically recorded in the ego-documents? What images were evoked about ‘the
other side’ before the war and at the beginning of war? Were these stereotypes
modified, did they level off, or did they become even more entrenched with
the concrete experience of wartime? Is it possible to reach a common percep-
tion of the enemy? At the same time, this chapter aims to show the rich variety
of the accounts of Austro-Hungarian commanders.
The degradation of the Balkans to a secondary theatre of war soon after the
war began is also reflected in the historiography.2 As the emphasis of interna-
tional research has largely been on the Western Front, it is important to shift
the focus to other WWI fronts and thus close the research gap.3 Recently, a

1  Subsequently, all original quotations are translated into English.

2  The Austrian historian Oswald Überegger refers to the Balkans as a “historiographical
sideshow” (Überegger, “ ‘Man mache diese Leute, wenn sie halbwegs verdächtig scheinen,
nieder,’ ” 121).
3  For more recent studies of the eastern front, see for example: Gross, Die vergessene Front;
Liulevicius, Kriegsland im Osten. Analyses concerning the south-western front have also
arisen recently; see for example: Überegger, Zwischen Nation und Region.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_005

56 Schanes

number of analyses on the Balkans during this period have been published.4
As mentioned above, the primary source for this new historical work are
ego-documents, including published and unpublished war memoirs, diaries
left behind by commanders, published war diaries, notes, letters, contempo-
raneous descriptions of war, and the biographies of commanders, which are
not strictly speaking ego-documents). From the Serbian side there are many
so-called ‘prepared memoirs,’ that could be classified as biographies. These
include passages from commanders’ diaries and are therefore important for
this study.
Stereotypes and prejudices about Serbia and the Balkans, abundant in
the ego-documents of western commanders, originated before WWI and had
already hardened by the time the war began in earnest. It is clear that the ani-
mosities between Austria-Hungary and Serbia did not erupt with the assas-
sination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife Sophie. Rather,
the development of the conflict had its roots in the mid-nineteenth century
and then the Bosnian crisis of 1908 triggered a much deeper hatred between
Austria-Hungary and Serbia.
After the Serbian uprisings of 1804 and 1815–1817 against the Ottoman
Empire, Serbia became a partially autonomous princedom under Ottoman
sovereignty. It gained full independence from Ottoman rule at the Congress of
Berlin in 1878. Concurrently, toward the end of the nineteenth century, nation-
alism was on the rise in the Balkan states, including Serbia, as well as in the
rest of Europe. Parallel to rising nationalism, polarisation between Russophiles
and Austrophiles in the Serbian political sphere became evident at this time.
In 1881, a radical catchall party, The National Radical Party (Narodna Radikalna
Stranka) was founded under the leadership of Nikola Pašić (1845–1926), who
ranked among the most famous and influential Serbian politicians from the
1880s until his death in 1926. With the rise of his party, the pro-Russian wing in
Serbian politics was greatly strengthened.
In the 1890s, Serbia was characterized by extreme political insecurity and
indeed was on the verge of a civil war. The popularity of King Aleksandar
Obrenović had plummeted due to the unpredictable and arbitrary style of
his rule. This culminated with the murder of the king in June 1903, which
brought the Obrenović dynasty to an end. The assassination of the Serbian

4  For example: Schanes, Serbien im Ersten Weltkrieg; Angelow, “Der Erste Weltkrieg auf dem
Balkan.”; Gumz, The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914–1918;
Holzer, Das Lächeln der Henker; Holzer, Die andere Front; Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War, 1914–
1918; Angelow, “Der ‘Kriegsfall Serbien’ als Willenstherapie.”; Fryer, The Destruction of Serbia
in 1915.
Between Reality and Imagination 57

king shocked the European public and was responsible for the pejorative ste-
reotyping of the Balkans. A British journalist wrote: “Are the Serbs or any other
nation of the Balkans civilized at all? The answer to this question is clear: No!”5
In hindsight, it is astonishing that the journalist condemns the entire Serbian
nation for the murder, characterizing it as barbarian, instead of limiting his
condemnation and subsequent characterization to the assassins. Furthermore,
he broadens the stigma to the Balkans in general, a widely seen phenomenon
during this time. After the murder, Petar I. Karadjordjević was enthroned as
the new Serbian king. During his rule, Serbia’s foreign policy changed radically:
namely, it turned away from Austria-Hungary and towards Russia. The bilat-
eral relationship between Serbia and Austria worsened dramatically. Both the
so-called Pig War and the Bosnian Annexation Crisis almost ended in a war
between the two of them. The outcome was far-reaching and dramatic: the
Habsburg Monarchy became Serbia’s archenemy.
The chronology outlined above indicates that the cause of the war between
Serbia and the Habsburg Monarchy was established in the pre-war period. In
addition, the statements of leading Austro Hungarian and German command-
ers reflect the unfriendly climate between the two states. One of them was also
a Chief of Staff of Austro-Hungarian army who claimed that:

This aggressive, persistent Serbdom, persistently aiming for a Greater

Serbia at the expense of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, essentially
threatened the Habsburg predominance, its inner coherence, even its
existence. It was either a growing, independent Serbia, and consequent
collapse of the Monarchy, or integration of Serbia with(in) the Monarchy.
It was to be or not to be for both parties. This could only be resolved by
fighting [emphasis Conrad von Hötzendorf].”6

The elimination of the “small annoying neighbouring country of Serbia” was

seen as a necessity long before WWI erupted. As indicated in the quote above,
the pre-war era in Serbia was also characterized by the development of the
idea of a Greater Serbia, which would include parts of the Habsburg Monarchy
not inhabited by southern Slavs.
A comparison of the military education received by the leading Austro-
Hungarian generals to that of officers in the Serbian theatre of war reveals
virtually the same picture: the former passed through the Theresia Military

5  May, The Passing of the Habsburg Monarchy 1914–1918. Cited in Ilčev, “Die Kunst des
Unmöglichen.”
6  Conrad von Hötzendorf, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, 1906–1918, Vol. 3, 25.
58 Schanes

Academy in Wiener Neustadt or a military school in another town of the dual

monarchy. In order to become a member of the Austro-Hungarian General
Staff they had to attend the Wiener Kriegsschule. At the beginning of WWI,
the leading commanders were between ages of fifty and sixty-five, that is they
were born in the 1850s and 1860s. Serbian generals were more or less the same
age when they began to fight in WWI and they went through education in mili-
tary schools in Serbia, mostly in the capital of Belgrade. The difference between
Serbian and Austro-Hungarian commanders could be found in their practi-
cal experience of warfare. Whereas the last war of the Habsburg Monarchy
had been in 1866, Serbia had been involved in five wars between 1876 and the
beginning of WWI. In other words, the Austro-Hungarian commanders were
relatively lacking in practice. Furthermore, the Monarchy had lost the last war
it had fought against the Prussians in 1866, whereas Serbia had been a decisive
victor in its most recent conflict, the last one being the Second Balkan War.
This undoubtedly gave them a psychological advantage.
At the outbreak of the WWI, two completely different ‘systems’ confronted
each other: Serbia with just over four million versus Austria-Hungary with
over fifty-two million inhabitants; a relatively young country that had been
under foreign Ottoman rule for centuries versus a consolidated empire. Apart
from these very distinct starting positions, the relative situations of Serbia and
Austro-Hungary also changed during the war. The Serbian side had only to
focus on the war against Austria as they fought on their home front (except
at the end of the war when they also fought on the Salonika Front in alli-
ance with Entente troops on Greek territory to recapture their homeland),
whereas the Austrian commanders had to face a number of front lines, fight-
ing on the Western and Eastern Fronts not to mention the South-eastern and
South-western Fronts. For Austria, however, the Serbian Front was a secondary
battlefield, while the Western and Eastern Fronts captured the bulk of their
attention, a fact that can also be detected in the war memoirs or diaries of the
Austrian combatants. Usually the Serbian war scene is mentioned only briefly
or not even touched on at all, even when the respective Austrian general had
been engaged in combat operations there.

Records of Austro-Hungarian Commanders

The following excerpts from the ego-documents of Austro-Hungarian and

Serbian military personnel give insight into various memories of WWI. Many
statements refer to the devastation right at the beginning of war, as the
Between Reality and Imagination 59

subsequent quotation from Feldmarschalleutnant7 Aurel von le Beau shows.

In his unpublished memoirs, Le Beau described the Serbian city of Šabac in
August 1914:

We passed through the city along the main road. It is impossible for me
to describe the condition the city was in, the level of devastation was ter-
rible. It was not only due to the damage caused by artillery fire, the looted
and demolished houses left an even worse impression on the passers-
by. The entire household goods, completely destroyed, was lying on the
street, every door was broken and detached from the hinge, every win-
dow destroyed, the interiors in ruins or in flames, and so on. I was very
disgusted by this dreadful vandalism.8

The misery of the war are reflected in many diaries and memoirs of Austro-
Hungarian commanders. On the one hand, they found themselves in an enemy
country, and, on the other hand, they could see the misery of the Serbian civil-
ian population.

I saw a very shocking image on that day [December 1, 1914]. [W]hen

passing by, [I] came upon a rack wagon, broken due to a shell hit and
still harnessed to two dead oxen. Lying dead next to the oxen was an old
man who had driven the vehicle, and next to him, his faithful dog, and
on the rack wagon, filled with all kinds of scanty household goods, was a
dead woman, reduced to a skeleton. It was truly a picture of horror. [. . .]
I thought of the pre-war pacifist, the often denounced and taunted Bertha
von Suttner, and as I saw the image of this misery, I had to admit in my
heart that she was right. Indeed, anyone who has ever seen such a thing
cannot feel any differently at heart than Bertha von Suttner had once felt,
believed and acted [emphasis Eduard Zanantoni].9

7  There is no direct translation of this military rank in the Imperial and Royal Army. The
Feldmarschalleutnant was equivalent to a Lieutenant General in the Prussian Army. The term
Lieutenant General will be used in this essay.
8  AT-OeStA/KA NL Donation Aurel von le Beau (sign. B/558), Meine militärischen und persönli-
chen Erinnerungen aus dem Kriege gegen Serbien und Russland im Jahre 1914 und gegen Italien
in den Jahren 1915 bis 1918, 6 Bde.: Bd. 1: Krieg gegen Serbien von Kriegsbeginn bis 30.8.1914,
83 pages.
9  AT-OeStA/KA NL Zanantoni (sign. B/6), , Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben . . . Manuskript, 525
pages, 304.
60 Schanes

The same Lieutenant General Eduard Zanantoni remembered a similar

scene of wartime horror at the beginning of WWI, even though he interpreted
it in another way:

I got to know the horrible atrocities of war for the first time. Residents
who remained behind (only old men, women and children) slyly fired at
our convoy from their houses, housetops and out of the cellars. To make
us feel safe, they were sticking small white flags out of the windows as we
arrived and were shouting to us in Serbian: “Long live the Austrian army!”
This was wicked treachery. The residents paid for this severely; every
house from which gunshots were fired burst into flames, all the residents
[of the involved houses] were shot, regardless of whether they were old
men, women or children! A horrible sight! Even today I get the creeps
whenever I think of this sight! Back then, I did not know war with all
its tragic side effects! But we should have been on the alert, particularly
as we had known that we were dealing with such a hate-filled, vengeful
nation.10

As the two last records shows, the war inevitably led to contact between
members of the Austro-Hungarian army and Serbian civilian population.
Furthermore, changing ideas and behaviours, not only between different
humans being but also within one individual, can be discerned. Records about
contact with civilians reflect a wide variety of behaviour patterns, from relaxed
to strained to actually violent responses. “The domestic Serbs serve as spies
for Serbs [Serbian army]. A proper intelligence system was organised,”11 wrote
General Alfred Krauß on September 14, 1914 in his war diary. His representa-
tion of the Serbian nation and the experience he had with the Serbian civil-
ian population shaped his behaviour towards them, and especially towards the
male population. His diary entry from September 22, 1914 reads as follows, “The
impudence of the farmers is infinite, equal to our kind-heartedness. [. . .] What
shall I do with this mob. Prosecute?” Krauß reported that a subordinate had
killed a farmer the day before. He continued:

He [the subordinate] heard gunshots; moments later, a farmer stepped

out of the maize field, without a gun, but with a cartridge belt. A head-

10  Ibid., 259.

11  AT-OeStA/KA NL Krauß (sign. B/60), B/60:7, Serbien. Tagebuch vom 23. August 1914 bis 26.
März 1916.
Between Reality and Imagination 61

shot put an end to his criminal existence. In my opinion, our soldiers

should kill every farmer they find. Everybody is a treacherous Chetnik.12

On October 11, 1914, Krauß reported an incident which once again revealed
his harshness in dealing with the local population. A woman with three chil-
dren approached Krauß’ troops. Krauß sent them back in order to intern them
and then use them for harvesting. The woman, however, returned one day
later and showed him a report from a doctor in Austro-Hungarian medical
office. The report said that her youngest son (under the age of six, according
to Krauß) suffered dysentery and that he should be brought to the military
hospital in Ruma.

This is certainly a huge stupidity. [T]hat we have to feed the whole Serbian
population and also this mob, [they pass on] diseases and also take over
beds in the hospital from our soldiers. It would be absurd to keep captives
like these. I was caught in a difficult situation. My generosity compelled
me to set them free, my mind told me to send them back again. The latter
and my sense of duty prevailed—although it was cruel, I sent the mother
and children back [in order to intern them].13

In contrast, General Franz Kalser shows a more neutral attitude towards both
the Serbian soldiers and the civilian population. He treated them with respect
and dignity. The following is the entry in his war diary on November 15, 1914:

Now we have arrived in the area of dead bodies, a well-dressed Austrian

here, three awkwardly positioned Serbian corpses with open eyes and
seized hands in another place, a Serb with a headshot that entered from
behind and exited underneath the left eye. At that point, an arm was
raised [and] we approached; a wounded Serb had been lying there for
two days with a shattered thigh, we gave the poor devil a chocolate, he
immediately begged for cigarettes; I commanded my main surgeon to
bandage the man with the help of the paramedic.14

Another diary entry in which Kalser describes a woman giving birth to a baby
in his quarter indicates the occasionally extremely close contact with Serbian

12  Ibid.
13  Ibid.
14  AT-OeStA/KA NL Kalser (sign. B/52), B/52:1, Tagebücher 1 bis 6 (2.4.1913 bis 18.8.1916)
eigenhändig geführt, Tagebuch II. Heft (22. Oktober 1914 bis 18. Jänner 1915).
62 Schanes

civilians. Being aware of the extreme suffering of the people in an embattled

country, Kalser felt pity:

And the sad convoy of ox-drawn carts, old men, women and crying chil-
dren is passing by. [. . .] The fleeing residents stated coincidently that 1,100
persons had died of hunger and cold in Valjevo in the recent days. The
man who confirmed this recently lost two children himself. [. . .] Masses
of the rural population are returning, this is a misery!”15

In comparison Krauß complained about the leniency towards the Serbian

civilians,

But we have to be human towards the Serbs, at command. We are inhu-

man only towards our own soldiers and people [. . .]. We have to use [. . .]
the captured Serbian men and women at the rear of the troops and pay
them one krone per day—in order to secure their love! Too foolish!16

Beside of degrading Serbia and the Serbs, the Austro-Hungarian ego docu-
ments also idealize the ‘German culture’.17 Conrad von Hötzendorf, for exam-
ple, was constantly stressing the uncivilized way of the Serbs and disrespect of
the international law within Serbian army. The following entry was recorded
in his memoir:

The headquarters of the Balkan forces reported a number of actions

against international law. [. . .] Anybody who knows the cultural level and
the mentality of the people of the Balkans would not be surprised.18

In contrast, Kalser noted that Austro-Hungarian soldiers had been cap-

tured when crossing the Drina River “but were apparently treated in a very
humane way.”19 Similar to his Serbian enemies, Conrad never wrote about

15  Ibid.
16  AT-OeStA/KA NL Krauß (sign. B/60), B/60:7, October 22, 1914.
17  E. g.: Conrad von Hötzendorf, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, 1906–1918, Vol. 4, 24; Krauß, Die
Ursachen unserer Niederlage; Moltke, Erinnerungen, Briefe, Dokumente, 1877–1916, 3–14.
18  Conrad von Hötzendorf, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, 1906–1918, Vol. 4, 503.
19  AT-OeStA/KA NL Kalser (sign. B/52), B/52:1, October 9, 1915.
Between Reality and Imagination 63

Austro-Hungarian atrocities in his memoirs, but rather emphasised the broad

tolerance of his own army.20
Besides the usual expressions like “uncivilized”, “wild”, “cunning”, the
documentation we have gathered, depicts the Serbs as “cutthroats”, “peace-
breakers”, and “king-slaughterers,”21 while the Kingdom of Serbia is described
as “flashpoint”22 or “bubbling cauldron.”23 All these negative designations were
so common during the era of WWI24 that they did not need to be explained to
readers. It was hardly necessary to prefix the adjective Serbian to them. The
most common descriptive nouns ascribed to Serbs as a whole were: deceit,
traitor, betrayal, lack of character, primitiveness, and cruelty. These were in
sharp contrast to the positive characteristics that were sometimes assigned to
certain groups of Serbs, though in most cases they were mentioned together
with negative judgements and pejorative stereotypes about the whole Serbian
nation.
Lieutenant General Aurel von Le Beau recalled the Serbian enemy in an
exclusively negative way:

Thereby, the first period of campaign, the war against Serbia which has
been lasting for one month, has ended. The memory of this time is not
pleasant, and albeit I am glad to have witnessed it, it has left me only with
unpleasant impressions [. . .]. Above all, the reason for this was the char-
acter of war which was evoked by the spineless, mean, treacherous oppo-
nent. This was not an enemy who would face you fairly and squarely and
would fight openly; something deceitful was characteristic of the enemy,
lying down and waiting in order to attack ambush-style from behind or
out of hiding.25

20  Conrad von Hötzendorf, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, 1906–1918, Vol. 5, 44. About Austro-
Hungarian atrocities, see, e. g.: Holzer, Lächeln der Henker; Mitrović, Serbia’s Great War,
73–74.
21  The expression was used to condemn the assassinations of the Serbian King Aleksandar
Obrenović in 1903, as well as shooting of the Austro-Hungarian successor to the throne
Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo.
22  Cf. e. g. AT-OeStA/KA NL Wiesinger (sign. B/77), B/77:15, Die Kroaten und Serben, 97
pages, 5.
23  Cf. e. g. ibid., B/77:24, Autobiographie, 125 pages, 23.
24  Conrad von Hötzendorf, Private Aufzeichnungen, 82.
25  AT-OeStA/KA NL Donation Aurel von le Beau (sign. B/558).
64 Schanes

In contrast, officer cadet Albert Fiedler described a rather relaxed interaction

with Serbians in his war diary:

A sort of communication has developed between Serbian and our infan-

try, our patrols would leave some tobacco, matches and newspapers
from Agram [Zagreb] at certain places, and they were replaced by simi-
lar generous gifts overnight. Here, the front seemed to be established for
eternity [. . .]. Strange – nobody here desired any major victory, we always
hoped the others would accomplish that.26

This statement indicates that there was an element of fraternization with the
enemy at the level of individual soldiers, despite hostilities and prejudices.
The enemy, after all, was in the same situation—in this case, without no
chance of an end to the clashes. The only thing that separated the two sides
was the trench.
Furthermore, Fiedler wrote about encounters with Serbian civilians that,
in his case, took place without incidents and often even very amicably. He
reported in his diary entry on November 17, 1914:

Countless residents with wain wagons who were returning have

approached us because they were no longer allowed to accompany
Serbian army on the run. On each wain, there were at least four, but usu-
ally more children; the people did not even scowl, they spoke with our
gunners, wanted to trade salt (we did not have any for ourselves!), offered
rakija and were content to be able to drag their poor wains home again.”27

A few days later, Fiedler noted down that the trade took place. Four Serbian
peasant boys from nearby farmhouses came to the Austro-Hungarian posi-
tions and offered bread and bacon. In exchange, they asked for salt, tobacco,
and sugar. Fiedler was astonished when the boys returned again, this time ask-
ing for work in the Austro-Hungarian army because they found it so pleasant
there.28
Fiedler’s diary accounts illustrate the difference between high and low
ranks concerning the frequency and intensity of contact with Serbian civil-
ians. Whereas staff personnel officers usually stayed in their billets and worked
on the next operations, soldiers and lower ranked officer camped outdoors

26  AT-OeStA/KA NL Fiedler (sign. B/240), B/240:1, Kriegstagebuch.

27  Ibid.
28  Ibid.
Between Reality and Imagination 65

where they often were surrounded by Serbian farms. During pauses in the
fighting, they frequently came into contact with Serbian civilians. Fiedler
described the peaceful coexistence of soldiers and civilians:

[A]n entirely peaceful situation: there were three farmhouses where

all the residents have stayed, there were many children in particular,
all of them looking very pretty and healthy. I remember a little boy in
traditional costume and with calm manners, just like a miniature edi-
tion of a grown-up farmer [. . .]. We—i.e. the Serbian-speaking person-
nel, but also myself with my quite modest Croatian—often conversed
with the people, including the very trusting children. Many jokes were
exchanged [. . .]29

The German historian Jürgen Angelow describes Oskar Potiorek, the

commander-in-chief of the Balkan forces, and his generals with the fol-
lowing terms: “a maniac search-and-destroy calculation,” with “excessive
intention to kill,” and as leading a “revenge campaign against the Serbian
population.”30 There were arbitrary military courts and shootings of Serbian
farmers under military law, as alleged spies for the Serbian army. According
to Angelow, the main objective—victory of the Austro-Hungarian Balkan
forces—finally granted them opportunity to vent their anger.31 Angelow’s find-
ings are certainly applicable to a part of the Austro-Hungarian generals. The
records of Alfred Krauß, who thought of his army as being even too sympa-
thetic, reflect such an attitude in particular. Nonetheless, generalisation is not
in place as the behaviour of the Austro-Hungarian commanders was multi-
layered. An “excessive intention to kill” can certainly not be ascribed to all
involved, as will be shown with the subsequent comparison of some of the
involved.
In the following excerpt from mid-August, 1914, Lieutenant General Theodor
Konopicky describes his first wartime experiences, which took place before
the beginning of the first big battle:

During the march we came across [. . .] the first dead [. . .] Montenegrins.
[. . .] Suddenly, some soldiers brought in a tall elderly Montenegrin who
was captured with a weapon in the hand and who did not wear military
clothes or badges. He was brought before me. According to martial law,

29  Ibid.
30  Angelow, “Kriegsfall Serbien,” 323.
31  Cf. Ibid.
66 Schanes

he was bound to die. I felt bad for him. After all, he fought for his home-
land. But several hundred men were looking at me [. . .]. I made a deci-
sive slight movement with my hand [. . .] few minutes later, the man was
hanging from a tree, and a loud hurray echoed from soldiers’ lungs.32

This example provides an example of the difficult situations to which people

in authority were often exposed. Konopicky was subject to the pressure of his
subordinate crew which indicates that he did not cultivate a personal hatred
against Serbs or Montenegrins.
Beyond individual situations, another aspect must be considered. The
investigation of Austro-Hungarian ego-documents supports the conclusion
that different levels of command seemed to determine a divergent judgement
and description of the Serbs and consequently a different sort of contact. Chief
of Staff Conrad did not waste any positive words on Serbs in his just under four
thousand pages of published memoirs. Conrad felt that Serbian way of fight-
ing was the consequence of their supposed low cultural level and to their his-
torical tendency toward atrocious acts, which could only be stopped through
rigid and severe punishment. In additional, he ignored the crimes of his troops
in Serbia.33 The above quoted except of the war diary of General Alfred Krauß
provides insight into his attitude towards Serbs, i.e. that, as a people, they were
characterised by fanaticism and the intention to kill.
The unpublished memoirs of Lieutenant General Eduard Zanantoni reveal
that opinions about Serbian civilians could change during wartime. At the
beginning of war, he wrote about shooting old men and women and children
with the justification that gunfire had come out of the houses in which they
lived. The question, of course, arises whether the children had fired the shots,
and whether the Austrians could precisely identify in the turmoil and con-
fusion of war out of which houses the shots had come. Towards the end of
1914, Zanantoni already felt pity for the civilians. His attitude seemed to have
been changed by the continuous fighting. The diary entries of General Franz
Kalser report a correct contact with Serbian soldiers as well as with civilians.
Stereotypical notations for the Serbian nation as a whole (e. g. when he wrote
about the “regicides”) can also be found in his diary entries, but it did not
seem to influence his attitude towards the people in reality. Kalser repeatedly
stressed his sympathy for the civilians.

32  AT-OeStA/KA NL Konopicky (sign. B/49), B/49:1, Kriegstagebücher des Feldmarschal­

leutnant Theodor Konopicky (2 Stück) vom 26.7.1914 bis 31.12.1918.
33  Cf. Conrad von Hötzendorf, Aus meiner Dienstzeit, 1906–1918, Vol. 4, 387–388.
Between Reality and Imagination 67

Officer cadet Albert Fiedler reported a very relaxed contact with civilians as
the quotations above show. Except for those of Fiedler, all of the other exam-
ined ego-documents were written by Austro-Hungarian commanders who
ranked among generals. Conrad, as Chief of the General Staff, never partici-
pated in direct actions, hence never had contact with Serbian troops or civil-
ians. The lower the level of command the more frequently they had contact
with the population and the more likely they were to enjoy it. They had the
opportunity to reconsider their rigid images of the enemy and to possibly
revise them. All the same, it should be noted in closing that not every general
succumbed to the blind intention to kill.

The attitude towards Serbia and Serbs as reconstructed from the diaries and
autobiographies of Austro-Hungarian army personal is also reflected in the
ego-documents of Serbian commanders and soldiers. In their presentations
of the enemy, “the Swabians”34 are depicted as ruthless, but also as scared and
helpless. Particularly when the informants are talking about the prisoners
of war.35

We came upon a big group of prisoners of war. There are Czechs over
here, frightened Magyars and Germans from Upper Austria over there;
Slovaks and Romanians as well; there are also Croats and even Ličani.36

Like their Austro-Hungarian counterparts, members of the Serbian army also

reported enemy atrocities. For example, vojvoda37 Stepa Stepanović made the
following entry in his war record after the battle of Cer:38

The defeated Austrian army wreaked their anger on the innocent Serbian
population. [. . .] Mass executions were carried out and old people,
women and even helpless children were hung; not only men, but also
women were taken prisoner and brought away; houses were burnt, the
belongings looted or destroyed.39

34  Skoko and Opačić, Vojvoda Stepa Stepanović u ratovima Srbije 1876–1918 (2), 27.
35  Janković, Dani i godine, 78.
36  Janković might have meant Croats from the West Croat region Lika.
37  Vojvoda was the highest Serbian military rank, corresponding to Field Marshal.
38  The main battle took place between August 16 and 19, 1914. The Battle of Cer, also known
as the Battle of the Jadar River, marked the first substantial combat between the Serbian
and Austro-Hungarian troops. It ended in victory for the Serbian forces.
39  Skoko and Opačić, Vojvoda Stepa Stepanović u ratovima Srbije 1876–1918 (2), 44.
68 Schanes

Lieutenant Colonel Viden Tošić also remembered the violence towards civil-
ians, when he gave account of the battle of Drina:40

We fought the most difficult battle on the Jagodnja Mountain in order to

take over the massif of Mačkov. We attacked the Swabians on the Jagodnja,
we conquered the mountain and marched onward. First, we chased the
Swabians, then they chased us back from the Jagodnja Mountain as far
down as Krupanj, and we reversed it repeatedly. The clashes continued
without cease, it was all we were thinking about. The Swabians carried
out atrocious bestialities among the innocent population. They took their
anger out on anyone they came across, killing and raping. A normal per-
son cannot grasp the crimes that they committed among the civilians.41

After the war, the Austro-Hungarian war crimes against civilians were docu-
mented in special reports which again were compiled from ego-documents.42
As in Austro-Hungarian ego-documents, the transgressions of the own troops
were not mentioned. It was astonishing to many Serbian commanders that,
although the Austro-Hungarian troops considered themselves members of a
superior culture, they all the same committed atrocities among civilians. This
is repeated in almost all diaries and autobiographies and at numerous occa-
sions. Time and again, the authors stress that WWI in Serbia “was no clash
between two armaments, two armies,” but the struggle between “one who
defended its home country [and] another who wanted to force a slave-like
burden upon” him. In their view, it was “a war against the Serbian nation”—
“everything Serbian was condemned to death.”43

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40  The Battle of Drina was the second large combat between the Serbian and Austro-
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41  Tošić and Lilić, Uspomene rezervnog pešadijskog potpukovnika, 20.
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———. Private Aufzeichnungen. Erste Veröffentlichungen aus den Papieren des k.u.k.
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 CHAPTER 4

“An Ugly Black Night”: Remembering the

Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Serbia 1915–1918

Olga Manojlović Pintar and Vera Gudac Dodić

Instead of an Introduction

In 1929, Erich Kästner published a novel title entitled Emil und die Detektive
(Emil and the Detectives),1 which became one of the first global bestsellers
in children’s literature. Celebrated by the reading public as an extraordinary
book about an ordinary boy, it was translated into almost sixty languages. The
decision of its author to take the unusual tactic of establishing direct con-
tact with the reader appeared to be crucial for its wide popular reception.
In the opening pages of the book, Kästner explains why he wrote a novel with
a little boy from an ordinary neighborhood as the main character rather then
a cannibal girl looking for a toothbrush, which had been his initial idea. He
goes on to explain that a benevolent acquaintance unintentionally made him
rethink his decision to write a novel on the exotic theme. Kästner describes
how—while in his usual relaxing pose lying on the room floor—he contem-
plated the comment that children prefer stories about people they live with,
things they know, and situations that they could experience themselves, over
fantasies or invented stories. Lying on the carpet, he experienced a revelation
as he looked around the well-known room and saw the old furniture in a com-
pletely different way for the first time. From the low perspective of the floor,
the writer explained to his readers, he was able to see things out of everyday
focus along with other things forgotten a long time ago when they had fallen
from the table onto the floor. “When a man stretches out across the room, the
world gets a completely different perspective [. . .] I was lying, therefore, curi-
ous in my room looking, for a change, things from below rather than above and

1  Erich Kästner (1899–1974) was one of the most popular writers in Germany after WWI.
During the Nazi period, he was labelled a pacifist, and his works were censored or forbidden
because of their “Bolshevist” attitude. Kästner’s were among the thousands of books burned
at the Berlin Stake on May 10, 1933. After 1945, Emil and the Detectives was the first novel to
be translated from German into Hebrew for the Israeli market. See: Ladenthin, “Erich
Kästner, the Innovator,” 19–26.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_006

72 Manojlović Pintar and Gudac Dodić

at my biggest surprise I noticed that table legs have calves . . .”2 The term table
legs (in German Tischbeine) reminded Kästner of the story of Emil Tischbein.
This different perspective, which allowed him to focus on omnipresent but
usually unnoticed or hidden things, inspired and encouraged Kästner to write
his best-known novel instead of the long-planned Petersilia in the Jungle.

The discovery of the bottom-up perspective, exposing concealed objects and

items that might have once been important in everyday life, but have since
been, intentionally or not, lost or forgotten, provokes a new way of thinking
about history as a process of remembering the past and simultaneously forget-
ting it. Furthermore, it poses questions about the proper perspective of seeing
and interpreting numerous series of historical images situated within vari-
ous narratives. Discovering what was forgotten or hidden, and why, allows for
the reconstruction of the context in which the memory of certain episodes,
events, and persons faded away. It can illuminate the reasons and explain the
mechanisms according to which the dominant or preferred interpretation was
established.
Applying this phenomenon to WWI history raises the following questions:
why was history always expressed through the perspective of the soldier, and
why were the experiences of millions of civilians marginalized in historical
narratives? The distinct WWI image of the dying soldier has been dissemi-
nated, analyzed, and remembered in numerous public discourses with differ-
ent intensity throughout the last century. The millions of mobilized men who
lived in the trenches, marched in columns, and died on battlefields became
national heroes and martyrs even before the war was over. On September 23,
1915, during the German bombardment of Belgrade a young girl named Mara
Radenković wrote the following in a letter to her brother conscripted in the
Serbian Army: “I love that we are surviving all of this: first, because I want to
participate in this important event; second, so that I can experience life in its
various colors, even the evil ones, in order to go through all the stages of tor-
ment and temptation; and third, so that I feel closer to you who are risking your
lives for us. By suffering, I become, at least to a certain extent, worthy of being
called your sister.”3

2  Kästner, Emil i detektivi, 16. Translated from Serbian by author.

3  The diary and the letters of Mara Radenković written to her cousin Živan Petrović are part of
his personal documentation, which is kept in the Historical Archives of Belgrade. Historical
Archive of Belgrade (HAB), Zbirka arhivalija, K-9/LF, 1808–1957, pojedinačni dokumenti,
Živan Petrović, 1915–1957 Dokumenti iz delatnosti, prepiska, arhivska građa.
“ An Ugly Black Night ” 73

Soldiers were a vital symbol of every national discourse and the main politi-
cal mobilizing force—a central topos and memory marker for evoking the past
and constructing the present. Consequently, the experience of life behind
the front lines was considered insignificant in comparison with the soldier’s
experience, and was thus almost completely concealed. The battle for bread
and lard compared with the battle for life and military victory was perceived
as banal.4 Published memoirs and diaries presenting everyday life behind the
front lines remained outside of the dominant historical paradigm. Despairing
civilians struggling for survival were viewed as the lucky ones. They escaped
mutilation, injury, and death in the battle at the front lines, but at the same
time missed “the glorious war saga.”5 Even the suffering of civilian popula-
tions during punitive actions, not to mention mass death during widespread
epidemics, was only presented at the margins of the official military narratives.
After the war, the process of establishing the canonic image of the soldier
eclipsed the multifaceted war experience, and any episodes that might have
threatened a functional and ideologically recognizable model of remember-
ing the war and its victims were rejected. This was by and large based on the
need to cohere to the narratives of war-stricken nations throughout Europe.
Survivors became communities of mourning, grieving for the millions of dead
soldiers whose bodies lay destroyed, decomposed, and buried hundreds of
kilometers from home.6 Simultaneously, the survivors’ own personal war sto-
ries were left out of official commemorations and representations of the war.
The collective focus on those who died or were killed in uniform served to
inhibit and homogenize individual memories. Moreover, the civilians’ authen-
tic sense of satisfaction at being alive was mixed with suppressed feelings
of embarrassment and irrational shame for having survived. These complex
emotions led survivors to actively take part in the creation of the single domi-
nant war narrative. The dual, even contradictory position, of the civilians who
lacked the epic experience of war heroism and martyrdom, caused them to
even further glorify the soldier’s death as the utmost sacrifice for the nation. As
young Mara Radenković watched the Austro-Hungarian and German soldiers
enter Belgrade, she wrote in her diary: “Crushed by pain that cannot be com-
pared even with the loss of the most beloved being, I am crying at the window
as I watch our military retreat, and I envy the people who are able to be in the

4  Winter, Sites of memory, sites of mourning; Capdevila and Voldman, War dead; Dimitrova,
“ ‘Taming Death’: The Culture of Death (1915–1918),” 175–195.
5  Cooper, Behind the Lines: One Woman's War, 1914–1918; Glatzer and Glatzer, Berliner Leben
1914–1918; Winter and Robert, Capital Cities at War.
6  Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning.
74 Manojlović Pintar and Gudac Dodić

army. [. . .] I want to join every soldier, go down to Serbia, and throw myself into
the bosom of my sweet homeland.”7
After the war, the socio-psychological mechanism of suppressing personal
experiences influenced the politics of remembering the Great War, which,
expressed through the symbol of the dying soldier, expanded the ground for
political and social radicalization and militarization in a number of European
societies during the 1930s.8 Establishing a more complete and comprehensive
image of the WWI out of the countless heterogeneous episodes presupposes
the inclusion of events and phenomena that were considered unpleasant and
left at the margin of the public discourse during the two interwar decades.
Illuminating these forgotten war episodes and re-analyzing the overexposed
ones reveals processes of social and political (de)construction.9 This article
aims to explore how self-inhibition and suppression of individual memories
interacted with the creation of the official historical narrative, and how ambig-
uous personal experiences and dubious social episodes of the WWI in Serbia
were thus removed from the historical record.

Austro-Hungarian Occupation of Serbia: Methods and Tactics

From the very beginning of the war, both soldiers and civilians in Serbia were
faced with the harsh brutality of warfare. The first punitive expeditions of the
Austro-Hungarian army in the northwestern region of Mačva introduced a
mass terror over the civilian population and the destruction of Serbia’s econ-
omy and cultural heritage.10 Austro-Hungarian brutality over the Serbian pop-
ulation was performed simultaneously with German brutalities in Belgium.
This level of cruelty can fully be understood when perceived as a continuation
of the practices developed and performed during the colonial wars that took
place in the final decades of the nineteenth century.11 “The ruthless brutality
against the entire population” with the terrifying intention “to cause maxi-
mum damage to the enemy in the shortest possible time, even if it contravened
international law”12 that was employed on the African continent found its first
expression in Europe in 1914.

7   Historical Archive of Belgrade (HAB), Zbirka arhivalija, ZARH, K-9/LF.

8  Mosse, Fallen Soldiers.
9   Winter and Robert, Capital Cities at War.
10  Mitrović, Srbija u Prvom svetskom ratu.
11  Hull, Absolute Destruction.
12  Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction.
“ An Ugly Black Night ” 75

In Serbia, punitive military expeditions were followed by an epidemic of

typhoid fever that further decimated the army and civilian population. The
demographic catastrophe of the first two war years reached its peak with the
mobilization of forty thousand recruits, many of whom were under-age, but
nevertheless participated in the military retreat of the defeated Serbian army
through the Albanian mountains in the winter of 1915. The contact with mass
death and everyday experience of war culminated with the imposition of a
cruel system of occupation that divided Serbia into three zones of occupation:
Austro-Hungarian, Bulgarian, and German.13 The principal aim of the occu-
piers was the inauguration of a new legal system that would prevent guerilla
resistance and exploit Serbia’s economic resources.
The Austro-Hungarian system of occupation, including its numerous prohi-
bitions and penalties, simultaneously established and represented the power
and the strength of the new rulers. Immediately after the occupation, control
over the civilian population was established in accordance with the following
two documents: Directives for the Political Administration in the Areas of the
General Military Governorate in Serbia (Direktiven für die politische Verwaltung
im Bereiche des Militärgeneralgouvernements in Serbien) and General Principles
for the Imperial and Royal Military Administration in the Occupied Territories
of Serbia (Allgemeine Grundzüge für die K.u.K. Millitärverwaltung in den beset-
zen Gebieten Serbiens). Both of these documents were meant to justify the new
occupational system in Serbia, to enable its economic and industrial exploita-
tion and to pacify the population.14
A set of drastic measures was introduced soon after the installation of the
new authorities—Military General Governorate (Militärgeneralgouvernement).
Threats and intimidations, even some as extreme as public hangings, filled
the public space.15 The Cyrillic alphabet was banned from schools and other
public places, and most streets and schools were renamed.16 The activities of
publishing houses and bookshops were stopped; political, cultural, and sport
associations were disbanded and even the wearing of traditional or folkloric

13  Ristović, “Occupation during and after the war.”

14  From the very beginning the numerous clashes and conflicts between the civilian and
military officials characterized the occupational system in Serbia (Mitrović, Srbija u
Prvom svetskom ratu, 343).
15  For example, fourteen-year-old Dušan Vujić and twelve-year-old Jovan Stanić were
hanged in the centre of Belgrade, See Mladenović, Grad u austrougarskoj okupacionoj zoni
u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918. godine, 43.
16  The decision to outlaw the Cyrillic alphabet was introduced on January 1, 1917 (Mladenović,
Grad u austrougarskoj okupacionoj zoni u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918. godine, 43).
76 Manojlović Pintar and Gudac Dodić

clothing forbidden.17 Materials and artifacts from numerous cultural institu-

tions, archives, and museums were taken out of Serbia.18 Between 150,000 and
200,000 men, women, and children were deported and interned in numerous
camps in the Austro-Hungarian territories.19
In such a situation, it is clear that the military staff and their families that
comprised the Austro-Hungarian occupying system, on the one hand, and the
Serbian population on the other, existed as parallel but separate communi-
ties. Needless to say, the attempts to annihilate the traditional Serbian national
culture and identity created a sharp division between the new rulers and the
inhabitants of the occupied country.20 The majority of the civilian population
under occupation practiced a variety of methods of passive resistance: refusing
to salute foreign soldiers, spreading rumors of Serbian military victories, and
establishing close connections with the Italian and Russian prisoners of war.21
Furthermore, news of the so-called Toplica guerilla uprising, which began in
the fall of 1916 and lasted for several months in the Bulgarian zone, strength-
ened hopes for liberation in the Austro-Hungarian zones of Serbia as well.22
And yet the gap between the two seemingly distant and distinct commu-
nities was crossed with numerous activities conducted by individuals trying
to reestablish and reorganize everyday life.23 Certain segments of the popula-
tion accepted the new reality and struggled to maintain businesses, wealth,
and existing positions by pursuing various survival strategies.24 One of the

17  Mladenović, Grad u austrougarskoj okupacionoj zoni u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918. godine, 45.
18  On November 1915, the University in Hale in Germany asked German officials in Serbia
to send sets of the several Serbian newspapers from Belgrade in order to complete their
library (Mladenović, Grad u austrougarskoj okupacionoj zoni u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918.
godine, 159).
19  Public executions, hostage taking, and internments were considered precautionary mea-
sures aimed at disabling insurgent activities in Serbia. The largest number of citizens
fell victim to the process of internment, most sent to camps in the territories of Austro-
Hungary. Individuals and small groups of interns were constantly being sent out of Serbia,
but, in addition, there were four significant waves of deportations: after the entrance of
the Austro-Hungarian troops in Serbia in 1915; after the entrance of Rumania in the war;
after the Toplica Uprising in the spring of 1917; and after the breakthrough on the Salonica
Front in the fall of 1918. (Mitrović, Srbija u Prvom svetskom ratu, 383–385).
20  Milikić, “Beograd u prvom svetskom ratu.”; Đorđević, “Austro-ugarski okupacioni režim u
Srbiji i njegov slom 1918.,” 205–226.
21  Mladenović, Grad u austrougarskoj okupacionoj zoni u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918. godine, 186.
22  Mitrović, Ustaničke borbe u Srbiji 1916–1918.
23  Knežević, “Prostitutes as a Threat to National Honor in Habsburg Occupied Serbia, 1915–
1918,” 312–335.
24  Mladenović, Grad u austrougarskoj okupacionoj zoni u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918. godine, 183.
“ An Ugly Black Night ” 77

first missives of the Austro-Hungarian intelligence service, sent from Serbia on

April 30, 1916, evoked the general atmosphere of the public. The report ended
with the following conclusion: “The peasants are obviously happy that they are
spared from everything the war means. The intellectuals, in contrast, although
currently peaceful because of fear, remain as they were i.e. every Serbian intel-
lectual is half lawyer and half politician. He is a sworn enemy to any compatriot
of a different political stamp, but united with all others in hating the winners.”25
The density of the web that evolved between the opposing and distinct
communities of occupiers and the occupied increased over time. New reali-
ties produced different methods and techniques of survival. As one observer
noted, during those three gloomy years in Serbia, they manifested themselves
in various unfortunate ways. Conscious service to the enemy, according to
one contemporary reporting on events, was dictated by the basic instinct for
survival.26 In the already cited diary, the twenty-year-old Mara Radenković
made the following entry on January 31, 1916: “Finally, I have had the experience
of entering their Governorate, to watch them wallow in our beautiful build-
ings. Yes, necessity makes people do things against their will. In these days, one
must be kind and bow to one’s enemies. True, there are some very intelligent
and fine characters among them. But everything is such a mess and money
is the only solution to anything. Until now, I thought that only we had truly
rotten people, but among our occupiers, there are even worse. Among them,
only the clinking of coin rules people and opens iron doors.”27 After only three
months of occupation Mara was forced to take part in the daily struggle for
groceries, and ultimately compelled to break the “patriotic vows” uttered with
such passion when German and Austro-Hungarian forces entered Belgrade.
One intriguing example of the complexity of the occupation was an order
issued by the military commander of the small town of Kruševac in central
Serbia in 1916. According to this order, any attempt at bribery or corruption
was strictly forbidden and the wrongdoer would be subject to martial law.
The officials of the town and its citizens were warned that they would be pun-
ished severely for any taking or offering of bribes. Moreover, the order also

25  Mitrović, Srbija u Prvom svetskom ratu, 406. According to the report of the Austro-
Hungarian officials the number of intellectuals who stayed in Serbia during the occupa-
tion was less than three thousand (exactly 2,707). Having in mind this relatively small
number of highly educated people, one might question the scope of their influence in
society at large during the occupation. See Mladenović, Grad u austrougarskoj okupa-
cionoj zoni u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918. godine, 183.
26  Stanković, Pod okupacijom.
27  Historical Archive of Belgrade (HAB), Zbirka arhivalija, ZARH, K-9/LF.
78 Manojlović Pintar and Gudac Dodić

prohibited denunciations and defamations of “quiet, upright, and loyal

citizens.”28 On the one hand, this document draws attention to the shameful
practice of denunciation, and, on the other, it represents direct evidence of the
occupiers’ decision to maintain a rigid distance vis-à-vis the local population.
Attempts by certain groups and individuals to establish closer connections
with the new authorities were strictly controlled and observed with suspicion.
Contact was established only at the occupiers’ initiative and never vice versa.
The clearest example of this prohibition was the refusal of the suggestion made
by former Prime Minister of the Serbian government Jovan Avakumović’s to
the representative of His Imperial and Royal Majesty, First Governor General
Johann Graf Salis-Seewis, to jointly issue a proclamation asking for the restora-
tion of peace and order in the occupied territories. Worse still, Avakumović’s
suggestion to put his name next to that of the Austro-Hungarian official was
viewed as arrogant and ultimately led to his arrest and internment.29 The occu-
piers alone defined the scope and nature of collaboration between the two
parties. According to this line of reasoning, the Kruševac order represented a
specific stage in the process of the implementation of the occupation, making
a sharp distinction between the conquerors and those they had conquered.
However, the Kruševac order was erased from the official image of the every-
day life under occupation. After 1918, analyzing this phenomenon became a
complex, dissonant, and unpleasant task for the new Serbian and Yugoslav
elites. They did not want to open Pandora’s box and destabilize the process of
nation building and thus opted instead for the simplified but functional inter-
pretation of the heroic war. The focus of the public gradually shifted from con-
troversial matters to tragic and glorious images of the soldier at war.
Over time, representations of the military saga rooted in heroic episodes
of war were introduced into the public space using biblical symbolism. For
example, the retreat of the Serbian army through Albania and the fighting on
the Salonika Front were presented as Golgotha and the Resurrection. A few
years after the war, women’s magazines were advising readers to remove old
paintings of Austrian and Hungarian artists and to decorate their homes with
images presenting dramatic war episodes. The white snow of Albania as the
symbol of the purification of war became the central image and the new secu-
lar icon in nearly every house and parlor.30 The symbolism of the Albanian
retreat and the Salonika Front confirmed the prevailing stereotype of Serbia

28  Mladenović, Grad u austrougarskoj okupacionoj zoni u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918. godine, 55.
29  Mitrović, Srbija u Prvom svetskom ratu, 391.
30  “Ukrasite svoj dom,” Žena i svet, February 15, 1926, 2.
“ An Ugly Black Night ” 79

as a deserted and devastated land during the war and suppressed unwanted
narratives about the occupation.
Despite this backdrop, shortly after the end of WWI, the first attempts
to legally and morally process problematic war episodes emerged, some
being debated in the public sphere. Articles appeared in newspapers and
magazines questioning the responsibility and the potential criminal guilt
of people who worked for the occupying regime. Journalists writing for the
journal Beogradske novine published by the Military General Governorate
(Militärgeneralgouvernement) of Serbia during the war were the most exposed
and became the subjects of public condemnation, some finally being sent to
court for trail.31 These trials were not only perceived as legal proceedings, but
as a venue for morally condemning collaborators, and as an opportunity for
some parties to achieve significant political benefits. Although often lacking
legally acceptable proof and evidence, the courts were nevertheless criticized
if they didn’t arrive at harsh verdicts. If the courts failed to impose strict pen-
alties, they were accused of causing the weakening of the state. During the
period the new constitution was being adopted (the first constitution of the
Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was promulgated on June 28, 1921),
the condemnation of collaboration with the occupiers was used for political
gain and inter-party allegations. Created distinctions between so-called patri-
ots and traitors trumped the search for the legal and historical truth, and thus
the Great War functioned simultaneously as a symbol of national unity and a
cause of national strife.32
One of the most serious critiques of life under occupation was written by
Isidora Sekulić, who, being a prominent intellectual, essayist, art critic, trav-
eler and the first woman member of Serbian Academy of Arts and Sciences,
was an important figure in the newly created Yugoslav public. In June 1921,
she questioned the moral conditions and consequences of the collaboration:
“The Occupation was an ugly, black night through which no firebug flew. But
this sentence does not represent compassion for the population. It represents
regret and dissatisfaction for that part of our national epopee of which we can-
not be proud. In the occupation there were many victims. These were the vic-
tims of the heartless and stupid force over an unarmed and subjugated people.
There were no, or just a few, however, victims of the real tragedy. We did not
have, or maybe we had a little, just a droplet, of Napoleon’s demi-solde, we did

31  Pejović, “Beogradska štampa o suđenjima za saradnju sa okupatorima u Srbiji 1918–1920,”

85–109.
32  Mladenović, Grad u austrougarskoj okupacionoj zoni u Srbiji od 1916. do 1918. godine,
148–164.
80 Manojlović Pintar and Gudac Dodić

not have Don Quixote, we did not even have Montauban’s horse, who at the
price of death refused to go down on his knees before Charlemagne in front of
whom Montauban himself had kneeled. The Austrian occupation caused the
suffering of a nation that was neither knight nor saint [. . .] In that moment of
misery, we entered the occupation lethargically and were awakened primarily
by the question of food and groceries. In the battle against food shortages, our
people proved to be beneath all suspicion.” Stating that military officials and
the “eminent men of letters” had lied shamefully and denounced each other
in order to get closer to the “Austrian butcher shop and officers’ storehouses,”
she concluded: “One thing is clear: during the three years of slavery that are
now gone like the wind, we only materially overcame the temptations of
the invasion, but not spiritually, and the present level of our common life is the
offspring of the lack of spiritual strength during the time of Austrian rule in
Serbia.”33 With this article, Isidora Sekulić established the continuity between
the ignored collaboration and the political tensions and conflicts in the post-
war period. Her article was an attempt to provoke dialogue about unpleasant
historical episodes that were forcefully suppressed from public debate.34

Remembering the Dead

After WWI, civilians throughout Europe who had survived focused their atten-
tion on the memorialization of the soldiers whose bodies were buried hun-
dreds of kilometers from home and, thus, never properly mourned. Friends
and relatives of the fallen soldiers had been unable to practice funeral and
bereavement rites and mourn the dead in traditional ways. The subsequent
changes to existing commemorative customs created new memory communi-
ties. Unable to wash, cloth, or kiss the dead, unable to gather at gravesides to
express the pain of bereavement, surviving relatives, friends, and colleagues

33  Sekulić, “U ratu i ropstvu, kako je upravo bilo?,” 281–284.

34  In 1922, Isidora Sekulić published the article “Bloody Nationalisms” in the same maga-
zine, stating that after the war nationalism was defined as a phenomenon “that gradually
recedes from the mentality, disappears, and leaves its place to something newer and more
humane.” However, she also concluded: “. . . when man slowly puts his ear to the vein of
humanity, or to his own vessel, one hears and feels something completely different. Is it
because the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles abused the nationalism of the people,
that could hardly be worse, or is it because of other profound historical reasons, that
nationalism is not only here, but it increases and is rejuvenated from below the War tro-
phies and beneath its debris, as every passion.” (Sekulić, “Krvavi nacijonalizmi,” 225–227)
“ An Ugly Black Night ” 81

established new customs that kept the memory of the dead soldiers alive.35
Preserving the names of the fallen soldiers in the public space represented a
specific way of expressing and overcoming pain and grief. Public monuments,
paintings, propagandistic photographs, novels and movies that evoked the
epopee of the Serbian army fighting and winning the war became important
symbols in the everyday life of Yugoslav citizens. Only one pair of statues by
the prominent sculptor Đorđe Jovanović, depicting a dying mother and her
daughters, reflected the civilian war experience.36 In contrast to the main sym-
bolic pillars of the new community—the strong masculine symbols of the sol-
dier and the ruler—those living behind front lines were perceived as weak and
therefore represented through the form of the female body.
The parts of the new state of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes that were previ-
ously the territories of the Kingdom of Serbia entered a process of monumen-
tomania, erecting numerous statues, commemorative plaques, and fountains
that memorialized the names of the fallen soldiers and members of the local
communities. In the western regions of the new kingdom that were previously
the territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, various visual representations
of the Kings Peter and Alexander Karađorđević were introduced as the best-
known and most robust symbols of the new state. The royal monuments were
erected to strengthen the narrative of Serbia as the Piedmont of the Southern
Slavs and to create loyalty to the new community. Monuments to the fallen
soldiers wearing Austro-Hungarian uniform were set up inside local cemeter-
ies, behind the walls and away from the central squares and streets, providing
a space for the members of this grieving community to mourn the loss of their
loved ones in relative privacy.
The newly established kingdom was faced with great numbers of demo-
bilized soldiers from both victorious and defeated armies. It was shaken by
social unrest and by sharp political disagreements of almost every imaginable
sort. At the same time, however, inspired by the sense of a new beginning and
by the prospect of being united on the grounds of common ethnic descent,
culture, and language, state officials inclined toward the inauguration of a
preferred vision of the past as an element of collective cohesion.37 Different
economic systems and cultural legacies had to be incorporated into the new
Yugoslav society as it searched for a distinctive identity. Thus, the war epopee
might have well been considered—and finally was introduced—as a possible

35  Bucur, Heroes and Victims.

36  Manojlović Pintar, Arheologija sećanja.
37  Ignjatović, Jugoslovenstvo u arhitekturi 1904–1941.
82 Manojlović Pintar and Gudac Dodić

integrative social element in the process of seeking and creating a common

identity. Subsequently, presentations of unpleasant war episodes were per-
ceived as potential provocations for further disturbances. This was the reason
that in the context of the highly politicized climate of the first Yugoslav state,
discourse picturing and questioning life in the cities and villages behind the
frontlines (disseminated during the first post-war years through published
memoires and diaries) diminished over time. It was simply too difficult to
incorporate images and stories of life in occupied Serbia and its numerous
survival strategies into the more standard unifying narratives of heroes and
martyrs.38 The new collective identity in construction included episodes of
monstrous punitive actions over the civilian population in western Serbia in
1914, of the typhoid epidemic of 1915, and of the severe Bulgarian reprisals after
the uprising in Toplica region in eastern Serbia in 1917, while the retelling the
stories of fear, hunger, betrayal, and denunciations slowly disappeared from
the public discourse.

Conclusion

Monochrome interpretations of WWI, created during the two interwar

decades in the newly established kingdom of Yugoslavia, were based on the
strong symbolism of the Serbian soldier as the winner of the war. Local com-
munities whose members were killed faraway from their homes paid tribute
to their fallen sons through numerous commemorative practices including
the erection of monuments and plaques in almost every town and village.
Transformations in the practice of war caused a change in memory politics
and produced the iconic image of the fallen soldier. Inscribing and remember-
ing the names of the fallen soldiers was considered tribute and repayment to
those who lost their lives wearing national uniforms. The tragic destiny of the
civilians who were killed in punitive actions or who died of infectious diseases
was also incorporated in the official historical narratives, but their names were
kept private and often forgotten.
War survivors initiated many actions that glorified the military saga, and at
the same time kept from view more shameful and unpleasant episodes from
the period of occupation. The power of the hero and martyr narratives was
used to cover up the memories of those who in different ways accepted the
occupation. Although the majority of the population developed tactics to keep

38  Lazarević, Beleške iz okupiranog Beograda 1915–1918; Maršićanin, Uspomene iz zbega;

Miodragović, Tragični dani Srbije; Lapčević, Okupacija; Nikolajević, Pod Nemcima.
“ An Ugly Black Night ” 83

a safe distance from the occupying forces, the struggle for everyday survival
created a thin layer of collaborators, the memory of which was suppressed
immediately after the war.
The ongoing process of writing WWI history reveals that which was hidden
or willingly unseen or obscured, refusing to deny elements that were always
at “the table of history.” And yet various perspectives of seeing the past need
not be mutually exclusive or incompatible. To the contrary, the simultaneity
of different views is the only way to make history more critical, relevant, and
unbiased.

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 CHAPTER 5

Bosniaks in WWI: Loyal, Obedient, Different

Ahmed Pašić

Introduction

In 1878, fulfilling the terms of the Congress of Berlin, Austria-Hungary occu-

pied Bosnia and Herzegovina (which will be abbreviated as BiH in this
chapter). At that time, few would have imagined that only several decades later
soldiers from the newest member of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy would
serve in its most elite units and would become a synonym for courage on the
battlefields of Galicia, Serbia, the Isonzo Front, and the Dolomites.
After the end of the uprising in BiH, Austro-Hungarian authorities were
reluctant to introduce conscription, wary of the reaction such a measure
might provoke among both the local Muslim population that was still hoping
for the return of the Ottoman Empire, and the Orthodox population that also
regarded the new authorities with distrust. In addition, the new authorities
were preoccupied with setting up an administrative system, investing in infra-
structure, and writing new laws. The official declaration of conscription that
finally came in 1882 was received with the expected indignation and served
to increase the outflow of men from BiH, especially Muslims who generally
migrated to Sandžak, Macedonia, Albania, or Turkey taking their entire fami-
lies with them. This led to the decrease of the population in certain parts of
the country, especially eastern Herzegovina where whole villages were left vir-
tually deserted. Many Orthodox families migrated as well, mostly to Serbia,
although in smaller numbers than Muslims.
Nevertheless, the Austro-Hungarian authorities carried on with conscrip-
tion. In order to reduce the tensions, military authorities paid a great deal of
attention to the specific characteristics of BiH, especially to the delicate reli-
gious differences. These considerations played an important role in the for-
mation of regiments, the selection of uniforms, nutrition, religious personnel,
the pledge of allegiance, etc. It is interesting to note that of all regiments in
the Austro-Hungarian military, those from BiH remained the longest without
their own flags. The reason for this was religious. Traditionally, flags had been
consecrated by a priest. Since there were grounds to fear that such flags might
offend the religious sensibilities of Muslims, military authorities resorted to
the diplomatic, but rather poor, solution of no flag at all. During WWI, they

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_007

86 Pašić

finally consented to the demands of the troops and each battalion was allowed
to carry its own flag, albeit a Croatian one.1
The Austro-Hungarian authorities had the utmost regard for the ethnic
and religious diversity of their troops. Each Bosnian-Herzegovinian regiment
had its own Imam, Catholic or Orthodox priest, Protestant minister, or rabbi,
depending on the composition of a given unit. Even the pledge of allegiance
was adapted to religious rituals. In peacetime, the Austro-Hungarian Army
employed one hundred thirty-eight Catholic, ten Orthodox, eight Protestant,
ten Jewish, and two Muslim military chaplains. During the war, the number of
military chaplains increased, since they played an important role as moral and
spiritual leaders at the front.
Muslims had a separate kitchen. Officers and soldiers were free to attend
Mass or Friday prayer ( Jumu’ah). Moreover, Austria-Hungary invested enor-
mous amounts of money and resources into the development of the province.
They built numerous schools and hospitals, and opened many factories. The
construction of roads, bridges, and railways was at an enviable level. Owing
to the respectful attitude of the authorities towards the various communities
in BiH and the enormous investments that had been made in the country, the
majority of the population in BiH received the news of the declaration of WWI
with loyalty to the Monarchy and readiness to enter military service.
Well aware that the problem of Serbia would sooner or later be pushed to
the forefront of the Drang nach Osten foreign policy, Austria-Hungary invested
long-term and systematic efforts into the development of a military system
in BiH, which bordered on both Serbia and Montenegro. In 1882–1914, many
barracks and military posts were set up in the eastern part of BiH. During that
period, towns such as Trebinje, Bileća, Gacko, Stolac, and Višegrad received
major infrastructural investments.
Soldiers performed military service in the following four Bosnian-
Herzegovinian (BH) regiments:

• BH1 – Sarajevo region with the recruitment center in Vienna

• BH2 – Banja Luka region with the recruitment center in Graz
• BH3 – Tuzla region with the recruitment center in Budapest
• BH4 – Mostar region with the recruitment center in Trieste
The soldiers were called Bosniaks (Die Bosniaken), which was a standard appel-
lation for all members of Bosnian-Herzegovinian units, regardless of ethnic or
religious affiliation.

1  Avsenak, “Na fronti,” 48.

Bosniaks in WWI: Loyal, Obedient, Different 87

News of War and Setting out for the Front

Serbia followed these developments in BiH with suspicion, seeing Austria-

Hungary as a potential threat, especially in the wake of its annexation of
BiH in 1908 and the Monarchy’s active policy of thrusting towards the east.
Both in Serbia and BiH, secret organizations began to spring up with the objec-
tive of pushing Austria-Hungary out of BiH and simultaneously developing
the idea of bringing all Southern Slavs together in one single state indepen-
dent of the great powers. Among them were also Black Hand (Črna roka) and
Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna), whose members carried out the assassination
of Archduke Franz Ferdinand during his visit to Sarajevo on June 28, 1914. The
murder of Franz Ferdinand helped Austria-Hungary make a more definitive
decision to put an end to Serbia’s interference in Bosnia’s internal matters
and continue its policy of pushing eastwards. There followed an ultimatum
with conditions that Serbia could not possibly accept, and on July 28, 1914, the
Monarchy declared war on Serbia. Other great European powers followed suit,
and the stage was set for WWI to begin.
The general atmosphere was charged with excitement and optimistic
belief that the soldiers would be back by Christmas. Only a few could have
foreseen that the war would drag on for four years and that nine million
soldiers would die before the carnage ended. Especially in BiH, enthusi-
asm was the strongest among Catholics and Muslims and a small number
of the Orthodox. The former sought revenge on Serbia for the assassination,
and the latter wanted to prove their loyalty to the Monarchy. The situation of
the Orthodox faithful was much more complicated: whereas some wanted to
fight against Serbia and Russia and enlisted voluntarily in the army, a great
many Orthodox were Serbian sympathizers and would secretly cross the east-
ern border to volunteer for the Serbian or Montenegrin Army. By the time
Bosnian-Herzegovinian units reached the Russian battlefield in the summer
of 1914, many Orthodox soldiers had deserted and joined the Russian Army.
In April 1916, most of them joined a unit called the First Serbian Volunteer
Division.2
Within the framework of the Austro-Hungarian Army, Bosnian-
Herzegovinian units fought in WWI in Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Galicia,
Bukovina, Russia, and the Carpathians, as well as in Romania, the Dolomites, and
on the Isonzo Front. Soon after the declaration of war, Bosnian-Herzegovinian
and other regiments were on the move from the interior towards the battle-
field. While they had been present in Serbia and on the Eastern Front since

2  On more about the unit, see Chapter 1 by Luthar.

88 Pašić

August 1914, they reached the Isonzo Front in May 1915. One piece of evidence
testifying to their arrival is the signpost still standing in Lepena, a village in the
upper part of the Soča/Isonzo River basin, stating that the members of BH4
arrived in the area in May 1915 and left on October 24, 1917 after the break-
through at Kobarid/Caporetto. During the war, Lepena served as a logistical
and military base to support the Austro-Hungarian units positioned on the
Zagreben alpine pasture above the village.
Austria-Hungary extracted the maximum out of BiH’s military potential.
Immediately after the war broke out, a general mobilization was ordered to
complete the existing four BH regiments. Later on, they raised four new regi-
ments, eight hunter battalions and several units of mountain artillery, reserve
battalions, as well as work units. The latter were almost exclusively composed
of Orthodox soldiers, whom the regime viewed with distrust because of the
war with Serbia. These units were usually stationed far behind the front lines
where they constructed bridges, roads, and buildings in the rear of the bat-
tlefield. Bosnia and Dalmatia provided the bulk of armed police units in the
occupied parts of the Balkans or the rear of the frontline.3 In mid-1917, BH
units totaled 234,662 soldiers, of which 212,541 or 90.85% were in the infan-
try, 4,111 were in artillery units, 2,924 technical-transport units, and 15,046 in
other units. By the end of 1917, the number of soldiers had increased to 298,773.
In other words: during WWI, 17.2% of the male population of BiH between
the age of sixteen and seventy were mobilized in the Austro-Hungarian Army,
either combat or labor corps.
Many Bosniaks, especially older men, served in work units as well. They
took care of logistics, transport from bases or warehouses to the battlefields
and back again. They operated sawmills, cableways, etc. The labor was strenu-
ous, especially in winter, when the work was impeded by heavy snowfalls and
extremely low temperatures not to mention frequent avalanches. As a rule, sol-
diers in Bosnian units were poorly clothed and nourished.

From the Mountains to the Plains and Back Again

Like other soldiers, many Bosniaks experienced a great shock on their arrival
to the battlefield. Their lives were immediately turned upside down. Military
routine (standing watch, making rounds, reconnaissance, cleaning weapons)
in what was for most of them a completely different natural environment
replaced their previous work in fields, offices, schools, and factories. In other

3  Galić and Marušič, Tolminsko mostišče 1, 78.

Bosniaks in WWI: Loyal, Obedient, Different 89

words, the Bosnian-Herzegovinian regiments were unaccustomed to waging

warfare in the endless plains that they first experienced in Galicia and Bukovina.
Trained for mountain warfare in the hilly parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina, the sol-
diers quickly discovered that it was a completely different matter fending off
the onslaughts of attackers in the shallow and primitive trenches. Moreover,
since the battlefield was constantly shifting, it was hard to maintain any newly
gained positions.
Later, when they were transferred again, this time to the mountainous
Isonzo Front, the Bosniak soldiers confronted new hardships, such as extreme
cold and wind, avalanches, and impassable mountainous terrain. Below
the Zagreben alpine pasture in the Upper Soča/Isonzo River basin, for exam-
ple, a plaque dedicated to twenty-seven members of the BH4 Regiment
keeps the memory of one of the avalanches alive. The unlucky victims of ava-
lanches are mentioned by the Slovenian historian, Franc Malešič,4 who states
that during WW I, 140 Bosniaks died on the Isonzo Front as a result of ava-
lanches, collapses, cave-ins, lightning, and ordinary slips and falls.
The hazards of mountain warfare and the attitude of Slovenian soldiers
towards their Bosnian comrades are also described by many witnesses. One of
them was Ivan Turel, a Slovenian soldier who fought side by side with Bosniaks
on Mount Rombon and Mount Čukla above Bovec:

I spent roughly one month on Mount Kota 1313. It was connected to

the Možnica Valley by a cargo cableway. We were stationed in wooden
barracks. Most of the work and unloading was done by the Bosnians
or Bosniaks, as we used to call them. Later I was stationed on Mount
Rombon with them, and we got along well. There were also quite a num-
ber of Slovenian officers. I had it the toughest on Mount Rombon, stay-
ing in the trenches on the summit. We would often descend by ropes to
the precipitous cliffs just below the top. Once, a bolt of lightning killed
six soldiers at the top. We were afraid of lightning and often warned our
officers of the danger. We spent days on end in the trenches where we
slept and ate. Food was scarce. We mostly ate canned goods. We collected
water by melting snow.[10]

The lack of food, water, and equipment is also clear from the accounts of other
soldiers and officers who, in addition to the inadequate trenches, also described
caverns or shelters cut into the rock face protecting soldiers from Italian artil-
lery fire. Provisions were the responsibility of the Bosniak units that, due to the

4  Malešič, Spomin in opomin gora.

90 Pašić

difficult terrain, relied on dog and horse teams. In this situation, the small but
hardy Bosnian horse proved to be a tremendous asset, patiently carrying the
cargo along the narrow mountain trails.

In Battle

Although merciless and courageous in their fighting, Bosniak soldiers were,

according to war diaries and officers reports, extremely supportive and sympa-
thetic to their fellow combatants. In keeping with usual orientalist stereotypes
about their behavior, they are depicted as emotional and primitive, transform-
ing in the space of a moment from compassionate men to ruthless fighters:

One day a Russian guard, standing ten meters or so from the Austrian
positions, called to a Bosniak guard: “Hello, Bosniak!” Our guard, Ahmet
Babić, cautiously lifted his head to see what was going on, and the
Russian raised high a bottle of vodka and shouted: “Vodka!” Then, just
as Babić lifted his head a little more to look towards the Russian, he was
shot. He was dead on the spot. My Bosniaks, so docile and obedient until
that moment, suddenly became unrecognizable. They went completely
mad, pounding the Russians with mines and bombs day and night, never
stopping. That night a group of volunteers charged a Russian trench, kill-
ing the entire crew, and returning pleased to have avenged Ahmet Babić.
Provocations and attacks continued throughout the week, and eventually
I was called by the high command and asked what was the matter. When I
told them what had happened, our superiors ordered us to bombard that
section of the Russian line with heavy artillery to punish them for such
unbecoming conduct.5

This excerpt describing the incident that happened in BH3 Regiment and taken
from Pero Blašković’s biographical report Sa Bošnjacima u svjetskom ratu (With
Bosniaks in the World War) is supported by many other officers reports, diary
entries, letters, and written memoirs compiled after the war. Similar material
is drawn on by historians such as Lovro Galić, one of the foremost authorities
on the Isonzo Front, as a way of explaining the Bosniaks’ conduct by stressing
their religious background:

5  Blašković, Sa Bošnjacima u svjetskom ratu, 5.

Bosniaks in WWI: Loyal, Obedient, Different 91

However you look at it, the Bosniaks went to war without even a shred of
enthusiasm. The Emperor in Vienna ordered it, and his commands had
to be obeyed. At the core of the Bosniaks’ formidable (the Italians saw it
as horrific) reputation as warriors was defiance (or spite). The Bosniaks
wouldn’t tolerate anyone resisting them or dominating them on account
of numerical superiority. In addition, they had the indigenous skill and
stamina of highlanders, coupled with a strong warrior tradition, and an
almost childlike black-and-white conception of people and the world.
Muslim fatalism—belief in kismet—contributed to a wild courage and
a willingness to take all kinds of risks. In battle, they were both staunch
individualists and splendidly loyal comrades. Believing that everyone’s
fate was predetermined, Muslim Bosniaks awaited attacks with little
excitement.—If the book says you will fall, you will fall, but if it says you
will see Bosnia again, then not even the fiercest fire can do you harm. You
shall endure. It is all kismet (fate), brother . . .6

Numerous accounts of Austro-Hungarian officers testify to the courage, loy-

alty, and sacrifice of Bosnian soldiers. They were often chosen to undertake
high-risk attacks or defend exposed positions especially in mountainous areas.
Mount Rombon is a massive mountain between Bovec and a tiny village Log
pod Mangartom. On April 12, 1916, positions on Mount Rombon were taken
over by the Bosniaks from BH4, a unit that consistently had some two thousand
troops. They were for the most part Herzegovinians and well used to rocky ter-
rain. The arrival of these troops was best described by Dr. Vasja Klavora, one of
the foremost Slovenian experts on the Isonzo Front:

On April 12, 1916, the Carinthian Mountain Rifle Regiment on Mount

Rombon was replaced by the soldiers of the 4th Bosnian-Herzegovinian
Regiment, who had come from the Russian battlefield. The positions on
Mount Rombon and in the low flat parts of the battlefield were held by
three battalions of this regiment, and a battalion from another regiment
that consolidated its position in the alpine pasture of Zagreben, along
with the 20th Hunter Battalion and Black Army units taken from other
sections of the 10th Army, all composing the 27th Mountain Brigade.
They maintained their positions on Mount Rombon until the begin-
ning of the October Offensive in 1917. The Italians remembered their
new enemies as being extremely bold and dangerous in close combat.
They excelled at setting up covert and surprise attacks. Engaging in close

6  Galić and Marušič, Tolminsko mostišče 1, 193–194.

92 Pašić

combat, they would use a rifle, as well as a knife and an iron-spiked mace,
or buzdovan. Their red fezzes and their murderous weapons struck fear
into the Italians, and there is evidence that any Bosniak captured holding
a buzdovan was shot on the spot. On April 26 and May 2 and 4, members
of these units, together with the members of the Black Army, executed a
series of successful attacks on Mount Rombon.7

When these Bosniak regiments arrived in the area, winter conditions prevailed
and, because of this, the new Italian offensive started only in the middle of
summer. What started as an artillery overture and repetitive attacks by three
battalions ended in close man-to-man combat that literally decimated the
Italian soldiers. The Bosniak soldiers received the most credit for this success-
ful defense and thus the reputation of Bosniaks as the strongest fighters on the
Isonzo Front began to grow. After the August 1916 offensive, the fellow fighters
and commanders of the Bosniaks began to describe them as bloodthirsty, com-
radely, and uncompromisingly loyal soldiers. Much of this had already been
evident from the way members of the BH3 Regiment had conducted them-
selves on the Eastern Front.
Relying on the diary entries of their fellow fighters and especially their supe-
rior officers, it is clear that the Bosniaks left no one indifferent. “It’s a disgrace
how the Bosniaks, poor devils, are treated. Everyone keeps pushing them into
the fiercest and bloodiest of encounters,” one supporter lamented, while oth-
ers dismissed them as good-for-nothings and liars.8 According to a Slovenian
officer, Ivan Primožič, such attitudes towards the Bosniaks reflected the per-
ception and treatment of these soldiers. Namely, the so-called fellow Bosniaks
(subbosniaken) were always put “in the hardest positions.” “Every time the
Hungarians botch things up” Primožič reports, “they send in our Bosniaks.” On
the other hand, the Bosniaks were also seen as “masterful liars. [. . .] You can
beat the hell out of one and he still won’t tell the truth,” Primožič once wrote in
another entry in his diary, openly admitting that he always blamed the Bosniaks
first for occasional thefts.9 Others treated them as children, almost noble sav-
ages. This was quite often evident from the depiction of the Bosniaks in big
cities. Most of them being unfamiliar with urban life, they usually appeared in
their colleagues’ narratives as observing in amazement the hustle and bustle of
a city or a landscape different from the mountainous BiH.

7  Pašić, Klavora, and Grabus, Bošnjaki na soški fronti, 42–43. Translated to English by author.
8  Primožič, Vojni dnevnik 1916–1917.
9  Ibid.
Bosniaks in WWI: Loyal, Obedient, Different 93

In memoirs of Slovenian soldiers, Bosniaks regularly appear as unassuming

and reserved people who most often talk about farms and cattle when sharing
the memories of their home places. As such they are mentioned by former
Austrian President, Adolf Schärf, who first met a group of them as an officer
on the Eastern Front. He too remembers that they differed from other Austro-
Hungarian soldiers by their uniform and weapons. He remembers them wear-
ing green-grey fezzes and using the knives and buzdovani i.e, spiked wooden
clubs for the hand-to-hand combat.
The Bosniaks crafted the buzdovani themselves, after their first experience
with close combat or after their standard-issued equipment was damaged or
destroyed. Their conduct in other situations was similarly resourceful. The first
thing they would do when the fighting was over was to make use of the food
and equipment seized from the enemy. For example, after the victorious Battle
of Montello, which immediately followed the breakthrough at Caporetto,
nearly every Bosniak soldier was wearing an Italian raincoat and carrying a
short Italian carbine.10
But what Bosniaks were most remembered for, both by fellow fighters and
the enemy, was their courage and loyalty. Renowned for being almost invinci-
ble in close combat, they were often assigned the most demanding tasks. When
commanding officers gradually become aware of the awe the Bosniak soldiers
inspired in the enemy, they sometimes distributed their traditional head-
dresses to other troops. On the eve of the last and Twelfth Isonzo Offensive, the
fezzes were distributed to Hungarians, Austrians, and even German soldiers.
A similar tactic was used by some commanding officers during the prepara-
tions for the breakthrough at Caporetto.
Pero Blašković, Commander of the 4th Battalion of the BH3 Regiment, also
remembered the Bosniaks as loyal and efficient:

What I must say about my valiant soldiers, the Bosniaks, is that they were
among the best soldiers in the world. [. . .] [They] were good, brave, and
disciplined. [. . .] [They] were quiet, mostly keeping to themselves, but in
battle they were always cheerful, loud, hot-blooded, and spirited. They
reminded me of good children. They always followed the orders of their
commander with fierce loyalty and absolute obedience.11

The Bosniaks reminded Blašković of children not only in battle, but also
because of their conduct in areas behind of the front. According to his

10  Blašković, Sa Bošnjacima u svjetskom ratu, 13–18.

11  Blašković, Sa Bošnjacima u svjetskom ratu, 6.
94 Pašić

recollections, they loved to carve their names into rocks and walls. Their
inscriptions have been preserved in the Dolomites, the Upper Soča/Isonzo
basin, and the Karst to this day.

Captivity and the End of the War

We learn from the narratives of survivors and especially their superior officers
that the Bosniak soldiers on the Isonzo Front greeted the Austro-Hungarian
capitulation with mixed feelings. On the one hand, they were happy that the
war was over and they would finally go home; on the other hand, they felt
betrayed. As Blašković put it in his book, the Bosniaks of his regiment, sta-
tioned on Monte Grappa at the time of the capitulation, refused to put down
their weapons for a long while. According to his account, it took a great
deal of convincing to get them to surrender along with the other three hundred
thousand soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian Army, many of whom had been
captured.
Mustafa Čepalo from Prusac was among the captured. He first received mili-
tary training in Mostar and then in Ljubljana. After being transferred to the
Isonzo Front, he was captured in 1916 during an Italian offensive. For years, he
was moved between camps in Udine, Bari, Naples, and Salerno, and was finally
released to go home in 1920.12
Blašković’s account is also highly informative in describing the post-war
return of his fellow Bosniaks:

After the end of the war, we were sent across northern Italy into cap-
tivity in France, from where we finally started returning home in the
summer of 1920. We envied the soldiers who were sent home immedi-
ately after the collapse. Our homeward journey took us through places
such as Lago, Vittorio, Lago di Santa Croce, Ponte nelle Alpi, Polpet, and
after that through Langarone in the north, as far as Innichen in Tyrol.
Then our journey continued through Carinthia and Carniola, until we
reached Tuzla via Zagreb and Brod. Many authorities in parts of the for-
mer Austria-Hungary competed over who could take more weapons and
equipment from us. The collapse of the front brought chaos. The only
bright moment during the retreat was the arrival of the Bosniaks in
Kamnik, where Bolsheviks were attempting to seize power. The arrival

12  Hikmet Karčić from Sarajevo told me this story on May 23, 2006. Mustafa Čepalo was his
great-grandfather.
Bosniaks in WWI: Loyal, Obedient, Different 95

of our soldiers brought the old rule back. The people of Kamnik received
them with jubilation.13 But when they arrived in Tuzla late at night, they
were told that they had better go their separate way and leave no trace.
For this reason, they were immediately labeled Abraten in their own
hometown . . . as if they had done something shameful . . .14

A somewhat different fate was in store for Bosniak soldiers who were captured
by Russians on the Eastern Front. Those who refused to join the volunteers
were sent far to the rear of the war, all the way to Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
On the other hand, those who were willing to join the First Serbian Volunteer
Division were sent from the central prison camp at Darnica in Kiev and from
the prison camp at Kharkov to Odessa. The soldiers’ conditions in captivity
were appalling; not only was food scarce, but inmates were also tormented by
the sense of isolation, not being allowed to receive or send letters. As the front
line shifted eastwards, the remaining prisoners of war were transferred to cen-
tral Asia where many Austro-Hungarian soldiers lived to see Russia’s capitula-
tion at the end of 1917. However, due to poor road connections and general
shortages, these prisoners of war did not return home until the end of 1920.
The memory of fallen Bosniak soldiers is maintained at both common
graves and individual tombstones scattered from the Tyrolian Dolomites and
the upper part of the Soča/Isonzo River basin to Lebring in Austrian Styria,
from cemeteries around Cracow and the Kielce region to the characteristic
pyramid-shaped monuments in Dobruja. The most complete list is kept in the
small church at Javorca near Tolmin, where the names of the fallen soldiers
have been burned into wood panels.

Bibliography

Avsenak, Vinko. “Mošeja v Logu pod Mangartom.” Na fronti: Revija za vojaško zgodovino
4 (2006): 45–50.
Blašković, Pero. Sa Bošnjacima u svjetskom ratu. Lovran: Cambi, 2000.
Čuček, Janez, Zoran Jerin, Miloš̌ Mikeln, Andrej Novak, Božidar Pahor, Kazimir Rapoša,
Janez Stanič, Jože Šircelj, Jaka Štular, and Milan Orožen Adamič̌. Stoletje svetovnih
vojn. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, 1981.
Fortunat-Černilogar, Damjana. Tolminsko mostišče—ob 90. letnici prvih bojev na soški
fronti. Tolmin: Tolminski muzej, 2005.

13  Author’s note.

14  Blašković, Sa Bošnjacima u svjetskom ratu, 6–7.
96 Pašić

Galić, Lovro, and Branko Marušič. Tolminsko mostišče I. Tolmin: Tolminski muzej, 2005.
———. Tolminsko mostišče II. Tolmin: Tolminski muzej, 2005.
Hadžijahić, Muhamed, Mahmud Traljić, and Nijaz Sukrić. Islam i muslimani u Bosni i
Hercegovini. Sarajevo: Svjetlost, 1977.
Imamović, Enver. Historija bosanske vojske. Ed. Bosanski Korijeni. Sarajevo: Art 7. 1999.
Imamović, Mustafa. Historija Bošnjaka. Sarajevo: Bošnjačka zajednica kulture
Preporod, 1998.
Klavora, Vasja. Plavi križ. Klagenfurt: Mohorjeva Celovec, 2000.
Luthar, Oto. “O žalosti niti besede”: Uvod v kulturno zgodovino vélike vojne. Ljubljana:
Založba ZRC, 2000.
Malcolm, Noel. Bosnia. A Short History. New York: New York University Press, 1994.
Malešič, Franc. Spomin in opomin gora—žrtve nesreč v Julijskih Alpah. Ljubljana:
Didakta, 2005.
Neumayer, Christoph, and Erwin A. Schmidl, eds. The Emperor’s Bosniaks; The Bosnian-
Herzegovinian Troops in the k.u.k. Army; History and Uniforms from 1878 to 1918.
Vienna: Verlag Militaria, 2008.
Pašić, Ahmed. Islam in muslimani v Sloveniji. Sarajevo: Emanet, 2003.
Pašić, Ahmed, Vasja Klavora, and Nedžad Grabus. Bošnjaki na soški fronti. Jesenice:
Kulturno športno društvo Bošnjakov Biser; Kranj: Gorenjski glas, 2007.
Primožič, Ivan. Vojni dnevnik 1916–1917. Kobarid: Muzej v Kobaridu, 1919.
Schachinger, Werner. Die Bosniaken kommen—Elitne trupe u k.u.k armiji 1879–1918.
Translated by Omer Mujaković-Veličanin and Smail Alijagić. Lovran: Cambi, 1996.
 CHAPTER 6

Caring for the Wounded: Zagreb Military

Hospitals in WWI

Vijoleta Herman Kaurić

At the end of May 1915, Zagreb was declared the medical aid center for sol-
diers fighting on the Austria-Hungarian side who were wounded on the Italian
Front.1 Croatia saw Italy’s entry into the Entente Alliance as an act of high
treason and an attempt to occupy Croatian territories. As a result, Croatians
felt much more passionately about the events on the Italian Front than devel-
opments on other battlefields, although their compatriots died more or less
equally on all fronts. Attention to the Italian Front intensified when activities
on the Serbian Front let up, making the Italian Front geographically the closest
war zone to Croatia. When weather permitted, the muffled roar of Italian can-
nons could be heard in Zagreb, the sound being carried by the western wind.2
Even before this decision, the residents of the Croatian capital had had
the opportunity to witness the consequences of the war up close, as the first
wounded soldiers from the Serbian Front began to arrive as early as August 18,
1914. News of their arrival spread through the town like wild fire, completely
overshadowing public celebrations of the birthday of Emperor Franz Joseph I,
which had been organized at the same time.3 A number of newspaper articles
attest to the preparations for the treatment of the wounded, but a great deal of
other valuable data was lost to military censorship.
Considerable changes had to be made to Zagreb’s hospital infrastructure to
admit even a small number of soldiers, as the existing hospitals had barely
been sufficient to cover the needs of the city’s residents and its regular gar-
rison during peacetime. In 1914, city authorities estimated Zagreb’s population
to be 86,000, but this number grew with the arrival of refugees from occupied

1  “Zagreb središte za ranjenike s talijanskoga ratišta,” Jutarnji list (hereinafter referred to as: JL)
4/1915, no. 1147, June 8, 1915.
2  Horvat, Prvi svjetski rat, 294; “Za našu dalmatinsku braću,” Narodne novine (hereinafter
referred to as: NN) 82/1916, no. 122, May 27, 1916.
3  “Dolazak prvih ranjenika u Zagreb,” NN 80/1914, no. 192, August 19, 1914; “Danas nadošli prvi
transport ranjenika . . .,” JL 3/1914, no. 753, August 19, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika u Zagreb,” Obzor
54/1914, no. 228, August 19, 1914.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_008

98 Kaurić

and war-torn territories.4 We do not yet know how many refugees arrived dur-
ing each year of the war nor how many inhabitants Zagreb had at the time of
Austro-Hungary’s disintegration. The first census after the war, which was car-
ried out in 1921, showed Zagreb to have had 108,674 residents, 37% more than
in 1910.5
Only four civilian hospitals had previously catered to the needs of the
general population: two large public hospitals run by the Orders of Mercy,
an infectious disease hospital administered by the city, and a small pri-
vately run sanatorium. There were also two military hospitals. The Sisters of
Mercy Hospital (Bolnica Milosrdnih sestara) on Vinogradska Road was the
biggest with seven hundred beds and a staff of seventeen physicians, seven of
whom were head physicians (so-called primariuses). The Brothers of Mercy
Hospital (Bolnica Milosrdne braće) was located right next to Zagreb’s main
square, Ban Jelačić square, and had five hundred beds and a staff of eleven phy-
sicians, six of them with primarius status, sixty-eight male and female nurses,
including monks and nuns, and an administrative staff of fourteen. The two
military hospitals, Garrison Hospital Number 23 (Posadna bolnica br. 23) on
Vlaška Street and Home Guard’s Military Hospital Number 25 (Domobranska
četna bolnica br. 25) at Kunišćak, could admit five hundred soldiers between
them. The Home Guard’s hospital and its hundred beds were insufficient
to satisfy the army’s needs even before the war, and the possibility of add-
ing an annex to it had already been considered. Unlike these two hospitals,
the Infectious Diseases City Hospital (Gradska zarazna bolnica) was more a
location for then observation of potentially infected patients than a treatment
center. As it had ninety beds, it could only be used for small-scale epidemics.6
Zagreb had a hundred licensed physicians and sixteen public pharma-
cies on the eve of WWI. Although the number of healthcare workers and
institutions remained virtually unchanged throughout the war, a shortage
of physicians catering to the civilian population as well as a shortage of hospi-
tal physicians had been observed in Zagreb as early as 1914.7 After the general
mobilization, only thirty-eight physicians remained in the city. Eight of them
were dentists and five were general practitioners who no longer practiced
medicine either because they were too old or because they had decided to

4  Zagreb godine 1913–1918, 116, 154.

5  Kolar, Radni slojevi Zagreba od 1918. do 1931, 18–19; Vranješ Šoljan, Stanovništvo gradova ban-
ske Hrvatske na prijelazu stoljeća, 147–148.
6  Zagreb godine 1913–1918, 109–111.
7  Zagreb godine 1913–1918, 117, 119–120, 122, 124, 129–130.
Caring for the Wounded: Zagreb Military Hospitals in WWI 99

pursue another profession. Count Miroslav Kulmer,8 the head of the Committee
for the Organization of the Volunteer Nursing Service in the Kingdoms of
Croatia and Slavonia,9 warned about the lack of physicians and called for the
ban (viceroy) Baron Ivan Skerlecz10 to intervene. Worse still, eighteen new phy-
sicians were called up during a subsequent mobilization, eight of whom were
to report to the battlefield immediately. The ban interceded with the Provincial
Ministry of Defense in Budapest and some of these physicians were allowed to
keep their positions until further notice.11 However, it was only a matter of time
before they would be mobilized again, as the needs of soldiers on the battle-
fields and the military hospitals had absolute priority.
In order to compensate for the lack of qualified medical personnel, authori-
ties decided to enlist training volunteers, the vast majority of whom were
women. The first call for “the Croatian women of the city of Zagreb” to volun-
teer to become nurses was publicized as early as July 28, 1914 when all women
willing to participate in the program were invited to come to Starčević Hall.
Helping wounded and ailing Croatians was considered a woman’s duty, and
thus all women were expected to help “to the extent their female strength
permitted.” Croatian physicians were also asked to contribute their expertise
and help organize this charitable activity.12 Several hundred women from all
walks of life arrived at the specified time, surprising both the organizers and
the Red Cross delegate. The women were told to report to the administrations
of the Orders of Mercy hospitals where the nursing courses were going to be
organized. A list was made of the women who had already received nursing
training and women who were prepared to serve in any capacity. 13
The unexpectedly massive response to the call necessitated the organiza-
tion of a special committee that would enroll potential nurses and organize
the nursing courses. The Provincial Women’s Earning Society (Zemaljska gos-
pojinska udruga za zaradu ženskinja) took on the task and began to organize
courses immediately. The first courses were taught by the distinguished Zagreb

8   Count Miroslav Kulmer-Šestinski (Šestine, 1860–1943, Zagreb), lawyer, member of

Croatian parliament and the joint Hungarian-Croatian parliament in Budapest as a
“virilist” (entitled to be member of parliament by his position rather than being elected),
and also a prominent figure in public, economic, and social life of Zagreb and Croatia.
9  “Grof Kulmer vrhovni upravitelj sanitetske službe,” JL 3/1914, no. 735, August 2, 1914.
10  Baron Ivan Skerlecz de Lomnicza (Oroszló, Hungary, 1873–1951, Budapest), Croatian
Viceroy (ban) 1913–1917.
11  The Croatian National Archives Zagreb, Presidency of the Provincial Government,
vols. 6–22, General Files, radical number 7.885 Pr./1914, and umber 9.112 Pr./1914.
12  “Hrvatice grada Zagreba,” JL 3/1914, no. 729, July 28, 1914.
13  “Hrvatske bolničarke u nastajnom ratu,” NN 80/1914, no. 175, July 29, 1914.
100 Kaurić

surgeons Miroslav Čačković at the Sisters of Mercy Hospital and Dragutin

Schwarz at the Brothers of Mercy Hospital. One-week courses were taught to
groups of twelve to twenty women. The courses were set to continue for as long
as it took all interested women to be trained. By August 2, 1914, this number
had grown to 245.14
Approximately two hundred nurses were prepared for service by August 28
and there was no further need to recruit new volunteers or to train them. Many
of the nurses, however, were teachers and substitutes for them were needed in
the classroom. Individual summons were sent out in such and similar cases
to trained nurses. However, when a large number of wounded soldiers were
transported to Zagreb in September, no more individual summons were sent
out and all trained nurses were required to report to the makeshift hospitals.15
At the beginning of October 1914, volunteers were again asked to apply for
nursing duty, but this time everyone who applied was assigned to hospitals
immediately and trained on site. Trained volunteers were sent to work on the
battlefield or at provincial hospitals. Completing the course was not a require-
ment for these positions; the volunteers merely had to agree to be assigned to
positions outside of Zagreb.16
News about the shortage of volunteer nurses in the city in general and
at military hospitals in particular started to circulate at the end of October.
However, the news was denied and the activities of the volunteer nursing
service re-examined. It turned out that there was indeed a shortage of vol-
unteer nurses at military hospitals because the hospital administrations had
failed to recruit them. Put another way, they only accepted help from the
outside when there was too much work for their own staff to handle, but when
the situation quieted down, they stopped looking for new nurses. There were
enough trained volunteer nurses in the city. There were even too many of

14  “Tečajevi za njegu bolesnika,” NN 80/1914, no. 176, July 30, 1914; “ ‘Zemaljska gospojinska
udruga [. . .],” Obzor 54/1914, no. 211, August 2, 1914; “ ‘Zemaljska gospojinska udruga za
naobrazbu ženskinja u Hrvatskoj i Slavoniji [. . .],” NN 80/1914, no. 179, August 3, 1914.
15  “Pozor dobrovoljne bolničarke!,” NN 80/1914, no. 201, August 28, 1914; “Pozor dobrovoljne
bolničarke,” JL 3/1914, no. 765, August 28, 1914; “Pozor Dobrovoljne bolničarke!,” Obzor
54/1914, no. 237, August 28, 1914; “Važno za bolničarke,” NN 80/1914, no. 223, September 14,
1914; “Važno za izučene bolničarke,” JL 3/1914, no. 792, September 15, 1914.
16  “Poziv na dobrovoljnu bolničarsku službu,” JL 3/1914, no. 825, October 3, 1914; “Bolničarima
i bolničarkama,” NN 80/1914, no. 264, October 6, 1914; “Pozor bolničarke i bolničari,” JL
3/1914, no. 829, October 6, 1914.
Caring for the Wounded: Zagreb Military Hospitals in WWI 101

them, since not all of them were assigned to posts. Apparently there was no
additional need.17
This attitude on the part of the military authorities was reflected at all lev-
els. Articles written by Miroslav Čačković might help shed some light on it.
Čačković’s experience of the volunteer nurse courses drew him to speak pub-
licly about his own prejudice against women, which had been influenced by
the medical literature of the time. Čačković only reluctantly agreed to hold the
courses, believing them futile and deeming most women unable to satisfacto-
rily perform demanding nursing duties. Moreover, he felt it was impossible to
teach the women all they needed to know in such a short time period. Above
all, he believed that the women would not be able to control themselves in the
face of the “shocking and revolting” aspects of nursing duties, that they lacked
the necessary discipline and seriousness, and that they were not up to the
physical challenges of service. After teaching the course for a mere twelve days,
Čačković swung to the other extreme and was full of praise for the women,
describing them as “heroes in the field of duty and sacrifice,” and wanting to
make everyone around him aware of this impression.18
At the beginning of August 1914, the military authorities and the Red Cross
set up a resting area for the acceptance of severely wounded soldiers at the
third-class waiting room of the Southern Station along with a makeshift hospi-
tal designed to accept two hundred patients at the infantry barracks. In addi-
tion, the Red Cross set up its own hospital for two hundred wounded or ill
soldiers at one of the wings of then School of Crafts (present-day Museum of
Arts and Crafts).19
While preparations were being made to accept the wounded soldiers, sev-
eral companies and individuals in Zagreb offered premises for the accommo-
dation of the wounded, but most of these were smaller private sanatoriums
that had room for only fifty or sixty beds.20 After the first exchanges of fire,
it became clear that the 412 beds at the military hospitals and the Red Cross
hospital would be inadequate and a further expansion of the capacities

17  “Bolničarsko pitanje u Zagrebu,” Obzor 54/1914, no. 299, October 29, 1914; “Poslovanje
dobrotvorne ratne bolničarske službe,” NN 80/1914, no. 291, October 31, 1914; “Poslovanje
dobrovoljne ratne bolničarske službe,” JL 3/1914, no. 876, November 1, 1914.
18  Čačković, “Žena kao dobrovoljna bolničarka,” 33–38.
19  “Akcija Crvenog križa,” NN 80/1914, no. 179, August 3, 1914.
20  “Zagrebačko općinstvo za ranjenike,” Obzor 54/1914, no. 216, August 7, 1914; “Rodoljuban
čin,” NN 80/1914, no. 184, August 8, 1914; “ ‘Prva hrvatska štedionica [. . .],” NN 80/1914,
no. 204, August 31, 1914.
102 Kaurić

was discussed.21 These expansion efforts were in line with the orders of the
Provincial Government’s Interior Affairs Department issued on August 31, 1914,
which required smaller hospitals to cede fifty to sixty percent of their available
capacity to wounded soldiers, and hospitals with more than 110 beds to cede
eighty or ninety percent of their available capacity.22
The military authorities organized five makeshift hospitals at large schools
(mostly two-storey buildings). The Orders of Mercy hospitals relocated civil-
ian patients to make room for the wounded soldiers. In this way, the Brothers
of Mercy hospital made ready six rooms for one hundred and eighty wounded
soldiers. There were also plans for further expansion of the military and pub-
lic hospitals as well as the Red Cross hospitals, but the implementation of
these plans was put on hold until the need arose for additional capacity. After
measures taken in the first week of August, Zagreb had five thousand beds
prepared for wounded soldiers.23 At the end of September, Zagreb had ten hos-
pitals, about which we know virtually nothing. But not even ten hospitals were
enough, as the military authorities soon demanded another thousand beds.
The Red Cross offered to provide them if it was granted the use of a university
building that was in the immediate vicinity of its hospital, but this request
was denied. The Red Cross instead made expansions to its existing facilities
and other adequate buildings in the vicinity of the hospital, thus securing an
additional seven hundred beds.24
At the end of 1914, Zagreb had twenty-two hospitals treating wounded sol-
diers. Because of the increasing occurrence of infectious disease among the
wounded soldiers, the royal residence hall for students from the upper classes
was converted to an infectious disease clinic with three hundred beds.25 The

21  “Društvo Crvenog križa [. . .],” NN 80/1914, no. 184, August 8, 1914; “ ‘Društvo Crvenoga
križa,’ ” JL 3/1914, no. 742, August 8, 1914.
22  Zbirka zakona i naredaba, 487.
23  “Briga za ranjenike,” Obzor 54/1914, no. 218, August 9, 1914.
24  “Skauti mole novine i knjige za hrvatske ranjenike,” NN 80/1914, no. 238, September 22,
1914; “Skauti mole novine i knjige za hrvatske ranjenike,” JL 3/1914, no. 807, September 23,
1914; “Sjednica ‘Crvenog križa,’ ” NN 80/1914, no. 251, September 29, 1914; “Sjednica
‘Crvenoga Križa,’ ” JL 3/1914, no. 819, September 30, 1914; “Nova bolnica ‘Crvenog križa,’ ”
NN 80/1914, no. 299, November 10, 1914; “Nove bolnice ‘Crvenog križa,’ ” NN 80/1914, no. 312,
November 25, 1914; “Nove bolnice Crvenoga križa,” JL 3/1914, no. 917, November 25, 1914;
“Iz kr. zem. obrtne škole u Zagrebu,” NN 81/1915, no. 15, January 20, 1915; “Iz obrtne škole,”
JL 4/1915, no. 1006, January 21, 1915; “Nova bolnica ‘Crvenog križa,’ ” JL 4/1915, no. 1031,
February 12, 1915.
25  “Božićnica našim ranjenicima od ‘Družtva hrvatskih srednjoškolskih profesora,’ ” NN
80/1914, no. 330, December 17, 1914; “Božićnica našim ranjenicima od ‘Družtva hrvatskih
Caring for the Wounded: Zagreb Military Hospitals in WWI 103

next four and a half months were spent engaged in the expansion and reorga-
nization of hospital sites, the relocation of convalescent patients to locations
outside of Zagreb, and the thorough decontamination of hospitals to make
them fully prepared to accept wounded soldiers. At the beginning of April
1915, Zagreb had approximately ten thousand beds ready to accept wounded
and ailing soldiers, including those suffering from infectious diseases. Many of
these beds were in auxiliary army huts.26
In the final analysis, Zagreb was relatively well prepared to be the medical
aid center for wounded soldiers from the Italian Front. Nevertheless, despite
all the preparations, the requests of the military authorities proved difficult
to fulfill.
At the end of May 1915, the medical corps commander Dr. Isaak Tritsch27
called a meeting of the commanders and directors of all military and civil-
ian hospitals as well as of the representatives of the city healthcare office to
arrange for a further expansion of hospital capacity. During the meeting, the
military leadership initially ordered that the existing capacity be expanded by
fifty percent, but a new order arrived while the meeting was still in progress,
insisting that the capacity be increased by a full one hundred percent. Because
Zagreb was the only medical aid center for wounded soldiers from the Italian
Front, the authorities needed to secure twenty thousands beds, a task that was
virtually impossible. In an attempt to comply with the order, the city authori-
ties cancelled classes at all schools, and decided to convert boarding houses
and factories to makeshift hospitals. But to be able to do successfully make
these conversions, they also needed enough beds as well as physicians and
other medical staff.28
Above all, it was the lack of space at permanent buildings that was the
main limiting factor that stood in the way of one hundred percent expansion.
Factories could not be converted to hospitals because they were supplying the
army, and boarding houses and hotels were packed with foreigners who had
no other place to go. The suggestion was therefore made to initially increase

srednjoškolskih profesora,’ ” JL 3/1914, no. 958, December 20, 1914; “Nove bolnice,” NN
80/1914, no. 337, December 28, 1914.
26  “Dolazak novih ranjenika u Zagreb,” JL 4/1915, no. 1040, February 21, 1915; “Malo statistike
zagrebačkih bolnica i baraka,” JL 4/1915, no. 1079, April 1, 1915; “Ranjenici iz Karpata [. . .],”
JL 4/1915, no. 1088, April 11, 1915.
27  Dr. Isaak Tritsch was a physician at the Command of the 13th Imperial and Royal Military
District in Zagreb.
28  “Ponovno zatvaranje zagrebačkih škola,” JL 4/1915, no. 1138, May 30, 1915; “Povećanje
bolnica u Zagrebu,” JL 4/1915, no. 1138, May 30, 1915; “Zagreb središte za ranjenike s
talijanskoga ratišta,” JL 4/1915, no. 1147, June 8, 1915.
104 Kaurić

capacity by only three thousand beds. The number of beds at Red Cross hospi-
tals was increased by sixty to eighty percent, and the number of beds at civilian
hospitals by ten to twenty percent as civilians also had to be treated during
wartime.29 Four new hospitals were opened, two military hospitals with two
hundred and three hundred beds, and two Red Cross hospitals with four hun-
dred and six hundred beds. Other hospitals’ capacities were expanded as much
as possible and satellite hospitals that had stood empty were reactivated. It
seems, however, that the outfitting of the hospitals, at least the ones adminis-
tered by the Red Cross, proceeded very slowly: a month later only two hundred
out of the planned six hundred beds were installed at the new hospital in the
upper town. The Red Cross was finally granted use of the university building
in mid-July 1915, where a hospital with six hundred beds was scheduled to be
organized as soon as possible. The construction of army huts then commenced
in the immediate vicinity. Almost all schools were converted to hospitals and
so was the Observatory in the upper town.30
So many army huts were built in Zagreb during this time that it was possible
to vacate one school in December 1915 and resume classes there. We do not
know how quickly the other school buildings could follow suit, but it seems
that the authorities were able to vacate at least some of them by the sum-
mer of 1916, because only six thousand wounded soldiers remained in Zagreb,
some of whom could be relocated to other hospitals in order to vacate the
schools and resume classes.31
The number of wounded soldiers in Zagreb, however, only truly started to
decline at the beginning of October 1917, making it possible for the univer-
sity building and several primary schools to be freed up and returned to their
primary purpose.32 Military hospitals were moved closer to the battlefield as

29  “Konferencija liječnika radi povećanja bolnica,” JL 4/1915, no. 1148, June 9, 1915; “A šta ćemo
sa civilnim bolesnicima?,” JL 4/1915, no. 1148, June 9, 1915.
30  “Nove vojničke bolnice,” JL 4/1915, no. 1150, June 10, 1915; “Nove zdravstvene uredbe u
Zagrebu,” JL 4/1915, no. 1177, July 7, 1915; “Bolnica Crvenoga križa u zgradi hrv. sveučilišta,”
JL 4/1915, no. 1185, July 15, 1915; “Sveučilišna zgrada—vojna bolnica,” NN 81/1915, no. 169,
July 23, 1915; “Uredjenje novih vojničkih bolnica,” JL 4/1915, no. 1198, July 28, 1915; “Gradnje
baraka za vojničke bolnice,” JL 4/1915, no. 1226, August 24, 1915; “Gdje će se smjestiti
zagrebačke škole,” JL 4/1915, no. 1226, August 24, 1915; “Proširenje bolnice milosrdne
braće” NN 81/1915, no. 214, September 15, 1915; “Barake za vojništvo,” NN 81/1915, no. 284,
December 7, 1915.
31  “Premještanje prostorija pojedinih pučkih škola,” NN 81/1915, no. 301, December 29, 1915;
“Napuštanje bolnice u nadbiskupskom sjemeništvu,” JL 5/1916, no. 1565, July 29, 1916.
32  “Ispražnjenje sveučilišta,” JL 6/1917, no. 2014, October 17, 1917; “Smještanje realne
gimnazije u sveučilišnu zgradu,” JL 6/1917, no. 2037, November 9, 1915; “Otvorenje Krajiške
Caring for the Wounded: Zagreb Military Hospitals in WWI 105

the battle line in the Italian Front moved farther to the west. The administra-
tions of these hospitals were relocated to Trieste in November and December,
and wounded soldiers were transferred to other hospitals. Many of them were
moved to the newly established wards of the military hospital situated in the
Artillery Barracks.33 There were no more mentions of wounded soldiers in
Zagreb after that.
The first transport of wounded soldiers from the Southern (Italian) Front
arrived in Zagreb in the night of June 19, 1915. It was composed of Romanians
and various other members of the Deutschmeister regiment who had already
been put up in Ljubljana for several days before being transported to Zagreb.34
It was the first of many convoys of incapacitated soldiers from the Italian
Front. Although the newspapers systematically wrote about the expansion of
hospital capacities, as discussed above, they reported nothing about the arrival
of the wounded soldiers.
Instead, the local papers published Count Hardegg’s35 praise of the dexter-
ity, speed, and care with which the volunteer corps responsible for the trans-
port of wounded soldiers handled their charges, of which all active and passive
members of the corps were proud.36 Their job was to take the patients off the
train, put them on trams, and transport them to the various hospitals depend-
ing on their physical condition. The military command in Zagreb also sent
its compliments, although the emphasis was primarily on volunteer nurses,
physicians, and nurses.37

škole,” JL 6/1917, no. 2037, November 9, 1915; “Ponovno otvorenje škole kod sv. Duha,” JL
6/1917, no. 2043, November 14, 1917.
33  “Premještanje bolnice broj 1 u Trst,” JL 6/1917, no. 2043, November 14, 1917; “Premještanje
zagrebačkih bolnica,” NN 83/1917, no. 261, November 14, 1917; “Premještanje zagrebačkih
bolnica,” JL 6/1917, no. 2044, November 15, 1917; “Preloženje pričuvne bolnice broj 2 iz
Zagreba u Trst,” JL 6/1917, no. 2065, December 6, 1917; “Otprema bolesnika iz Zagreba,”
NN 83/1917, no. 282, December 10, 1917; “Premještanje uprave pričuvne bolnice broj 2.,”
JL 6/1917, no. 2070, December 11, 1917; “Proširenje posadne bolnice,” NN 83/1917, no. 290,
December 19, 1917; “Proširenje posadne bolnice,” JL 6/1917, no. 2078, December 20, 1917.
34  “Ranjenici s talijanskog ratišta,” JL 4/1915, no. 1160, June 20, 1915.
35  Count Hardegg was the Prior of the Order of Malta and the commander of the medical
train.
36  “Laskavo priznanje zagrebačkih organizacijama za prenos ranjenika,” NN 81/1915, no. 217,
September 18, 1915.
37  “Zahvala vojnog zapovjedništva u zagrebu hrvatskih organizacijama, koje obavljaju
dobrovoljnu bolničarsku službu na njihovom pariotskom djelovanju za vrieme rata,”
NN 81/1915, no. 224, September 27, 1915.
106 Kaurić

A procedure for the transport of the wounded from the railway station to
specialized hospitals was developed at the beginning of the war and perfected
over time by trial and error. No police officers or other guards were present at
the first transports to control the onlookers, a mistake that was very quickly
rectified. The exact procedure for admitting the wounded was then estab-
lished. The first step was to send scouts (high school students) to notify mem-
bers of the transport corps who were on duty that day of the impending arrival
of wounded soldiers. Trams that would transport the wounded to the hospitals
were prepared as soon as the news about the arrival of the wounded and their
number was received. The director of the Zagreb electrical tram services super-
vised the preparations personally, always making sure that there was room for
a little more than the announced number of wounded soldiers. After members
of the transport corps took the wounded off the train and onto the train plat-
form, the ladies on duty offered them hot soup, a cold buffet, tea, refreshing
beverages, and cigarettes. When the doctors examined them, the wounded sol-
diers were loaded onto tramcars and transported to hospitals all over the city.
The procedure described above was adhered to almost every time wounded
soldiers arrived, but the coordination of the transport corps improved over
time and other improvements were introduced as well. For instance, someone
designed a sort of a litter that was used to load severely wounded patients onto
the tramcars.38
The reality must have been very different from the idyllic picture painted
by the newspapers, but there are few surviving accounts that offer a glimpse of
it. The newspapers reported, for instance, about a transport of wounded sol-
diers that had taken the medical corps by surprise, when severely wounded
soldiers whose bleeding could not be stopped had to be immediately trans-
ported to a primary school at the city’s periphery. Nothing of the sort had ever
happened there before, since the makeshift hospital was supposed to admit
only lightly wounded soldiers. Because the physician on duty had not been
informed that the transport was coming, a local midwife ended up stopping

38  “Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” JL 3/1914, no. 755, August 20, 1914; “Drugi transport ranjenika,” JL
3/1914, no. 755, August 20, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika,” NN 80/1914, no. 194, August 21, 1914;
“Dolazak ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 757, August 22, 1914; “Dolaze ranjenici!,” JL 3/1914,
no. 757, August 22, 1914; “Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” NN 80/1914, no. 195, August 22, 1914;
“Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” JL 3/1914, no. 757, August 22, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika u Zagreb,”
JL 3/1914, no. 759, August 23, 1914; “Glasovi s bojišta,” Obzor 54/1914, no. 236, August 27,
1914; “Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” NN 80/1914, no. 197, August 24, 1914; “Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” JL
3/1914, no. 762, August 25, 1914; “Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” JL 3/1914, no. 763, August 26, 1914;
“Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” NN 80/1914, no. 200, August 27, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika,” JL 3/1914,
no. 764, August 27, 1914; “Novi ranjenički transporti,” JL 3/1914, no. 778, September 5, 1914.
Caring for the Wounded: Zagreb Military Hospitals in WWI 107

their bleeding until a physician arrived.39 Such incidents probably became less
frequent over time as the physicians got better at triage and the organization
of the supporting staff improved.
The volunteer corps in charge of transporting wounded soldiers was active
until the military hospitals were moved from Zagreb to Trieste. During this
time a much-needed reorganization of the corps took place, since its basic
structures had not changed very much since the beginning of the war. Many
of the younger members had been mobilized during this period and the older
ones were no longer up to the physical challenges of the service, so the corps
was reorganized in accordance with the expected decrease in the amount of
work. The number of members of the corps is unknown, but we do know that
eighty-three of them were decorated with Red Cross war medals over time.40
We also do not know when the corps was fully disbanded.
Wounded soldiers were occasionally brought to Zagreb by the Order of
Malta’s medical trains. The quality of the equipment, along with the level
of comfort and cleanliness, awed the residents of Zagreb, the local medical
corps commissioners, and the public officials.
The train had twelve large carriages for the transportation of wounded sol-
diers. Each bed was equipped with a board where the patient’s name was writ-
ten and a small folding table. The carriages that transported food were made
of tin and had double walls between which ice was inserted. The residents of
Zagreb thought dousing the carriages in which wounded soldiers were trans-
ported with water was especially extravagant. In addition, the train had a luxu-
rious salon and a dining room, a special laundry carriage with laundry folded
and stored in labeled compartments. There was also a pharmacy and a carriage
for physicians and pharmacists.41 The train was open to the public for the sev-
eral hours it stayed in Zagreb, after which it returned to the battlefield to col-
lect the freshly wounded, at the same time transporting convalescent soldiers
deeper into Austro-Hungarian territory. A male nurse’s medal was stolen dur-
ing one such tour of the train by the local residents. The theft was blamed on
the cleaning staff, but they were cleared when a search produced no medal.42

39  “Prvi ranjenici u Lašćinskoj školi,” NN 80/1914, no. 223, September 14, 1914.
40  “Premještanje zagrebačkih bolnica,” NN 83/1917, no. 261, November 14, 1917; “Premještanje
zagrebačkih bolnica,” JL 6/1917, no. 2044, November 15, 1917; “Reorganizacija dobrovoljačke
čete,” NN 83/1917, no. 265, November 19, 1917; “Dobrovoljna četa za prenos ranjenih i
bolesnih vojnika,” NN 83/1917, no. 246, October 26, 1917.
41  “Odprema ranjenika iz zagrebačkih bolnica,” JL 3/1914, no. 767, August 30, 1914.
42  “Jedan zdravstveni vlak u Zagrebu,” NN 80/1914, no. 198, August 25, 1914; “Zdravstveni vlak
maltežkih redova u Zagrebu,” JL 3/1914, no. 763, August 26, 1914; “Ranjenici u Zagrebu” JL
108 Kaurić

The luxurious equipment of these trains was matched only by the Red Cross
trains, which also featured sleeping carriages. The basic task of these trains
was to transport wounded soldiers from the battlefield, but they also trans-
ported patients back and forth between various hospitals in the interior. The
first of three such trains arrived in Zagreb in mid-April 1915. The Viennese
Rescue Society’s train arrived at the beginning of September.43 Other reports
make no mention of the trains that brought the wounded soldiers, making it
entirely possible that these specific trains were in Zagreb on occasions other
than those where there exists a written record.
Not even ten days after the first wounded soldiers arrived in Zagreb, the
first convalescents started to be transported to hospitals deeper in Austro-
Hungarian territory to make room for patients whose condition was more
serious. Since Zagreb had no more room to accept new patients, the transpor-
tation of wounded soldiers to other major Croatian cities was organized at the
time. Only the most severely wounded patients who could not survive the jour-
ney remained in Zagreb. At around this time, the reception of the wounded
soldiers also changed. There were no more curious onlookers or formal wel-
coming committees. Several trains passed through Zagreb every day and were
met by members of the volunteer transport corps, women who offered refresh-
ments, and members of the Red Cross Society. There were also no more lengthy
reports about the reception of the wounded soldiers in the newspapers. They
were replaced by short accounts of the numbers of wounded soldiers who
arrived in Zagreb and were transported to different hospitals in Zagreb or pro-
ceeded to other destinations.44

3/1914, no. 763, August 26, 1914; “Odprema ranjenika iz zagrebačkih bolnica,” JL 3/1914,
no. 767, August 30, 1914; “Svietli ban i maltežki voz,” NN 80/1914, no. 204, August 31, 1914;
“Malteški vitezovi kod bana” JL 3/1914, no. 770, September 1, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika,”
JL 3/1914, no. 899, November 14, 1914; “Bolesnički vlak maltežkog reda [. . .],” JL 4/1915,
no. 1082, April 4, 1915; “Časnici maltežkog reda u Zagrebu,” JL 4/1915, no. 1167, June 27, 1915;
“Princ Croy u Zagrebu,” JL 4/1915, no. 1228, August 26, 1915; “Razgledavanje maltežkoga
vlaka,” JL 4/1915, no. 1244, September 10, 1915; “Ukradena kolajna bolničaru maltežkog
vlaka,” JL 4/1915, no. 1245, September 20, 1915; “Maltežki vlak u Zagrebu,” NN 82/1916, no. 13,
January 18, 1916; “Odlazak maltežkog vlaka,” JL 5/1916, no. 1375, January 19, 1916.
43  “Spavaći vlakovi ‘Crvenoga križa’,” NN 81/1915, no. 90, April 20, 1915; “Spavači vlakovi
‘Crvenoga križa’,” JL 4/1915, no. 1097, April 20, 1915; “Bolnički vlak bečkog družtva za
spasavanje,” JL 4/1915, no. 1239, September 5, 1915.
44  “Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” NN 80/1914, no. 200, August 27, 1914; “Odvoz ranjenika iz Zagreba,”
JL 3/1914, no. 764, August 27, 1914; “Odprema ranjenika iz zagrebačkih bolnica,” JL 3/1914,
no. 767, August 30, 1914; “Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” NN 80/1914, no. 201, August 28, 1914;
“Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” JL 3/1914, no. 765, August 28, 1914; “Provoz ranjenika kroz Zagreb,”
Caring for the Wounded: Zagreb Military Hospitals in WWI 109

Only in rare cases can the intervals at which wounded soldiers arrived in
Zagreb be tied to developments on the battlefields, since we lack the most
basic information, which was considered a military secret in wartime and
therefore censored. The battlefields from which wounded soldiers arrived
were also rarely specified. This lack is especially evident during periods when
there was simultaneous fighting on two or three battlefields, which was the
case during almost the entire duration of the war. There is almost never any
mention of the date when the soldiers were wounded or the distance they trav-
elled to arrive in Zagreb. This makes the news about five wounded soldiers who
had been brought to Zagreb on September 9, 1914 from the right wing of the
Galician Front and wounded on August 30 all the more valuable.45 Military
censors deleted this kind of information from later reports. Zagreb residents
soon got used to seeing numerous soldiers in the streets of Zagreb, wounded
soldiers, convalescent soldiers and those in good health. All the upheaval and
commotion became such an ordinary part of everyday life that the papers no
longer bothered to report it.
Nevertheless, over the slightly more than four years of WWI, Zagreb was
transformed from a sleepy provincial capital into an important medical aid
center for wounded soldiers from all the fronts of Austro-Hungary’s war, but
especially from the Italian Front. The city was forced to stretch its medical and
human resources to the limit within a relatively short period of time, and to
tackle a previously unimaginable task. In some periods, there were virtually no

NN 80/1914, no. 202, August 29, 1914; “Ranjenici u Zagrebu,” JL 3/1914, no. 766, August 29,
1914; “Otprema ranjenika iz Zagreba,” NN 80/1914, no. 204, August 31, 1914; “Dolazak
ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 771, September 1, 1914; “Otprema ranjenika iz Zagreba,” JL 3/1914,
no. 770, September 1, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika,” NN 80/1914, no. 206, September 2, 1914;
“Provoz ranjenika iz Zagreba,” NN 80/1914, no. 206, September 2, 1914; “Prevoz ranjenika
iz Zagreba,” JL 3/1914, no. 773, September 2, 1914; “Otprema ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 772,
September 2, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 772, September 2, 1914; “Ranjenici u
Zagrebu,” JL 3/1914, no. 773, September 2, 1914; “Doprema ranjenika,” NN 80/1914, no. 207,
September 3, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 774, September 3, 1914; “Dovoz
ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 775, September 3, 1914; “Dovoz ranjenika,” NN 80/1914, no. 208,
September 4, 1914; “Dovoz ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 777, September 3, 1914; “Dolazak
ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 776, September 4, 1914; “Doprema i otprema ranjenika,” NN
80/1914, no. 209, September 5, 1914; “Dolazak ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 778, September 5,
1914; “Novi ranjenički transporti,” JL 3/1914, no. 778, September 5, 1914; “Odprema
ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 779, September 5, 1914; “Doprema ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 780,
September 6, 1914; “Doprema ranjenika,” NN 80/1914, no. 212, Septemeber 7, 1914; “Dovoz
ranjenika,” JL 3/1914, no. 781, September 7, 1914.
45  “Dovoz ranjenika,” NN 80/1914, no. 214, September 9, 1914.
110 Kaurić

public buildings that were not being used for one military purpose or another.
Most were used as hospitals. Volunteer nurses, women and girls from all walks
of life, bore the brunt of the burden of caring for the wounded soldiers and
saved countless lives with their dedication. It is up to future research to estab-
lish to what extent the care for the wounded was motivated by the higher cause
of serving emperor and country, and to what extent it was motivated by simple
concern for the ordinary man. It seems, however, that a feeling of reciproc-
ity was at work here: by tending to wounded soldiers of different nationalities
who were placed in their care, Croatian men and women hoped to ensure that
their owns sons, brothers, and husbands recovering in various corners of the
disintegrating Austro-Hungarian Empire might received the same care from
someone else.

Bibliography

Čačković, Miroslav pl. “Žena kao dobrovoljna bolničarka,” Liječnički vijesnik 37, no. 2
(1915): 33–38.
Horvat, Josip. Prvi svjetski rat. Panorama zbivanja 1914–1918. Zagreb: Stvarnost, 1967.
Jutarnji list, daily newspaper (Zagreb, Croatia), from April 19, 1914 to December 20, 1917.
Kolar-Dimitrijević, Mira. Radni slojevi Zagreba od 1918. do 1931. Zagreb: Institut za histo-
riju radničkog pokreta Hrvatske, 1973.
Narodne novine, daily newspaper (Zagreb, Croatia), from July 29, 1914 to December 10,
1917.
Obzor, daily newspaper (Zagreb, Croatia), from August 7, 1914 to October 29, 1914.
Vranješ Šoljan, Božena. Stanovništvo gradova banske Hrvatske na prijelazu stoljeća
(Socijalno-ekonomski sastav i vodeći slojevi 1890.–1914.). Zagreb: Školska knjiga—
Stvarnost, 1991.
Zagreb godine 1913–1918. Izvještaj Gradskog poglavarstva o sveopćoj upravi slobodnog i
kralj. glavnoga grada Zagreba. Zagreb: Knjigotiskara braća Kralj, 1927.
Zbirka zakona i naredaba, koje su u svezi s ratom izdane u kraljevinama Hrvatskoj i
Slavoniji. Zagreb: Kr. zemaljska tiskara, 1915.
 CHAPTER 7

Internment in WWI: The Case of Thalerhof

Katharina Wesener

Terminology

The first association that springs to mind when we hear the term internee in
the context of WWI is with a prisoner of war who was a civilian caught between
enemy lines, the status of whom was legally determined by the Geneva treaties
concluded before the war. Such internees were housed under similar condi-
tions as combatant prisoners of war and were subject to regular visits by inter-
national observers. In terms of providing housing and food for internees, each
signatory country was obliged to abide by these treaties.
In the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, there was another kind of internee, per-
haps best captured under the definition “suspects of anti-state activities.” This
category reflected the fear felt during the period of mobilization by politicians
in Vienna of potential manipulation and sabotage on the part of their sub-
jects, not to mention of their direct involvement in military activities. Today
such individuals would probably be labeled terrorists. As it is well known,
the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy was a vast conglomeration of nations, lan-
guages, and religions, and this no doubt added to the atmosphere of mistrust.
This was especially true in the northern parts of Galicia and Bukovina with its
mixed population of Poles, Germans, Rusyn-Ukrainians, Ruthenians, Hutsuls,
Gypsies, Jews, Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, and Orthodox. Owing to the
region’s tradition of peaceful coexistence, it was not unusual to find Jewish
schtetls bordering on small Hutsul villages. The few larger settlements had a
small nucleus of a so-called intellectual class, surrounded by a broader popula-
tion of poor people.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, nation-building processes
had intensified, not only within these groups, but also as a result of the influ-
ence from outside forces, especially Russia. Anna Veronika Wendland pub-
lished a book about this topic entitled Die Russophilen in Galizien. Ukrainische
Konservative zwischen Österreich und Russland 1848–1915 (Russophiles in Galicia.
Ukrainian conservatives between Austria and Russia 1848–1915), in which
she describes developments in Galicia before WWI. The book deals mostly
with the rivalry between Poles and Ruthenians, where the latter, ­aggravated

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_009

112 Wesener

by the monarchy’s significant concessions to the Poles in return for their loy-
alty, increasingly turned to Russia as a sort of big brother.
At the request of the authorities in Vienna, civil authorities in Galicia had
already by the beginning of WWI drawn up long lists of people under suspi-
cion, mainly those who maintained contacts with Russian individuals or asso-
ciations. Included on the list were poor inhabitants of Galicia who received
food and money not only from the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, but also from
Russian organizations, as well as citizens who worked in Russia or had relatives
there. People who received their education in Russia or tried to improve the
status of the Ukrainian language in Galicia were also regarded as suspicious.
On the one hand, the government allowed and even supported the forma-
tion of reading associations (called Lesevereine) to fight high rates of illiteracy,
which were sometimes as high as ninety percent in the countryside. On the
other hand, it discouraged the more active involvement of lower middle class
intellectuals, mainly priests and teachers, for fear that ordinary people would
place too much trust in them. The government also collected information
about what newspapers, especially Russophile ones, people subscribed to.1
Based on this kind of information, blacklists were drawn up, including a regis-
ter of people suspected of agitating against the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy.
At the beginning of the war mobilization, the War Supervisory Office
(Kriegsüberwachungsamt or KÜA), which was the highest military authority in
the Austro-Hungarian Empire, issued an order that led to mass indiscriminate
arrests with scant legal basis or justification.2 Those arrested became internees
even though they were citizens of Austria-Hungary.
This process occurred right at the beginning of the war. Already in the
final days of August 1914, the KÜA was notified of a significant number of
Russophiles having been arrested.3 The leadership suggested that the military
headquarters in Lemberg/Lvov follow the example of the military commander
of Bosnia-Herzegovina, which took hostages in villages on the Montenegrin
border in order to intimidate the local population into loyalty. The strategy had
the desired effect. In Galicia, however, the situation was more complicated.
There the Russian Army gained ground and civil authorities not only took
priests and chairmen of parish councils as hostages, but also transferred them
into the interior of the monarchy to prevent the remaining Russophiles from
continuing their anti-state activities in areas under temporary Russian control.

1  For more information about newspapers and journalists, see: Pacholkiv, Emanzipation durch
Bildung, 256–257; Wendland, Die Russophilen in Galizien, 195–200.
2  For more detailed information about the KÜA, see: Scheer, Die Ringstraßenfront.
3  Vienna: Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv, KÜA 2177.
Internment in WWI: The Case of Thalerhof 113

Although during the first weeks of the war, the authorities tried to remain vigi-
lant against pro-Russian espionage, they also had to deal with various acts of
sabotage, such as the destruction of railway lines necessary for the transport
of soldiers to the front lines. These activities were also linked to Russophiles.4

The Usual Suspects—Hutsuls and Rusyn-Ukranians

At the beginning of the war, civil authorities in Galicia and Bukovina were
given the order to arrest anyone suspected of sabotaging the mobilization, or
considered a useful hostage in some other way, and to send them to the interior
of the empire. Moreover, in case of a Russian breakthrough into the territory
of the monarchy, entire villages were to be evacuated and their inhabitants
relocated behind front lines where they would find work. However, in the real-
ity of war, these tasks were impossible to accomplish. Who were the suspects?
Who should be sent away? Or, perhaps, more importantly, who was unsuitable
to work the fields? Quite soon, people realized that the easiest way to get rid of
unwanted neighbors was to simply accuse them of Russophilia. Such behavior
was intensified by conditions of lawlessness during the period of mobilization,
which left the local police force seriously short-handed. Thus, a great many
stories told in early documents from the Thalerhof internee camp reveal that
the majority of internees didn’t have the slightest idea why they were arrested.
Some never had a hearing. Other were acquitted but nevertheless found them-
selves transferred to internment in distant parts of the empire. In addition to
targeted arrests and denunciations, many people were victims of arbitrary and
random arrests. For example, farmers working their fields might be arrested
by passing soldiers who did not understand their dialect and mistook it for
Russian.
When the first armed conflicts began inside Austro-Hungarian territory, the
number of refugees increased rapidly. From that time on, internment camps
experienced major influxes of persons who were preparing to leave, but didn’t
have time to wait for the formal evacuation to take place. Many were first
moved to relatives’ homes before being transferred to one of the camps. Some
were sent to the camps directly—some as refugees, others as internees.
In 1915, a new wave of arrests started in Galicia, this one targeting those who
had collaborated with the Russians during the occupation or helped Russian
soldiers to pillage and destroy villages and fields. However, in making these
enquiries, authorities in the Styrian capital of Graz (being partly in charge

4  Ibid., KÜA 2219.

114 Wesener

of the Thalerhof internment camp) sought clarifications from the Galician

authorities, and in some cases even tried to understand why people behaved
the way they did. For example, some were simply too poor to run away with
their children and tried to survive under Russian occupation, even at the price
of collaborating with the enemy. Others simply wanted to profit from the situ-
ation. In any event, the authorities seemed to have made a sincere effort to get
to the bottom of individual cases.

Detainees, Internees, or Simply Prisoners

Given that the initial arrests were limited to persons of interest during the
mobilization, there was no immediate need to construct large camps. Instead,
people were transferred to different parts of the empire or held for weeks in
garrison prisons.5 At the outset of hostilities, the Ministry of War started by
detaining the so-called Russophiles who were then to be transferred from mili-
tary headquarters in Lemberg/Lvov to Theresienstadt, which became a well-
known concentration camp during the Nazi period. Later on, they were joined
by other prisoners, most of whom were awaiting trial in Brünn and Olmütz.
At that time, there was still no record of the Thalerhof internment camp near
Graz.6
The authorities started to concentrate Russophiles in Thalerhof only in
September 1914, when the number of prisoners increased. Some interns would
travel for weeks in overcrowded train cars, generally without proper food and
under appalling hygienic conditions. Their journey to Styria usually began
in Galicia and continued through Hungary. However, between October and
December 1914, they were brought to Thalerhof directly in a few days. It was
only when the typhoid epidemic hit the camp that the transports were stopped
and many interns remained in prisons. In addition to the catastrophic condi-
tions of overcrowding and malnutrition on the journey, prisoners also faced
violence from soldiers and occasionally assaults from the local population who
denounced them as traitors to their home country. For example, I found a writ-
ten report about soldiers beating people to death, prohibiting elderly people
from sitting down in the train for days, and forbidding others from offering
the prisoners water or food.7 Years later, as government documents indicate,

5  Ibid., KÜA 2336.

6  Ibid., KÜA 2137.
7  Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv Graz, Statthalterei-Präsidium, E 91, TK 51.
Internment in WWI: The Case of Thalerhof 115

these same soldiers were sentenced to severe punishments for their conduct.
What I found interesting, especially in my research on refugees, was the sheer
scale of the numbers of people moved from one point to another, even though
mobilization and the deployment of soldiers constituted the largest share of
the railway transport in the state.

Conditions at Thalerhof

Most of the first 2,400 internees that arrived at Thalerhof in early September
1914 slept in the open until September 10 when they were moved into makeshift
tents.8 Only then did the authorities, already busy setting up other camps in
Styria, including the refugee camp Wagna/Leibnitz, commence the construc-
tion of a proper camp.9 It was not easy to acquire sufficient building material
and workers to begin erecting wooden barracks for the refugees, internees, and
prisoners of war. Nor was it easy—or even possible, despite the considerable
efforts of the authorities—to provide sufficient quantities of blankets, clothes,
and food for the internees. The documents describe a catastrophic situation:
lice, meager food rations, open pit toilets, sleeping on the ground in the open
field and later in cold barracks. There were no mess tins and inmates had to
drink soup from their hands or from their hats or caps.
Besides the essential problems of survival faced by the inmates, many of
them were suffering emotionally because they considered themselves loyal
citizens of the monarchy and favorably inclined toward the Emperor, and yet
they had been branded as traitors. In addition, there were strict divisions in
society at that time—separation between men and women and between dif-
ferent social classes—as well as strict rules regarding how people behaved
towards people of other classes. These divisions weren’t possible to maintain
in the camp environment and this made the detainees even more uncomfort-
able. Day laborers lived elbow to elbow with priests, prostitutes next to moth-
ers, bricklayers next to poor farmers, and none had even enough privacy to go
to the bathroom alone. Among the more educated classes, it was customary
for husbands and wives to have separate bedrooms in those days and now they
had to sleep next to unknown men or women. To make matters worse, most
people brought to Thalerhof were physically and emotionally exhausted and
therefore could easily fall victim to diseases.

8  Diözesanarchiv Graz, Pfarrakten Feldkirchen, Kapelle am Thalerhof.

9  Ibid.
116 Wesener

On September 7, 1914, when the internees were still sleeping in the open,
the Statthalterei-Präsidium in Graz sent a sanitary commission headed by the
governor himself to inspect conditions at Thalerhof.10 By that time, six people
were already suffering from dysentery, five were suspected of having dysentery,
and two were suspected of having typhoid. These were immediately isolated
from the rest of the camp population and contaminated clothes were washed
separately. To protect the camp from various illnesses, inmates were given a
bath before being allowed into the tents, and their clothes disinfected by a
mobile disinfection unit of the Statthalterei. The disinfection was scheduled
to begin on September 8, as soon as the unit arrived at Thalerhof. However,
as it could only disinfect the clothes of approximately forty to fifty people per
day, it would require two months to disinfect the entire internee population at
Thalerhof. Since the nearby villages needed units for their own purposes, the
plan to have the internees housed only after disinfection was unworkable. In
order to provide them with enough clothes for the disinfection process, the
governor promised to send twenty sets for each female and male internee.
The disinfection of feces was achieved with the use of lime milk. There were
four doctors on duty, two of them previously confined in Graz, and all had the
advantage of understanding the language of the internees.
By September 8, one person had died of tetanus and had been buried out-
side the camp. The poor sanitary conditions in the camp and the relatively
advanced age of the internees raised the risk of death. In addition, many of
the internees came from parts of the monarchy where diseases like chol-
era, dysentery, and typhoid fever were still a part of everyday live as indi-
cated by statistics of the time.11 In October 1914, two districts of Galicia had
been declared wholly infected by cholera.12 In expectation of more death
at Thalerhof, the sanitary commission made provisions for a burial place of
about a hundred square meters outside of the camp area.13 The housing for
the guard crew was on the south part of the camp in the middle were the
tents at the edge of the camp, on the left side at the border near the woods
was the burial place, and on the east were the first wooden barracks mainly for
the ill.

10  Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv Graz, Statthalterei-Präsidium, E 91, TK 104.

11  Das Österreichische Sanitätswesen, 26/44 (1914): 1124.
12  Ibid.
13  For more detailed information about to the burial place, see: Hoffmann, Goll, and Lesiak,
Thalerhof 1914–1936, 126–138.
Internment in WWI: The Case of Thalerhof 117

The camp received its water supply through a single water pump that was
previously used by the family whose hangar had become part of the deten-
tion facilities. The authorities planned to install a plumbing system in order to
ensure the water supply for the entire camp. The commission also pointed to
the chronic shortage of clothing and linen, and proposed to set up a facility in
which internees would make their own clothes.14
The sanitary commission examined the conditions in the camp and pre-
sented civil authorities with recommendations to make the necessary improve-
ments. The so-called Camp Commando Number Four15 scheduled the arrivals
of new transports to the camp and notified the authorities about measures
undertaken to meet the sanitary recommendations. Thus, each new transport
was to be inspected by the doctor on duty, and persons suspected of suffering
from infectious disease were to be quarantined immediately. The same proce-
dure was to be followed for all transports leaving the camp. The internees were
obliged to wash themselves every morning at special basins that they filled and
cleaned on a daily basis. It was also their obligation to maintain the cleanli-
ness of the entire grounds and empty waste into special disposal containers.
According to available records, only a few internees were allowed to cut the
hair of their fellow inmates. The hair was to be collected and burned under
supervision, and the cutting instruments were to be returned to the camp com-
mando before sunset.
Before the plumbing system was installed, the water supply was comprised
of four cisterns that internees had to fill and drive around the grounds each
day. It was forbidden to drink from any public water tank. On the other hand,
the camp managed its own kitchen facilities where food was prepared and
only internees in perfect health were allowed to work. Kitchen waste was col-
lected and moved to the compost heap. In the morning, internees were given
soup (roux, potato, or clear). For lunch, they received potatoes, barley, beans or
Türkensterz (a typical Styrian dish made of corn), as well as meat three times
per week. In the evening, they were issued seven hundred grams of bread. Sick
women and children were provided milk on doctor’s orders. The problem was
that there were too few pots to distribute milk. It was forbidden to put any-
thing into the food vats other than the ladle to distribute servings into individ-
ual pots. After meals, vats were cleaned with water and dried in a designated
place. The doctor made regular check-ups of sanitary conditions at least four
times each week.

14  Ibid., E 91, TK 104, “Sanitätsprotokolle.”

15  Ibid., E 91, TK 104.
118 Wesener

Each housing unit (tent, hangars, and later on wooden barracks) had its
own latrine to be used during the day. After eight at night, however, the intern-
ees made use of chamber pots or pails that had to be cleaned each morning
with cold water. This was another practice that added to sanitation problems
at Thalerhof. The housing units were to be aired out twice daily for at least
one hour, during which time the internees had to remain outside. The straw
was changed every three weeks and burned in a separate area. The cleaning
of bunks and the disinfection of housing units was allowed only upon the
approval of the head doctor of the camp. After disinfection, female internees
were charged with the laundry, although were strictly forbidden from wash-
ing the guards’ uniforms. There were also efforts at delousing. Immunization
against smallpox was ordered by authorities as late as March 191516 for all
inhabitants of the camp. That being said, epidemic diseases raged at virtually
all camps during the war.
The authorities clearly made reasonable efforts to prevent or reduce the risk
of infection and the spread of epidemic diseases, and to make the conditions
in the camp as humane as possible, but it was an arduous and time-consum-
ing process. The first internees (2,400 came on September 4, 1914, 5,700 more
by the beginning of November 1914) who arrived at the camp were already
exhausted from the strenuous journey from Galicia to Thalerhof, with nothing
more than their clothes on their backs. Upon finally reaching their destina-
tion, they found themselves in an empty field, with no shelter, no water supply,
and no sanitation. They knew nothing about the efforts of the authorities to
organize housing, food, and clothing, and were disappointed with their home
country for having failed them completely. Little wonder, then, that the stories
about Russia as a big protective brother found avid listeners among those who
were eager to believe in Russia’s generosity. What is more striking, however, is
that many internees still continued to declare their loyalty to Austria-Hungary
in their letters.
Another point of interest is the question of responsibility: did the internees
fall under the jurisdiction of military or civil authorities? Who was responsible
for them? In the beginning, civil authorities were in charge of the construction
of the camp as well as the provision of housing, food, and clothes, while the
military was in charge of guarding the internees. However, in December 1914,
the KÜA issued an order mandating that military authorities should assume
responsibility for setting up an administration system as well as for ensuring
proper sanitary conditions, and accommodation, and called upon civil author-

16  Das Österreichische Sanitätswesen 26/37 (1914): 926.

Internment in WWI: The Case of Thalerhof 119

ities to assist as much as possible. This decision was the result of a discussion
about who was going to find an urgently needed doctor to work at the camp,
since due to the war mobilization, civil authorities were already unable to pro-
vide enough doctors in Styria, as they were being assigned to the fronts and
to military hospitals. In fact, the camp fell under joint military and civilian
authority, so whenever decisions had to be made, the Statthalterei Präsidium
in Graz needed to obtain approval from the Ministry of the Interior and the
Camp Commando from the KÜA.

Legal Situation

As already mentioned, at the beginning of the war, and in part because of

its onset, the government had ordered the arrest of those it perceived to be
political opponents. However, for the authorities at the Thalerhof camp, it
soon became important to make decisions regarding which internees would
remain in captivity and which would be released. On November 14, 1914, the
Thalerhof Investigating Committee (Thalerhofer Untersuchungs-Kommission)
was established, consisting of two members of the Statthalterei, a police offi-
cer, two members of the military, and a representative of the Ukrainian party.
The Investigating Committee determined whether a person not accused of a
specific offence, but nevertheless viewed with distrust by the authorities, was
to remain in internment, whether he would be sent into some other sort of
confinement, relocated to a refugee camp, or released with a warning to keep
away from any area of military operations, or be set free. The committee sub-
mitted its proposals to the discretion and final judgment of the Statthalterei-
Präsidium. As evident from the first protocols, a significant number of people
were released or sent to refugee camps with only about five to ten percent
remaining in the internment camp or being relocated to confinement in
Styrian villages. Nevertheless, it took some time to establish the protocols
of all internees. The task of the committee was to check up on every single
suspected Russophile in Thalerhof as well as in other camps or prisons. On
November 9, 1914, when the KÜA decided to set up the committee, there were
5,700 internees in Thalerhof, 890 in Theresienstadt, Bohemia, forty in Schwarz,
Tyrol, fifty in Kufstein, Tyrol, and twenty at various other locations in lower
and upper Austria. The Ukrainian Party of Galicia sent to the committee lists of
its trustworthy adherents who were to be released immediately, provided that
they did not have a pending trial and were not included in the authorities’ lists
of suspected Russophiles. If there was no information available about a given
120 Wesener

individual, the committee contacted the home authority as soon as possible.

The committee continued with these investigations until May 3, 1917, when the
internment camp was converted into a hospital for prisoners of war.17
The idea of confining political suspects was present at the very inception
of the Thalerhof internment camp. The Statthalterei-Präsidium in Graz asked
authorities in upper Styria about the possibilities of confining various interns
who would be easy to guard in surrounding villages that had room for addi-
tional people. The initial response was not encouraging, mostly owing to the
weak military presence in the area and the fact that the railway would provide
an easy escape. Ultimately, authorities managed to find a few suitable loca-
tions such confinement could only start in the spring of 1915 after the great
typhoid outbreak. During the epidemic, the camp was isolated, with only to
urgently required personnel allowed access.18 However, even after the epi-
demic, there were still no guidelines or orders as to how the internees should
be categorized and treated. In 1917, the Polish and Ukrainian parliamentary
clubs put these questions to the government, and in the spring of the same
year, the authorities finally published the first official guidelines categorizing
internees into four classes, pursuant to which only those who had committed
serious offences were to remain in internment.19

Opposing Perceptions of the Thalerhof Internment Camp

In the case of the Thalerhof internment camp, the internees themselves were
clearly the victims. Although citizens of the empire, they were treated like
enemies and made into the victims of the empire. They were accused of things
most of them had not done or simply did not perceive as a crime. They were
arrested far from their homes and denied any contact with families and rela-
tives. They endured a long grueling journey only to face more hardship when
they arrived at their destination. Most of them had fathers, husbands, or broth-
ers fighting in the war and other family members struggling to survive at home.
Some became ill and were nearly driven insane by their circumstances. They
all slept, ate, and worked next to each other—something hardly conceivable at
a time when social status was of high importance and expressions of sexuality
a taboo.

17  Hoffmann, Goll, and Lesiak, Thalerhof 1914–1936, 43.

18  Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv Graz, Statthalterei-Präsidium, E 91, TK 565.
19  Ibid., A 5 b 635/1917.
Internment in WWI: The Case of Thalerhof 121

The documents reveal the efforts of the authorities, which, utterly unpre-
pared for the intake of such a huge number of people, focused primarily on
minimizing the human damage. Their first concern was finding accommoda-
tion and later on rectifying the disastrous sanitary situation that contributed to
the rapid spread of illness and epidemic diseases such as typhus. Even though
the authorities evidently approached these issues with anything but indiffer-
ence, they were nevertheless often powerless to effect any change.
Finally, the attitude of the local population was largely negative. Apart from
a considerable number of refugees for whom they showed pity and support at
least at the beginning of the war, the majority of prisoners at Thalerhof were
perceived as political enemies. In the eyes of the local population, they repre-
sented the cause of the war. They were viewed as citizens who did not want to
stay in the monarchy and thus deserved nothing but contempt. In newspapers
of the time, one can find articles about the inhabitants of Graz taking Sunday
strolls to Thalerhof, where they would watch the internees like animals at
the zoo.20
This and similar situations represent the starting points of future research
into the home front. Such research should draw from the memoirs of intern-
ees, particularly those from Galicia in the present-day Ukraine. There are sev-
eral such documents in Ukraine testifying to this experience, starting with the
Thalerhof-Almanac, a collection of personal accounts of Thalerhof internees,
compiled and published by an unknown author already in the 1920s, but the
stories are accessible only in the Ukrainian language. Perhaps one day this
project will be translated and shared with subsequent generations in the rest
of the world.21

20  Diözesanarchiv Graz, Pfarrakten Feldkirchen, Kapelle am Thalerhof.

21  In Austria, research on the Thalerhof internment camp was neglected until Ingo Mirsch
tackled it as late as 1994 and Herwig Höller in 2004. In 2010, a short and very specific
collection of documents was published in an attempt to demonstrate that there are no
remains of any internees or prisoners of war left under or around the former campsite
where a military and civilian airport now stands. Although there are some studies on
individual refugee or prisoner of war camps, no work has yet been done to compare them
with each other or place them in a broader context.
122 Wesener

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Anzenberger, Werner, Heimo Halbrainer, and Gabriela Stieber. Konflikt und Integration.
Die Lager Trofaiach /Gai 1915–1960. Graz: CLIO, 2003.
Departement für Sanitätsangelegenheiten. Das Österreichische Sanitätswesen. Organ
für die Publikationen des k.k. Obersten Sanitätsrates. Vienna: Alfred Hölder,
1889–1918.
Goll, Nicole-Melanie. “ ‘. . . Dass wir es mit zwei Kriegen zu tun haben, der eine ist der
Krieg nach außen, der andere nach innen’—Die Ruthenen und das k.k.
Zivilinterniertenlager Thalerhof bei Graz 1914–1917.” Historisches Jahrbuch der Stadt
Graz 40 (2010): 277–303.
Hoffmann, Georg, Nicole-Melanie Goll, and Philipp Lesiak. Thalerhof 1914–1936. Die
Geschichte eines vergessenen Lagers und seiner Opfer. Herne: Gabriele Schäfer
Verlag, 2010.
Höller, Herwig. “Das verdrängte Lager.” Falter 47, no.5 (2005): 4–5.
Magocsi, Paul Robert. The Rusyn-Ukrainians of Czechoslovakia: an historical survey.
Bausteine zur ethnopolitischen Forschung, vol. 7. Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1983.
Mirsch, Ingo. Die Geschichte der Marktgemeinde Kalsdorf. Kalsdorf: Druckhaus
Thalerhof, 1994.
Pacholkiv, Svjatoslav. Emanzipation durch Bildung: Entwicklung und gesellschaftliche
Rolle der ukrainischen Intelligenz im habsburgischen Galizien (1890–1914). Munich:
Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2002.
Prusin, Alexander Victor. Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish
Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005.
Scheer, Tamara. Die Ringstraßenfront. Österreich-Ungarn, das Kriegsüberwachungsamt
und der Ausnahmezustand während des Ersten Weltkriegs. (= Schriften des
Heeresgeschichtlichen Museums 15.) Vienna: Heeresgeschichtliches Museum, 2010.
Stampler, Katharina. “Flüchtlingswesen in der Steiermark 1914–1918.” MA thesis,
University of Graz, 2004.
Wendland, Anna Veronika. Die Russophilen in Galizien. Ukrainische Konservative
zwischen Österreich und Ruβland, 1848–1915. Studien zur Geschichte der Öster-
reichisch-Ungarischen Monarchie, vol. 27: 644. Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen
Akademie der Wissenschaften, 2001.
———. Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv (Vienna, Austria): KÜA 2137; KÜA
2177; KÜA 2219; KÜA 2236.
———. Steiermärkisches Landesarchiv, Statthalterei-Präsidium (Graz, Austria): E 91,
TK 51; E 91, TK 104; E 91, TK 565; A 5 b 635/1917.
 Chapter 8

War and Memory: The Fascist Instrumentalization

of the Italian Front

Fabio Todero

On the Italian front, WWI was experienced as one of the first contacts with
modernity. Those that returned were no longer the same; their war experiences
altered their minds and their way of thinking.1 New terrible noises exploded in
a world where time had once been measured by the sound of church bells.
Lights announced the coming of the possible end as captured by the English
war poet Wilfred Owen in his “Dulce et decorum est”: “Dim through the misty
panes of thick green light/As under a green sea, I saw him drawing.”2 And
everywhere the horrifying smell and vision of death. Position warfare that
eradicated thousands of years of history of human civilization and originated
from the cult of death came from the collective universe of the trincea, from
which the English word trench was derived, and which also related to the
Italian political context of trincerista. The sight of decomposition, occasion-
ally forced in other historic periods by the public executions of people who
had committed serious crimes,3 became a daily occurrence for the soldiers of
WWI. Bodies of dead brothers in arms left to rot for days, if not longer, in no-­
mans-land became part of the trenched landscape, objects of derision and
humor, or as described by Carlo Salsa in his memoirs, an essential shield
against enemy fire. Such were the circumstances of the war fought on the Karst
Front, aggravated by the characteristics of the landscape, the presence of sur-
face rocks, and the almost total absence of water.4
The horror was worsened by extremely poor hygiene.

An intolerably foul odor seeped through the soil, an infective stench.

On occasion, a breeze brought the smell of decay that caused short-
ness of breath, dizziness, even loss of consciousness. We kept our nos-
trils tamped, but the stench was everywhere. We ourselves were soaked

1  Gibelli, L’officina della Guerra.

2  Owen, The poems of Wilfred Owen, 117.
3  Huizinga, Autunno del Medio Evo.
4  Fabi, Gente di trincea.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_010

124 Todero

in it, so we smelled it all the time. We carried it with us, inhaled it with
our most profound breath. The whole of the land was in decay. Here and
there, back and forth, high and low, forwards and backwards, corpses,
corpses, corpses everywhere. Swarms of gluttonous green belly flies flew
over the remainders of our food, over decaying meat, over feces, over the
dead and living alike.5

This is how Alfredo Graziani, officer in one of the elite units of Italian infantry,
the Sassari brigade, where Emilio Lussu6 was serving, described the realities
of war. The words he used differed considerably from the ones used by the
major newspapers of the time, which were subjected to severe censorship in
order not to disturb the sensibilities of the general public. It is also interest-
ing to note the tone of exasperation in Graziani’s texts, as well as in the texts
of many other memoirists and poets of the Great War. The tone emphasizes
the difference between the experience they lived and that of their readers,
many of whom did not participate in the conflict. It shows the way, therefore,
toward remembering the conflict in a non-mythologizing and patronizing
way—­principle characteristics of a good deal of literature about the war—and
toward paying tribute to the actual experiences of those who did.7
Although civil and military censorship was rigorous in its attempt to limit
the spread of news that would inform the general public of the horrors of the
conflict,8 information spread nonetheless, mainly via testimonies of those
who returned from the front, but also as a consequence of the growing num-
ber of mourning Italian families and the increasing presence of mutilated war
veterans on the streets of Italian cities. Therefore, as early as the summer of
1915, the Italian writer Alfredo Panzini dared to write: “Dead, dead! War is lap-
ping over our shores in waves meeting a great black whirlwind.”9 Meanwhile,
major newspapers such as the Corriere della Sera and La Domenica del Corriere
decided to close the sections devoted to “our fallen” for fear that the over-
whelming number of deaths on the front would fuel public opposition to a war

5  Graziani, Fanterie sarde all’ombra del tricolore, 77.

6  About the Sassari brigade and the memories relative to his service on the carsic front,
see Todero, “1915–1916: la brigata Sassari sul Carso attraverso alcune fonti memorialistiche,”
55–82; Todero, “1918–2008: la Grande guerra novant’anni dopo,” 5–8.
7  About the war literature, see Isnenghi, Il mito della Grande Guerra; Todero, Pagine della
Grande guerra; Senardi, Scrittori in trincea.
8  Procacci, Soldati e prigionieri italiani nella grande guerra.
9  Panzini, Diario sentimentale della guerra.
War and Memory 125

that had already received little favor, having met with at best the indifference
of the majority of Italians.
Throughout the course of the conflict, a huge gap separated the reality of war
and the manner in which it was represented. This was certainly true of the so-
called irredente territories, the myth of which was central to the propaganda in
favor of military intervention in the months that preceded Italy’s entry into the
war. Once Italy entered the conflict and the country had to deal with the reality
of the increasing numbers of dead, a place of importance was assigned to the
memory of unredeemed volunteers (voluntario irrendento). For example, in
December 1916, after the tragic deaths of Cesare Battisti, Fabio Filzi, Damiano
Chiesa and Nazario Sauro, the newspaper Provincia di Vicenza gave an account
of the funeral of the volunteer Marco Prister from Trieste. It reported on the
sad procession made ​​up of military and civil authorities, associations, and rep-
resentatives of armed squads that accompanied the commemoration of “the
martyr of the new Italy [. . .] who had sacrificed his life for his greatest hope to
see the day when the tower of San Giusto would fly an Italian flag” (Provincia di
Vicenza, December 1, 1916). Even more significant were the celebratory honors
bestowed on the figure of Nazario Sauro. The Baptists of Venezia Giulia quickly
accepted him into the so-called Heavens of the Heroes during a ceremony held
in Rome on April 21, 1917 on the occasion of Natali di Roma in memory of a
volunteer captured by the Austro-Hungarian army and hanged in August 1916:

. . . an eternal flame was lit on the altar of the Hero Martyr. It seemed as if
the whole of Rome [.  .  .] wanted to bring the torch to light the fire. It
appeared as if every R oman citizen wanted to place his heart on the
altar of Nevarca Temerario, the ardent patriot, the Purest Victim, in order
to make the greatest a nd the most unquenchable flame. From doors,
walkways, stairways under the ancient tomb of Augustus [. . .] immense
streams of people poured into the round hall.10

The body of the unredeemed volunteer therefore became an instant instrument

of the cause of the italianita of Venezia Giulia, helping to reinforce the rea-
sons for the war effort supported by the government. Yet the exaltation of the
dead clashed sharply with the reality of the conflict. The severity of the situ-
ation made an impression on a novelist of the stature of Luigi Pirandello, a
patriot who devoted one of his novels to the theme of mourning.11 Even more
striking was the contradiction between the attempt to honor the fallen and to

10  Lega Navale Italiana, La rivendicazione dell’Adriatico, 5.

11  Pirandello, “Quando si comprende.”
126 Todero

normalize deaths at the front and all their phenomenology (as in the above-
mentioned section of the Corriere della Sera) and the uncivilized reality of the
situation, which includ e d the failure to identify bodies, the lack of burials,
and the subsequent denial of traditional forms of mourning. The remains of
the fallen heroes, glorified by journalists and state propaganda, were all too
often left to rot on the battlefield where sacred pyres for ancient warriors were
replaced by fire-throwers and disinfectant in order to prevent the stench of
decomposition from reac h ing the new front lines.12 After the war, a feeling
of unprecedented collective pain overwhelmed Europe, and, as a consequence,
it was necessary to elevate death to a sort of nobility, thus giving higher value to
the pain of the families in the private sphere.
Italy was particularly hard hit because of the vertiginous number of losses
in the short history of the Kingdom of Savoy. Of the 5,615,000 men mobilized,
650,000—more than eleven percent of the total—did not return home, a far
different casualty rate than during the wars of the Risorgimento, which cost
only a few thousand dead. From this terrible number came the urgent need
to build an aura of myth around those who fell in combat, to tangibly honor
them through the construction of monumental works, an activity into which
all countries that took part in this immense tragedy feverishly threw them-
selves. On the other hand, other problems also demanded immediate atten-
tion. After the war, people who lived close to the frontlines were desperate to
return to normality. Battlefields had to be cleared of the numerous traces that
the war had left, among these, of course, the many bodies that still remained
scattered about as well as those buried in temporary graves and cemeteries
erected behind the front line awaiting a more suitable solution. When hostili-
ties ended, various military units undertook this grim task, some making use of
the labor of prisoners-of-war.
On January 29, 1920, the Ministry of War, and more specifically the Direc­
torate General of Military Health, issued a formal assignment supported by a
decree of law. After selection and training of appropriate personnel, a special
section known as the COSCG (an acronym that could be translated as the Cen-
tral Office for the Honoring and Care of the Remains of the Dead) was estab-
lished in Udine. One COSCG manager, Giannino Antona Traversi, recalled that
the office employed “ten companies of workers, twenty-two sections for disin-
fection, five freight transport sections, four sections for the transport of per-
sonnel, as well as ninety-five officers, twenty-seven chaplains, 3,350 soldiers,

12  Memories of the Gr e at War are full of annotations about the oppressive presence of
corpses decaying on the battlefield. As an example, we refer to Graziani, Fanterie sarde
all’ombra del tricolore.
War and Memory 127

650 animals, and 105 vehicles.”13 Workshops of carpenters, blacksmiths, and

cement workers were organized, and each individual section was supported
by officers, chaplains, workers, disinfection teams, transport, and automotive
departments. According to Antona Traversi, the major difficulty of this thank-
less but necessary work was that:

. . . considerable time had passed since the end of the conflict and decom-
position was in an advanced stage. Dead bodies were no longer intact
with the exception of those in high-mountain areas where frost pre-
served them. Many interred temporary coffins were already completely
destroyed. Long, grueling, and gruesome work had to be p ­ erformed with
the devotion of a ritual.14

The recovery of remains of the dead soon became good business. Already dur-
ing the war there were reports that:

. . . in order to multiply the number of dead bodies, and therefore to

increase the wages agreed upon based on the number of coffins, the
workers sawed the remains of the dead in half. To add weight to the cof-
fins, they filled them with the carcasses of animals, turf or gravel.15

Mario Rigoni mentioned this dispiriting practice in his novel L’anno della
Vittoria (published in English as The Sergeant in the Snow). Neverthe­less,
D’Annunzio himself did not hesitate to praise the workers who dealt with
the recovery of remains, likening them to angels who “transport the remains
of heroes from one summit to another,” and referring to the establish-
ment of military cemeteries as testimony to the events of what he termed a
“Holy War.”16
Although the process was far from easy, the nation needed to be compen-
sated for all the losses, and feelings of mourning to be replaced with those of
honor and pride. The personal story of the poet Angiolo Silvio Novaro, author
of Il fabbro armonioso ( The Harmonious Blacksmith),17 reveals this process.
Novaro recalls the loss of his son whose body was never found, despite a pain-
ful search in which he himself participated. During the silver medal ceremony

13  Antona-Traversi, “Cimiteri di Guerra,” 450.

14  Ibid.
15  D’Annunzio, “Comento meditato a un discorso improvviso,” 542.
16  Ibid.
17  For more detail on the subject, see Todero, “Lutto privato e lutto pubblico in Italia,” 5–24.
128 Todero

in his son’s honor, amidst all the fanfare and celebratory speeches, questions
lingered in his mind: “But what of us? What shall we do? What thoughts should
fill our day?”18 These were the emblematic issues in which the values ​​of patrio-
tism mingled with the deepest emotions of human nature, and conditions of
mourning could last for the rest of the survivors’ lives.
Another case in point is that of Giani Stuparich and his family: as late as
1967, Giani’s wife, Elody Oblath spoke of Carlo Stuparich and Scipio Slataper—
both killed during the war, each in different circumstances—as if they were
still alive. Giani, in his memories of Istria, wrote:

In my life, there is a clear division between the years before the war and
the years that followed. [. . .] From early infancy to youth is a period of
calm, with joys and sorrows equally distributed in harmonious sequence,
the period after the war on the other hand is a troubled and restless mix
of pain and happiness, but with a constant background of anguish.19

The politics of memory of the Great War, therefore, dealt with a dual set of
problems. On the one hand, it was necessary to celebrate the war, a victori-
ous war, even though the country and its governments were confronted with a
complex diplomatic situation concerning the redefinition of the new eastern
borders, a process that fuelled the increasing nationalization of the masses.
On the other hand, it was necessary to provide some consolation to the many
grieving families, and at the same time to try and forget the atrocity of many of
those deaths. The politics of memory of WWI and, in particular, the honoring
of the dead reveals the inadequacy of an exclusively ideological approach to
such ceremonial celebrations. Ceremonies and monuments only satisfy “the
powerful, perhaps essential, tendency of ordinary people, of many faiths and
of none, to face together the emptiness, the nothingness of war.”20
The transport of the remains of the Unknown Soldier to Rome was emblem-
atic in this sense. On the morning of October 28, 1921, eleven identical coffins
containing the remains of eleven unknown soldiers were transported from
the church of St. Ignatius in Gorizia, where a vigil had been made for them,
to the Basilica of Aquileia. Flowers rained down on the procession as it crossed
the city, arousing the emotions of all present. A convoy of trucks adorned with
flowers accompanied three cars carrying General Paolini and Colonel Paladin,
members of COSCG, on a pilgrimage through Friuli Giulia, making stops in

18  Novaro, Il fabbro armonioso, 106.

19  Stuparich, “Ricordi istriani,” 94–95.
20  Winter, Il lutto e la memoria, 75.
War and Memory 129

Gradisca, Romans, Versa, Campolongo, Perteole, Cervignano, Terzo, and finally

Aquilea where the main event took place. Each time the convoy stopped
“women knelt and threw flowers of tenderness and love on the coffins.”21 At
the same time, a railway convoy departed from Trieste carrying more remains
and adorned with crowns offered by various municipal organizations (includ-
ing the Sursum corda), the coffin lid decorated with a silver halberd donated by
the city of Trieste. The region of Venezia Giulia thus played a central role in the
ceremony. There was the prominent presence of symbols related to the Julian
territories and the departure of the original convoy from Gorizia. The special
train carriage had built in the shipyards of Monfalcone, the train departed from
Trieste. Moreover, the choice of which of the eleven bodies to bury in the tomb
in Rome was given to Maria Bergamas, mother of Antonio, an unredeemed
volunteer who had been killed and whose body had never been found. It was
both a tribute to the cult of the fallen volunteer, but also and perhaps above
all, recognition of the centrality of Venezia Giulia and Trieste, places that were
consecrated in the new Fatherland by this sad procession.
From Aquileia, the chosen coffin was transported to Rome, where the
remains arrived on November 2. Thousands and thousands of people crowded
along the railway track and around the final resting place to honor this single
unnamed hero of the Fatherland. Or were they in fact remembering their own
sons, husbands, and fathers who never returned from the front? Were these two
dimensions intertwined in an inextricable mixture of attitudes and emotions?
It is possible to identify different levels of involvement in this kind of mani-
festation: emotions and expectations, aspects of private and public mourning,
the latter having several components. The fascist government undoubtedly
placed a great deal of importance on the concept of the unknown soldier in
order to create a symbol of the victorious war and the glory of sacrifice. Thus
the governing authorities endowed the ritual with enhanced meaning, as a sort
of compensation to the nation for the human losses and sacrifices endured,
as a symbol with which all could identify. Many among those who attended
believed that the Great War had been the fourth war of the Risorgimento, a
way to implement national unification and at the same time provide so-
called redemption for other European peoples. Although fascist uniforms and
pennants were abundant in the crowd that paid tribute to the convoy of the
unknown soldier, the emotions evoked represented republican and liberal
patriotism, something distinct from the fascist movement. And yet these emo-
tions would soon be silenced and swept away by the rapidly spreading fascist

21  “L’esaltazione del Milite Ignoto. La veglia alle undici salme dei soldati caduti, nella Basilica
di Aquilina,” Il Piccolo, October 28, 1921.
130 Todero

violence. It is important to underline that Fascism, with its organizations and

its ceremonies had the ability to wedge itself into the circle of mourning, and to
meet the needs of many who had lost a husband, a father, a son, or a friend. Nor
can we overlook the symbolic value of the voyage of the body of the redeemed
volunteer from Venezia Giulia to Rome, the capital of the country and of Latin
civilization.
What is less known is the fact that a year before this more recognized ritual,
the exhumation of the body of Nazario Sauro was organized in Pola. A year
later, the body of Enrico Toti, buried in the cemetery Monfalcone, was trans-
ferred to Rome, the remains having rested at the Cathedral of San Giusto in
Trieste, before being transported to Rome. On June 17, 1923, when the politi-
cal climate was already marked by the affirmation of Fascism, a massive dem-
onstration was held to consecrate the cult of the fallen of Venezia Giulia. In
fact, the remains of thirty-seven volunteers were returned to Trieste and other
towns on the Istrian peninsula—some of the bodies having been placed in
the cemetery of Sant’Elia from which they where transported to Monfalcone,
and from there, moved on to Trieste, with the remains of two volunteers con-
tinuing the journey onto Capodistira. In Trieste, the coffins were met on the
shore—much in the same way as the arrival of Italian troops on November 3,
1918—and a procession passed through the city to San Giacomo. The remains
were buried in the crypt of the volunteers in the city cemetery of St. Anne.
This so-called “return of the heroes,” after countless ones already held in previ-
ous years, helped to reinforce what was called “ ‘the Italian tradition of Trieste,’
namely that only death could raise and transfigure the national will of a people
regarding their country, and call for its redemption into an eternal symbol and
an example of sanctity.”22
The construction of huge monumental complexes destined to house the
remains of the fallen was a natural culmination of this ongoing process of exal-
tation. It was not a coincidence that the region of Venezia Guilia was at the
forefront of such activities. In fact, the first big military shrine was constructed
in its territory: the Shrine of Colle Sant’Elia, the cemetery of the undefeated
of the Third Army led by the Duke of Aosta, designed to accommodate the
remains of those who had fallen on the Eastern Front. The cemetery clings to
Sant’Ellia hill at an altitude of forty-five meters. It was intended to symbolize
Mount Purgatory, all the tombs being placed around its edges. Each tomb has an
inscription of so-called “high literary value” elaborated by the fervid imagina-
tion of Giannino Antona Traversi, a curious personality, the author of s­ uccessful

22  “Le commosse solenni onoranze di Monfalcone alle salme dei caduti trasportati sul.
Nettuno,” Il Piccolo, June 17, 1923.
War and Memory 131

vaudevilles, and, during the war, a proponent of case del soldato (houses
for soldiers), eventually dedicating himself to the recovery of the remains
of the fallen and the establishment of military cemeteries. The cemetery con-
tains the remains of thirty thousand soldiers, 5,860 of which are named while
the others remain unidentified. “The graves follow a line that spirals up in great
circles until it reaches the summit.”23 The monument was inaugurated in 1923
in the presence of Mussolini and the Duke of Aosta, who delivered the keynote
address, remarking that it was as if:

. . . memories of years gone by emerged from the very bowels of the sacred
hill within which rest thirty thousand lives taken by the fury of war, not as
echoes but as real words. It seemed that a solemn and prodigious conver-
sation is taking place between the Leader of the Third Army and his dead,
and that the ritual has taken on a superhuman character.24

Those killed were the martyrs of the new Italy, and they entered a mystical
communion with the countless veterans, amputees, and family members who
rushed to Redipuglia to honor memories that were increasingly slipping out
of the private sphere to become part of the grand scheme of the regime. The
intention of the regime was not only remembering the dead, but also inculcat-
ing and educating new generations about the absolute value of Fatherland and
Nation.
After the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo and by the time the first major
Italian military shrine was completed in Venezia Giulia, these monuments
became a permanent part of the kingdom. They also became a symbol of the
Italian sacrifice made to redeem these lands that were now consecrated by
the blood of the fallen. The problem lay in the fact that these lands were popu-
lated by communities that hardly fell into the category of the redeemed. In
fact, not long after these historical events, restrictive measures were taken
against the so-called alien population. It is telling what Elio Bertolini, a vet-
eran traveling to the places where he once fought, thought when looking at the
local Slovenian (and Croatian) population: as “a people inferior to us” and that
“surely Italian blood can only benefit these people.” He concluded that they
were barbaric populations, perhaps hostile, at best indifferent to the course of
history.25

23  Antona-Traversi, “Cimiteri di Guerra,” 449.

24  “Il colle sacro,” Il Piccolo, May 25, 1923.
25  Bartolini, Ritorno sul Carso.
132 Todero

Even though the cemetery of Sant’Ellia hill contains multiple symbolic

meanings and also succeeds in maintaining respect for individuality—
albeit in a different and much more regulated manner than in British war
­cemeteries—a new wave of monumental works commissioned by Mussolini
in 1930 changed things considerably. In the 1930s, several new shrines were
erected in the region: a large new shrine at Redipuglia, a shrine in Oslavia, and
one in Kobarid. All of them showed clear signs of italianita in their shape, size,
and visibility. The one located in Redipuglia remains the largest military shrine
in Europe. At the time, it was strongly backed by Mussolini who found the
old Cemetery of the Invincible insufficiently warlike: thirty thousand officially
identified soldiers (in reality, the remains of at least seventy thousand uniden-
tified soldiers are buried there) are lined up against the tombs of generals of
various army corps with the Duke of Aosta in the central and dominant posi-
tion. Moreover, because of its size, the shrine is visible from various points of
the Isonzo Valley and conveys a warning: that the Duke is ready to attack once
more with his army of the dead, a message depicted in the frescoes in the cha-
pel at the summit.
The Shrine of Oslavia was erected on the outskirts of the city of Gorizia and
on the slopes of the Collio in an area with an ethnically mixed population.
With its fifty thousand interred dead, its design in the form of a fortification, its
architecture modeled on that of Tottenburg in Germany, it was meant to rep-
resent a sign of the Italian presence in the “redeemed” lands. The story of the
memorial at Kobarid is even more complex. Like the previous two mausole-
ums, it was inaugurated during Mussolini’s visit to Venezia Giulia in September
1938. It was also during this visit that he proclaimed new racial laws from a
balcony of the Piazza del Unita in Trieste. Although everything had already
changed in the early 1920s for the Slovenian and Croatian populations in the
region, this new series of laws severely affected their lives and attempted—
fortunately, unsuccessfully—to strip them of their national identity. Moreover,
during the inauguration ceremony of the Kobarid memorial, a failed assassina-
tion attempt on Mussolini took place, an event mentioned by Boris Pahor in
his writings.26
Fascism in the new frontier region quickly took over the memory of the
Great War, using it as pretext to protest against the liberal government and to
focus on events organized parallel to those organized by the authorities. One of
the results of the affirmation of Fascism was the complete erasure of the exis-
tence of those who had left Venezia Giulia to fight in the ranks of the Austro-
Hungarian army: Italians, Slovenians, and Croats of whom nobody spoke for

26  Pahor, Piazza Oberdan, 79–84.

War and Memory 133

decades. The memory of the conflict had to be singular and unique, and there
was no place in it for those who fought on the wrong side. The memory of the
unredeemed volunteers monopolized the memory of what happened, worm-
ing its way into the collective imagination. Schools, sports clubs, and streets
were named after them, while the majority of giuliani fell into oblivion, those
who—willingly or not—served in the multinational army of the Habsburg
Empire.
Moreover, the construction of large military cemeteries was not sufficient.
The whole battlefield was ordained. Monte San Michele and Monte Sabotino
were declared “sacred areas.” There was even a project of “a sacred way” that
was intended to connect San Giovanni di Duino—where Giovanni Randazzo,
the war companion of D’Annunzio, had fallen—to the city of Gorizia, then
declared “a holy city.” Originally, these activities had the objective of protect-
ing graves and small cemeteries when local populations returned to their eco-
nomic activities at the end of the conflict. In a similar way, symbols of this
unique memory of war were dispersed in cities and villages. In Trieste, for
example, a dominant war memorial designed by Attilio Selva was built on the
Colle di San Giusto where the archaeological remains of Roman Trieste were
rediscovered. The cultural policy was the recovery of classical forms in which
an emphasis was placed on the continuity between the glory of the Roman
Empire and the splendor of the far more miserable and short-lived reign of
Mussolini.
Central importance was also given to the construction of museums that
remembered the conflict. As a consequence, the Museum of the Risorgimento
was reborn with a new function. Reopened with a solemn ceremony on April 11,
1922, it maintained the dual function of the Museum of the Risorgimento and
of the History of the Fatherland. In 1934, it was moved to the building of the
House of the Combatant, in Oberdan Square in the new heart of fascist Trieste.
The most important room of the new museum was (and remains to this day)
the one dedicated to the volunteers from Giulia, Fiume, and Dalmatia. The
room is decorated with frescoes by Carlo Sbisà. The image of the veiled woman
stands out. She is pointing toward the city of Spalato, a city that was excluded
from the lands assigned to Italy by the peace treaty. The central role of the
museum was to contribute to the patriotic education of younger generations,
so that they could draw inspiration from the examples of those who preceded
them, from Garibaldi to the volunteers of the Great War, and thus understand
how their predecessors had served the ideal of unification and its continuity
between the wars of the Risorgimento and WWI, a period in history that ulti-
mately led to Italian national unity. Similarly, the Museum of the Redemption
was inaugurated in 1924 in the city of Gorizia where “a clear political agenda
134 Todero

was evident throughout [. . .] its extensive and varied exhibitions: the reaffir-
mation of the italianita of Gorizia.”27
At the end of the conflict, different forms of testimonies related to the war
and its most terrible aspects became available. They came alive, first of all, in
the form of the words and stories of survivors who animated the most conspic-
uous heritage of this epic human history. Not surprisingly, Annette Wieviorka
stressed that WWI started an era of mass testimony.28 Although this literary
heritage was destined to be limited to the survivors’ immediate family mem-
bers, it featured an explosion of memoirs, poems, diaries, novels, and count-
less other genres that helped build the country’s collective imagination of the
conflict that would remain present for a long time. It should also be noted that
this mass literary production embraces works of different aesthetic value: from
avant-garde and classical records to traditional literature of little value. The
quantity of literary production was influenced by the fact that WWI, with its
mass mobilization saw the direct involvement of many “artistic and literary
talents.”29 As a consequence, many great artistic works emerged from the con-
flict as well as some with only documentary value. For many young writers,
the war represented a prime source of inspiration and provided the possibil-
ity to make their debut in the literary field. One need only think of Giuseppe
Ungaretti and his debut work Il Porto sepolto (The Buried Port), published in a
limited edition in 1916. As far as other famous names are concerned, although
they comprise a diverse group, we might mention: Carlo Emilio Gadda, Piero
Jahier, Adengo Sofficit, Paolo Monelli, Giani Stuparich, Pastorino Piero, Filippo
Tommaso Marinetti, Carlo Salsa, Curzio Malaparte, and Corrado Alvaro.
It is important to remember, however, that even the most critical literary
works of the war experience, the way it was conducted, and the massacres that
took place were often very close to works of intellectual fascism: for exam-
ple, Carlo Salsa, Curzio Malaparte, and Arturo Marpicati, and their attempt to
address the topic of the justice of war, albeit only in fictional form. It cannot be
disputed that the war literature that emerged from both the fronts in the Julian
Alps and the one on the Piave River contributed decisively to the myth of a
territory where, until the defeat at Caporetto, the most furious battles of the
conflict took place. The Karst, parched and unknown land, was portrayed as
an epic theatre of war on the way to Trieste and Venezia Giulia. These were the
unredeemed lands that needed to be liberated in order to join the fatherland.

27  Sema, “Storia di un museo isontino,” 17.

28  Wieviorka, L’era del testimone.
29  Mosse, Fallen Soldiers.
War and Memory 135

They were sacred lands soaked with the blood of heroes that fought and lost
their lives for the accomplishment of national unity.
In this way, the memory of the Great War on the Italy’s eastern border
became an instrument of political struggle. After the war, the Italian military
authorities created governorships in the newly conquered regions and issued,
for example, the following recommendation: a gold medal was to be awarded
“for political reasons” in memory of a fallen volunteer from Pazin in Istria, a
town where a strong rivalry between Italians and Croatians has existed since
the nineteenth century.30 The period immediately after the war—already a hot
political climate, which brought to a boiling point the question of Fiume—
was likewise characterized by a multitude of patriotic initiatives organized
by schools, municipalities, and patriotic associations. The bloodshed for the
Fatherland became the paradigm with which the italianita of these lands was
measured, and the first fascist gangs adopted methods to combat their oppo-
nents, chief among them being local Slovenians and Croats. A clever strategy
was put in place to merge the private memory to the public one, even though
they should be absolutely and strictly separated. This was a phenomenon that
characterized the history of Venezia Giulia for a long time. Today we can only
hope that, thanks to the many studies being made about the history of the
Italian eastern border, it is one that will finally be overcome.

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Vittoria. Pubblicazione nazionale sotto l’augusto patronato di S.M. il Re e con l’alto
assenso di S.E. il Capo del Governo, a cura dell’Associazione nazionale volontari di
Guerra. Florence: Vallecchi, 1925.
Bartolini, Luigi. Ritorno sul Carso. Milan: Mondadori, 1930.
D’Alessio, Vanni. “Italiani e croati a Pisino tra fine Ottocento e inizio Novecento: la
costruzione di identità conflittuali.” In Nazionalismi di frontiera: Identità contrap-
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D’Annunzio, Gabriele. “Comento meditato a un discorso improvviso.” In Prose di
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mento, di celebrazione, di liberazione, di favole, di giochi, di baleni 1. Per la più grande
Italia [u.a.], 495–563. Milan: Mondadori, 1954.

30  D’Alessio, “Italiani e croati a Pisino tra fine Ottocento e inizio Novecento: la costruzione di
identità conflittuali,” 73–121.
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Fabi, Lucio. Gente di trincea. La Grande guerra sul Carso e sull’Isonzo. Milan: Mursia,
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Oxford University Press, 1990.
———. Le guerre mondiali. Dalla tragedia al mito dei caduti. Translated by Giovanni
Ferrara degli Uberti. Bari and Rome: Laterza, 1990.
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———. “1915–1916: la brigata Sassari sul Carso attraverso alcune fonti memorialis-
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Il mulino, 1998.
 CHAPTER 9

War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania:

Cultural Politics and Social Context

Silviu Hariton

The following chapter deals with the cultural politics of war commemorations
promoted in Romania during the interwar period. Focusing on the prewar her-
itage of nationalism, militarism and religion, which shaped both the politics
of war commemoration and their reception at the level of popular culture, it
tackles the set of symbols used during official rituals and in the iconography of
the war monuments. In doing so, it looks at how the experience of the Great
War was reflected in the interwar Romanian literature.
The commemoration of the fallen soldiers in the Great War was a con-
tinuation of the commemoration of the soldiers fallen in 1877–1878, Greater
Romania being seen by its Romanian officials as a continuation of the Old
Kingdom, enlarged by adding Transylvania, Banat, Bukovina and Bessarabia
as a result of a Risorgimento style process. This is why the nationalist culture
of the Old Kingdom continued to dominate the paradigm of Greater Romania,
Orthodoxy being officially linked to the Romanian identity and taught so in
schools and in the army. However, during the 1920s other ethnic groups were
allowed to build their own monuments (even if not in very visible areas) and
only in the 1930s the authorities attempted to establish a standardized policy
of war commemorations.
The reception of the war commemoration of course, varied, subject to the
social, ethnic and religious contexts. While in the Romanian speaking commu-
nities, Orthodoxy played a major role at the level of popular culture, religion
was conspicuously missing in the literature devoted to war. Focusing primarily
on the inner struggle of characters, war literature tended to revolve around
more solemn topics such as duty, love and the human condition, authors using
the war period and experience as background to the more perennial topics of
their novels.

In 1917, there was an exhibition of the Romanian artists conscripted in the

Romanian army in Iaşi, the de facto capital of the country during most of

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_011

138 Hariton

the WWI.1 A group of them, including Oscar Han, Cornel Medrea and Ion Jalea,
exhibited a series of sculptures inspired by their personal war experience. The
best-known artifact to date is Dimitrie Paciurea’s God of war, presently exhib-
ited at the National Museum of Arts in Bucharest. Merely two years later, in
1919 and 1920, the theme of war became effectively the dominant theme of
the Saloon of the Romanian Sculptors. However, this time, one of the most
influential Romanian art critics of the interwar period, painter Francisc Şirato,
condemned the sentimental rhetoric of this type of sculpture, considering it as
being rather non-artistic.2 Such an aesthetic perspective in fact dominated the
interwar Romanian high culture and, implicitly, the reception of the war expe-
rience as a theme in painting, sculpture and literature, be it poetry or prose. In
this contribution, my aim is not to explore why and how this aesthetic perspec-
tive came about, but only to ascertain what more precisely happened, further
extensive research being necessary in order to offer satisfactory answers to the
first two questions. While the first part discusses the prewar experience of war
commemorations in Romania, the second part surveys three contexts of com-
memorating the Great War during the interwar period. The first one is repre-
sented by the institutionalized politics of war commemorations surrounding
the Tomb of the Unknown Hero, the Heroes’ Day and the Society for the
Cult of the Heroes. The second is represented by those involved in the daily
aspects of processes of war commemoration that bear on war monuments,
be they in main squares, nearby churches or cemeteries, regardless of their

1  This text is an improved version of a paper presented at the conference “Sacrifice and regen-
eration: the legacy of the Great War in interwar Eastern Europe,” held at the University of
Southampton on September 13–15, 2007). I wish to thank the organizers for the invitation
which refocused my PhD research, which has been articulated in the meantime in disserta-
tion defended in January 2015 at the Central European University. My thanks goes to the
other participants in the conference, especially Nikolai Voukov. My paper has largely ben-
efited from previous works on war commemorations and monuments in Romania, such as
Pippidi, About graves as landmarks of national identity, the most valuable contribution on
heroism and commemorations; Tucă and Gheorghe, Altarele eroilor neamului, which is a dic-
tionary of the most important public monuments in Romania still existing during the 1980s
and 1990s; Bălescu, Eroul Necunoscut, in which, based on being the curator of the archive of
the interwar Society for Cult of the Heroes during the 1990s and early 2000s, the author docu-
ments extensively the discussions around the establishment of the Tomb of Unknown Hero
in 1923, adding contemporary newspapers and brochures before turning to the 1991 moment
of the monument’s return to Bucharest; and Bucur, “Between the Mother of the Wounded
and the Virgin of Jiu,” and “Edifices of the Past.”
2  Vlasiu, “Emile Antoine Bourdelle şi sculptura interbelică din România.”
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 139

ethnic, religious social of regional background. Finally, the third context is

­represented by the reading public, war novels being used as the main indicator
of the most popular themes and debates, which are still ongoing.

The Politics of Commemoration in Romania before the Great War

The construction of public monuments or monumentomania represents a

general European trend of the nineteenth century, largely confined to urban
spaces and intrinsically linked to the expansion of high culture and the devel-
opment of the public sphere. Only after the Great War, this policy of construct-
ing public monuments found its way also into the countryside. My aim in this
respect is to emphasize that inter-war politics of commemorations of the Great
War used models, cultural codes and artistic languages which had been devel-
oped and used before the Great War as well. This aspect can, for example, be
seen in the case of the French Third Republic’s politics of constructing monu-
ments, a politics that was aimed not only at commemorating national heroes/
myths (e.g. Jeanne D’Arc) but also at instilling values of self-sacrifice among
men and youngsters. The difference was a matter of demographic impact and
material destruction which amplified the normal process of mourning.3
As in many other European countries, commemorative practices stimulated
by state authorities existed in Romania before the Great War as well. The most
important themes that clustered around the politics of commemoration were
the struggle against the Ottomans during the Middle Ages, the 1848 Revolution
and the War of Independence—the Romanian name for the Russian-Turkish
war of 1877–1878 in which the Romanian army played a major role. Monuments
to Michael the Brave in Bucharest (1874) and to Stephen the Great in Iași (1883),
as well as to the main protagonists of the 1848 Revolution in Wallachia and
Moldavia (Ion C. Brătianu and C.A. Rosetti in Bucharest and Vasile Alecsandri
in Iași, etc.), were created by French artists.4 The first monument to anonymous
soldiers was built in the early twentieth century to the firemen of Bucharest
who defended the city in September 1848 when Ottoman army crushed the
1848 revolution.

3  Prost, “Monuments to the Dead.” See also Troyansky, “Monumental politics.” For the case of
Germany compared with France, see Vogel, “Military, folklore, Eigensinn.”
4  Beldiman, Sculptura franceză în România (1848–1931).
140 Hariton

The War of Independence received the most attention, several tens of monu-
ments being dedicated to the 2000 dead soldiers and officers5 in Bucharest but
mainly in the county capital cities next to the Danube (Corabia, Calafat, Tulcea,
etc.), in the cities around Bucharest (Pitești, Ploiești, etc.) or in the ­middle of
Moldavia (Neamț, etc.). One of the most important sites is the Cernavodă
Bridge (build 1890–1895), which has two massive statues of dorobanti (the ter-
ritorial infantry troops which took the heaviest toll in 1877–1878), symbolically
guarding the entrance from the newly acquired territory of Dobrogea and at
the same time taking into possession the new province.
Next to the construction of monuments, the Ministry of the Cults and Public
Instruction had ordered paintings celebrating Romanian soldiers (the most
famous being those of Nicolae Grigorescu).6 In the meantime, patriotic lit-
erature started to be developed and disseminate through the system of public
education. The poetry of Vasile Alecsandri, George Coșbuc and Ioan Nenițescu
was the most widely circulated poetry at the time, while Coșbuc’s The story of
a steel crown became at the turn of the century one of the best-known narra-
tives for describing the events of the war.7 At the same time, a military fash-
ion started to spread among the children, illustrated by Ion Luca Caragiale’s
Domnul Goe,8 while in most cities, squares and street names were changed in
order to celebrate the victories of the Romanian army: Calea Victoriei, Calea
Plevnei, Calea Dorobanţilor, Calea Călăraşilor, Piata Independentei or the mili-
tary national heroes promoted at the time, Michael the Brave (Mihai Bravul)
and Stephen the Great (Ştefan cel Mare). These names of streets spread to
other cities of the Old Kingdom, too, for example Brăila, a town at the corner
of the river Danube before its delta.

The Politics of Commemoration in Inter-War Romania

Together with those who contributed to the rising of our Patria, together
with those who survived this generation of sacrifice, the fallen have their

5  Most of the names of over 2000 soldiers and officers are known, due to the fact that there
were pauses between battles intended for collecting the dead and wounded. The list is avail-
able also on the website of nowadays Romanian National Office for Heroes’ Memory (http://
www.once.ro).
6  Frunzetti, Arta românească în secolul XIX; Ionescu, Penel şi sabie.
7  Alexandrescu, “Război şi semnificaţie. România în 1877.”
8  Ionescu, Revista Muzeelor, no. 1 (1990): pp. ; Ionescu, Modă şi societate urbană în România
epocii moderne, pp.
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 141

own rights. They do not ask for our tiers—in exchange, they pretend the
recognition of their sublime sacrifice and the transformation of this sac-
rifice into a symbol, example and stimulant for new heroic deeds which
are needed for the complete consolidation and the future of our nation
[. . .] In front of these graves, in front of these temples, the youth of the
future will come during harsh time for the country to receive the gospel
and here they will learn, more than in any other place, the path to follow
so that our people to deserve, as in the past, the moral leadership of the
surrounding people, a role that represents the basic principle of our exis-
tence as a Latin people at the gates of Orient.9

These words belong to Ion Răşcanu, ministry at the Department of War and
they are taken from the introduction of the law for commemorating the fallen
soldiers that was published in September 1920.10 This law was issued together
with another three aimed at offering reparations to those affected by the Great
War and at establishing the National Office for War Invalids, War Orphans
and War Widows. There are multiple ways to decode and interpret the quote,
but my intention is only to showcase the attitudes of the military and civil
authorities towards the fallen soldiers of 1916–1919 (“a generation of sacrifice”)
and to point to the envisioned ends of the official cultural politics of commem-
oration (to educate further “generations of sacrifice”). In addition to defining
the object of commemoration and the practical ends of the process, it also
denotes, to some extent, the attitude of restraint towards suffering dissemi-
nated through and within the high culture. “Do not shed tears on the heroes’
graves but rather praise them through songs so that their fame should remain
like an echo throughout the century-old legends” is also a quote of Queen

9  Arhivele Naționale Istorice Centrale, fond Parlament, dos. 1888, f. 114: “La fel cu toți cei care
au contribuit la ridicarea Patriei, la fel cu cei ce supraviețuiesc generației de jertfă, morții
își au drepturile lor. Ei nu cer lacrimile noastre; pretind însă în schimb, în mod imperios,
recunoașterea sacrificiului lor sublim și ridicarea la înălțimea unui simbol, care să consti-
tuie exemplul și stimulentul a noui eroisme de care va avea nevoie completa consolidare
și viitorul neamului nostru [. . .] În fața acestor morminte, în fața acestor temple, veni-va
tinerimea viitorului, în orice moment greu pentru țară, spre a primi cuvântul de ordine și
aci va învăța, mai mult ca oriunde, drumul de urmat, pentru ca neamul nostru să merite,
ca și în trecut, conducerea morală a popoarelor ce ne înconjoară, rol care constituie totuși
principiul existenței noastre de popor latin la porțile Orientului.”
10  Legea Pentru cinstirea memoriei eroilor căzuţi [Law for honoring the memory of fallen
heroes], no. 119, 2 September 1920, 419–420.
142 Hariton

Maria published in România eroică, the official journal of the society for cult
of the heroes, and which appears frequently alongside her portrait.11
The care for the dead soldiers was stipulated in the Peace Treaties with
Germany and Hungary. Through the articles 155–156 of the Treaty of Trianon
(1920), the Hungarian, as well as the Allied and Associated governments, took
responsibility to respect and take care of the soldiers buried on the territories
resulting from respective treaties.12 A great number of these battles took place
on the territory of Romania. 2.000 Romanian soldiers died taking part in the
Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878, which represented about 0.04% of the five
million people living in Romania at the time. During the WWI the proportion
of casualties in Romania multiplied at least a hundred times when compared
to the death toll of the 1877–1878. The number of dead soldiers was estimated
at 250.000 and this estimation is a conservative one. Since the Romanian Army
in the WWI was recruited mainly from the Old Kingdom population of 7.5 mil-
lion, these numbers amounted to a 3.3 percent of the population that was lost.
And this without taking into account the wounded, the disabled and those
who got ill during the war, were supposedly cured but later continued to suffer
the consequences without being considered war invalids.13
A Heroes Day was established as an annual celebration on the Ascension
Day, forty days after Easter in Romania, and its first celebration took place in
1921. All the authorities and their subordinates had to participate: the mayors,
the military authorities, the priests, the teachers and their pupils. It was a ritual
of mourning, of communion and also of initialization into nationhood. The
array of instruments of commemoration followed the pattern, already expe-
rienced in relation to 1877–1878. Most of the name streets were changed, this
time with names of soldiers and corporals (in Braila, almost 90%). Patriotic
literature was a common feature of the Romanian educational system, stories
being dedicated to children and women who helped the troops (e.g. Maria
Manciulea who apparently met Camil Petrescu in August 1916) and of course
the soldiers. Paintings or simple sketches were drawn by Costin Petrescu,
Albin Stănescu, Emilian Damian, A. Mogoş, Dragoş Petrescu, I. Burghard,

11  România eroică, organul societăţii “Mormintele Eroilor” 8, no. 11–12 (November–December
1927): “Nu vărsaţi lăcrămi mormintele eroilor, ci mai curând slăviţi-i în cântece aşa ca
faima numelui lor să rămână un ecou prin legenda veacurilor.”
12  Tractat de pace între puterile aliate şi asociate şi Ungaria. Protocol şi declaraţiuni, din 4 iunie
1920 (Trianon) [Treaty of Peace between the Allied and Associated Powers and Hungary
and Protocol and Declaration, Signed at Trianon June 4, 1920].
13  Demographic, financial and social consequences of WWI in Greater Romania are broadly
assessed in my article “Asumarea politicilor sociale de catre stat în România.”
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 143

D. Stoica, Emilian Lăzărescu, Manasiu Creţulescu, while Iosif Iser painted a

Soldier and Camil Ressu devoted his attention to Ecaterina Teodoroiu. While
the first Romanian movie, Independenţa României, was dedicated to Romanian
participation in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878 (1911–1912),14 out of
eighty-four movies in the period 1912–1947 I could trace three interwar movies
dedicated to war experience: Datorie şi sacrificiu (Duty and sacrifice, 1925) by
Ion Sahighian, Vitejii neamului (The braves of. . ., 1927) by Ghiţă Popescu, and
Ecaterina Teodoroiu (1930) by Niculescu Brumă. Caricatures were published
in the period 1927–1928 by Romania Eroica, the official journal of the Society
for the Graves of the Heroes Fallen in the War (Societatea “Mormintele eroilor
căzuți în război”) in charge of organizing the official politics of war commemo-
ration, some of them reproducing ethnic stereotypes then current among the
Romanian officers, with references to Jews and especially Roma. Overall, there
is a high degree of similarity in the pattern of activities and in the spectrum
of cultural and artistic vocabulary between the commemorations before and
after the Great War. However, the level of destruction and the social and cul-
tural impact of the Great War transformed the inter-war commemorations
into a massive process of remembrance.
In 1919, the first attempts to expropriate the lands to be transformed
into cemeteries were randomly resisted, and consequently, in September
1919, a royal decree had recognized Societatea “Mormintele eroilor căzuți în
Război”—the Society for the Graves of the Heroes Fallen in War. From the very
beginning, the honorary president was Regina Maria/Queen Mary, the active
president was the Primate Metropolitan (Patriarch since 1925) Miron Cristea
while General Ion Manolescu was the director. This society was endorsed as the
only institution in charge of war memorials. It had a status of a private organi-
zation protected by the state. It received a budget from the Ministry of Public
Instruction and at the same time it organized donation collection, mostly
approaching former combatants and widows. The Society changed its name
several times: it became the Society for “The Cult of the Heroes” in 1927, the
National Foundation “Regina Maria” for the Cult of the Heroes in 1940, while
after the proclamation of the Romanian Peoples Republic (1948), it became the
Association “The Cult of the Heroes” to be dissolved in the same year. These
changes in the title can be linked to the expansion of activities which were
designed from then on to supervise also the construction of monuments and
troite.15 Reestablished after 1989, the Society today handles the reestablished

14  How this movie was made is the topic of a Romanian movie Restul e tacere, produced and
directed by Nae Caranfil in 2007.
15  Bălescu, Eroul Necunoscut. Istorie trecută şi recentă, 73–75, 82–107, 110–115, 124–125.
144 Hariton

commemorative practices and in the first decade of the new millennium took
over the archives of the interwar society.
During the 1920s, the monuments were erected slowly and randomly. In most
cases, the initiatives belonged to local authorities who would contribute with
large amounts of money. For example, in Odorheiu Secuiesc [Szekelyfehervar]
made a cemetery was made for all the nationalities regardless on which side
their soldiers fought during the war and the same case can be found in Focșani
and Iași. Many other cemeteries (Medgidia, Călărași etc.) accepted burials of
soldiers of all nationalities who had fought on the nearby battlefield. Maybe
because the Society for The Cult of the Heroes was not authoritative enough,
the design of the commemorative monuments started being supervised in
1929 by a newly established National Committee of Historical Monuments.
The Society published a monthly review, Revista Cultul Eroilor, directed
by Mircea Dem Rădulescu, and its editorial office was at the Palace of the
Patriarch. The review changed its name in January 1926 to România Eroică,
considering the former name as defining a much too limited palette of possible
activities. It aimed at patriotic activities where literature was to play an edu-
cative role.16 The issues were published monthly during the 1920s while after
a peak in 1930, with a special almanac and a supplement, most of the issues
tended to be grouped in double, sometimes also triple, and even quadruple
numbers. This review presents one of the main sources of information. It pub-
lished models of monuments, troițe, and especially patriotic literature, such
as, for example, Liviu Rebreanu’s “The temptation of death” [Ispita morţii]17 or
poems such as “Their dream” [Visul lor]18 by Camil Petrescu.
Against this background, it becomes clear that the discussion about the
establishment of a Romanian Unknown Soldier started as early as in 1921 but
things got postponed by one year, until the Ministry of War pressed the Society
for the Graves of the Heroes Fallen in War to urgently proceed towards the
establishment of an Unknown Soldier. Four places in Bucharest were proposed:
the statue of Mihai Viteazul in front of the University of Bucharest; the place
under the Arch of Triumph (another plaster monument standing next to the
latter-day Herastrau Park until mid-1930s); in front of the Military Club (Cercul
Militar) on the Calea Victoriei, or in front of the newly established Military
Museum (led by the general Radu R. Rosetti) situated in the Carol Park. The

16  România eroică, organul societăţii “Mormintele Eroilor” 7, no. 1 (January 1926): 15. “[. . .]
literatură în legătură cu sufletul românesc cu aspiraţiile acestui suflet smuls din suferinţele
trecutului şi năzuind spre orizonturile înseninate ale viitorului.”
17  România eroică, organul societăţii “Mormintele Eroilor” 7, no. 1 (January 1926): 3.
18  România eroică, organul societăţii “Mormintele Eroilor” 7, no. 3–5 (March–June 1926): 25.
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 145

proposition being too close to the Ascension Day, decision was postponed until
next year, 1923. The choice went to Carol Park with the following arguments: a
monument dedicated to all the fallen should not be placed in a crowded place,
as would be the case with the first three proposals, but in a quiet park.19
In addition to being a green area at the southern outskirts of Bucharest,
Carol Park of Bucharest had a historical significance as well. While in 1848
large crowds gathered there to support the Provisional Government, the name
of the place remained Liberty Field (Campia Libertatii). Then, the area was
transformed into a park in 1906 for the occasion of the National Exhibition
organized to celebrate 1800 years since the Romans conquered Dacia and the
“Romanization process” started (106 AD), forty years since Carol I become
the prince of Romania and the country started to prosper (1866), and twenty-
five years since the proclamation of the Kingdom after the recognition of the
independence (1881). The choice was highly symbolic for defining Romanian
nationalism: in 1848, the first generation of nationalists put forth their program
of westernization, the second generation proclaimed its success in 1906, and
almost the same generation gave the victims of the WWI. A third generation
was supposedly to follow with a different goal, namely to mourn the heroes
and learn to defend the gains of the Great War termed Reunification War by
the Romanian authorities.
The selection of the Unknown Soldier was the result of a set of symbolic
ceremonies carried out in Mărășești, the location of the most important
Romanian victory during the WWI, and in Bucharest. Initially it was supposed
to be selected from the eight unknown soldiers who died on eight battlefields
close to the Carpathian Mountains: the Jiu Valley, Dobrodja, the Prahova Valley,
the battle for defending Bucharest, Mărăști, Mărășești, Oituz, and Tg. Ocna.
Later, they realized the omissions and added first an unknown soldier from
Ciucea (Transylvania) and only later from Chișinău, as a symbol for Bessarabia.
Between May 8 and 10, the selection of the local unknown soldiers was made.
Local religious processions for the ten unknown soldiers were followed by the
soldiers being sent to Mărășești, where they all rest in the Church “Dormition
of the Mother of God.” Each of them had a small bag of soil from the battle-
ground they represented. At Mărășești, a war orphan, the best pupil from the
Romanian military high schools, Amilcar Săndulescu, was put in charge/given
the honor to select the Unknown Soldier. After the selection, the coffin was
ceremonially brought to Bucharest, left at Mihai Vodă Church for mourning for
two days, and on May 17, taken to the Carol Park, where the Tomb was prepared.

19  A presentation of these discussions was carried out by Traian Popa-Lisseanu (Popa-
Lissenau, Soldatul necunoscut, istoric și cult, 49–82).
146 Hariton

The most important/highest state and ecclesiastical authorities participated:

the King and all members of the royal family; metropolitans and bishops, mili-
tary authorities from Bucharest, the government, including its former mem-
bers, all the pupils and the military units of Bucharest.20 The department of
War even made a film which was disseminated as a news journal in the cin-
emas, but unfortunately does not exist anymore.
A votive light was put at the head of the Unknown Soldier by the pupils
of the “St. Mary” Seminar for Girls in 1924 and it was re-lighted again in 1927,
in the presence of Constantin Presan, considered the oldest military officer. In
June 1930, immediately after swearing the oath of allegiance to the nation,
in the Parliament, as the new king of Romania, Carol II went immediately to
the monument of the Unknown Soldier to pay his respect to what may have
been considered the second symbol and embodiment of the nation after the
Parliament.21 A fire severely damaged the Military Museum in 1938, which was
finally destroyed by the 1940 earthquake. The Tomb was rebuilt in 1946 and it
was moved to Mărăşeşti in 1959 in order to leave the space for the Monument
of the Heroes of Socialism. On October 25, 1991, it was brought back to Carol
Park (nowadays Liberty Park), Army’s official day since 1945, initially estab-
lished because it was King Michael’s birthday while later kept because it
largely coincided with the moment when the last locality of the present-day
Romanian territory (Carei) was liberated by the Romanian and Soviet forces.
The 1991 placement was changed again in 2006 to the initial pre-war position,
which is exactly in front of the Monument of the Heroes of Socialism after
several years of discussions whether to build the new Orthodox cathedral of
Bucharest in the respective place.

War Monuments and Contexts of Commemoration

Similar to the war monuments dedicated to the Romanian participation in the

Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878, most often the war monuments dedicated
to those fallen during the WWI were erected in the home towns and home vil-
lages of the soldiers once they were identified and on the former battlefields
if they were not identified. War cemeteries were designed as separate sections

20  Popa-Lisseanu, Soldatul necunoscut, istoric și cult, 49–82.

21  As reported in Carol al II-lea, regele românilor. Cinci ani de domnie, 8 iunie 1930–8 iunie
1935 by Colonel Gabriel Marinescu, prefect of Bucharest Police and honorary president
of “Vitejii Neamului” Association, Ion Modreanu, active president, and Constantin
Buruiană.
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 147

in the existing cemeteries in all towns and villages. Several monuments were
erected almost immediately after the war, and one characteristic of those built
in the early 1920s is to be seen in the lack of religious symbols in their archi-
tectural discourse, even if many of them presented the Commemorative Cross
of the War (Crucea comemorativă a războiului). Through the activity of the
Society for the Cult of the Heroes patronized by Queen Mary and Patriarch
Miron Cristea, religious elements started to be disseminated mainly through
models published in România Eroică (troiţe).22
The most important monuments were the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier
and the Arch of Triumph in Bucharest, the Mausoleums of Mărăşeşti Mărăşti,
Toplita and Soveja, the Cross of Caraiman and several monuments from
Bucharest (monument of the Sanitary Heroes with a fresco representing
Queen Mary in its center, the monument of the Aviators, the so-called Lion,
a monument to the engineer troops, the monument of the French soldier and
the monument of railway workers of Ion Jalea). Next to these, several hundred
public monuments to more than two thousands memorials were built all over
the country.
At the individual level, participation was a mix. Political reforms such as
universal suffrage for men and especially the land reforms of 1921, promised in
1914 and especially during the fierce battles of 1917, helped appease the what
would be inevitable dissatisfaction of the peasants. War pensions, the sup-
port for war invalids, war widows and war orphans, and several other financial
means were designed in the 1920s along the public ceremonies of mourning
where the construction of war monuments represented rather the conse-
quence than the cause or the occasion for the politics of war commemorations.
Most of the members of local notables, such as professors and teachers, mem-
bers of the clergy and of the administrative state framework and military
officers, either joined the Society for the Cult of the Heroes or took part in
the initiative committees established for raising funds and constructing the
numerous war monuments discussed in the previous chapters. As Maria Bucur
has shown, women were among the most active in playing the part in the reli-
gious processions designed as an aspect of the politics of commemoration
(parastase). Those who were able to read and write left numerous accounts of
their experience during the war, however the greatest part of the population
either did not have these abilities or were involved in trying to bring back some

22  The same observation was made also by Bucur in “Edifices of the past.” I further
approached in an analytical manner the historical series of war monuments in Romania
in “Nationalism, heroism and war monuments in Romania, 1900s–1930s.”
148 Hariton

equilibrium into their lives at a time of great political and social turmoil given
the new realities of the Greater Romania.
The war cemeteries represented one of the most important forms of mourn-
ing and commemorating those fallen during the interwar period, regardless of
the ethnic and religious boundaries. It also represented one of the most impor-
tant areas of activity for the Society for the Cult of the Heroes. Identification
and delimitation of war graves, as well as their placement within the existing
local cemeteries, was a process which was carried out throughout the 1920s
and it affected all communities, Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinistic,
Jewish and Muslim, with their inherent regional, social and ethnic boundar-
ies. Construction of war monuments by these communities was done as part
of the existing cemeteries, as well as nearby local churches, and it sometimes
represented the area where the ethnic and religious minorities were not lim-
ited in their process of commemoration, a complex process framed not only by
the political and social consequences of the WWI but also by prewar cultural
representations, symbols and narratives.
There are numerous interwar photos showing massive crowds gathered
for the occasion of inauguration of a new monument. This was the case with
the relocation of the Mangalia cemetery where soldiers from both sides were
buried: Romanians, Russians, Germans, Bulgarians and Turks. Crowds are
shown in a picture illustrating the inauguration of the monument to General
Dragalina in June 1929 in Caransebeș. At the level of popular culture, religious
practices were the most important and sometimes they were blended with the
official initiatives. Most of the times, the monuments were erected in the main
square of a given city, next to the church, the park and the local pub. It is hard
to prove this presupposition since veteran organizations hardly left an archive,
while newspapers, although they did have the tendency to present the official
ceremonies, mostly talked about veterans gathering in the respective park or
local pub discussing their matters and recalling moments of their glory. Since
ritual is extremely important for the Orthodox Church and its (female) believ-
ers, the fallen soldiers were individually mourned as part of the regular process
of mourning all dead people of the family and praying for the living. As Maria
Bucur has pointed out, only the troite were commemorating symbols readable
to the peasants, while what is usually known as monuments was a character-
istic of the towns and cities, and therefore was not available to the peasants
who would not have paid attention to them, but only to the troite. As for the
public sphere, what is visible in the case of the novels is the lack of religious
references and the presence of the idea of an unjust sacrifice that could have
been avoided to some extent.
Nationalism, militarism and religion were deeply interlinked factors in the
state-/ empire-/nation-building processes that took place in the ­nineteenth
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 149

century Central- and South-Eastern Europe. The period of framing the

national culture coincided with the period of mass alphabetization, and many
times the frameworks of army and local churches were more effective agen-
cies than public schools.23 As a result, in the first decade of the twentieth
century Romania, many people involved in state bureaucracy considered the
school, the church and the army as the three pillars of nation building, while
the groups of officers, teachers and professors and priests were among the
most active professional groups in Romania involved in the processes of war
commemoration and the construction of war monuments before and follow-
ing the WWI. Orthodoxy played an important role in the nation-building pro-
cesses of all four Balkan states (Serbia, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria), being
used as an identity mark in relation to the Habsburg and Ottoman empires.
In the Romanian case, during the nineteenth century, the secularization pro-
cess affected only the formation of the modern Romanian high culture. After
1860s, the Romanian Orthodox Church passed through a process of redefini-
tion in national terms, whereby the definition of “its flock” was reduced to
include only the Romanian people. The causes were multiple. By definition,
the ecclesiastical power was tolerant of the lay power, in the Byzantine world
the flock having two pastors, the Emperor as the military leader, taking care
of the material needs, and the Patriarch as the spiritual leader, taking care of
the moral problems of the people. Beyond this intellectual model of sym-
phonia, there were more immediate and stringent causes. On the one hand,
the Church needed to get the financial support of the state after the secular-
ization of the monastery lands and it tried to justify that it is not an agency
under foreign influence, the Patriarch of Constantinople being under control
of Ottoman sultans at the time. On the other hand, the state started to use
the network of priests to promote its cultural and social politics, including
national ­discourse.24 There has been the measures taken by the Holy Synod
to standardize the body of knowledge which has shaped the paradigm of the
nowadays Romanian Orthodox Church, to spread disciplinary rules that were
supposed to be respected by all believers (concerning marriage, baptism,
etc.), to increase the number of churches and to bring more people to the
divine services. Overall, the idea is that during the century before the Great
War, secularization noticeably affected only the public sphere while most
of the population continued to live in a religious paradigm, reinforced and­

23  Kitromilides, “Imagined communities and the origin of the national question in the
Balkans.” For the Bulgarian case, see Mishkova, “Literacy and nation-building in Bulgaria,
1878–1912.” For the Romanian case, see also my paper “Religion, nationalism and milita-
rism in nineteenth century Romania.”
24  Ursul, “From political freedom to religious independence.”
150 Hariton

fostered by the modernizing measures of the Holy Synod, the impact being vis-
ible for example in the increase of the number of nuns and monks.
How was it possible, one might ask, to preach love and mutual understand-
ing on the one hand, and on the other, to bless troops before going to battle and
to promise eternal life in exchange for killing other people in the name of the
nation, especially during the WWI. The British scholar Christopher Walter had
documented the cult of the military saints in the Byzantine period. 25 According
to him, after the ninth century AD, Constantinople’s links with Rome started to
weaken and the Byzantine Empire found itself isolated in its confrontation
with Islam, and this context eased the rise of a cult of military saints, models
to be followed by the Byzantines. The isolation from the rest of the Christian
world and the permanent confrontation with its neighbors led the Orthodox
Church of Constantinople to disseminate its message of peace and mutual
understanding only in reference to its own flock and not to all oikoumena. The
tradition was kept throughout centuries and this explains the appearance of
the “national saints”: the sanctification of Alexander Nevski by the Russian
Church, of the Serbian medieval rulers in the nineteenth century, and later
the inclusion of all dead soldiers of the Great War as martyrs of the commu-
nity—not as proper protagonists of the religious calendar but as one of the
many themes/repertoires of the Church discourse. After 1874–1875, every regi-
ment of the Romanian army had a spiritual patron from the Orthodox cal-
endar: St. George (April 23), Apostles Peter and Paul (June 29), St. Dimitrie
(October 26), Archangels Gabriel and Michael (November 8) and St Nicholas
(December 6).26 Images of military saints may be found in every Romanian
Orthodox church, even if their military background is not any more empha-
sized but rather ignored. Religious education was taught in the so-called
“regimentary schools” during the nineteenth century by the military priests
attached to every unit, while moral education (civic, military, nationalist) was
done using textbooks designed as catechisms.27 Jesus Christ was used as a sym-
bol and model to be followed of self-sacrifice for the fellow humans. Especially
during the war, this model was re-emphasized and later used in the process of
commemoration when referring to dead soldiers: “[S]oldiers who have been
sacrificed for the wellbeing of [our] neam are all unknown Christs.”28

25  Walter, The Warrior Saints in Byzantine Art and Tradition.

26  Monitorul Ostei, Partea oficiale [Official Army Gazette], no. 3, February 1875: 50–51;
Monitorul Ostei, Partea oficiale [Official Army Gazette], no. 18, June 14 1875: 479; Monitorul
Ostei, Partea oficiale [Official Army Gazette], no. 30, October 15 1875: 789.
27  Hariton, “Conscripţie militară şi educaţie primară în Romania, 1860–1900.”
28  “Toţi ostaşii jertfiţi pentru binele neamului sunt atâţi Christoşi necunoscuţi” (in Ionescu,
“Ziua înălţării-ziua eroilor.”). Later, in the issue of April 1930, “Christos a înviat!” was
defined as “desăvârşită curăţenie sufletească şi spirit de jertfă pentru binele obştesc.”
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 151

This deeply religious context explains the choice for Ascension Day as the
Heroes Day, and after 1934, the choice for August 6 to celebrate the Victory
Day. In the case of the Heroes Day, not unlike Jesus Christ, the fallen soldiers,
having accepted their mission (“to save the world”) and faith (possible death),
were sacrificed by their enemies but had reserved a place in Heaven next to
the Father (the moment of Ascension). August 6 was also not chosen arbi-
trarily. In the Christian Orthodox calendar, it celebrates “Schimbarea la față
a Mântuitorului,” the moment when Jesus Christ showed his godly nature
to his favorite apostles, Peter, Jacob and John, on the mount Tabor. This reli-
gious framework for defining heroism as accepted martyrdom for the home
country is, I think, visible in the cult of the Queen Mary during the war. The
German King, who opted for his adoptive country, remained permanently in
the shadow of the Mother of the Wounded. Maria Bucur has shown the trans-
formation of Queen Mary from a joyful animator of the Royal Court to the
“Mother of the wounded” dressed as a nurse. The model of Mary’s behavior
was most probably Queen Elisabeth, wife of Carol I, who was the first mother
of the wounded during the war of 1877–1878. The difference of impact consists
not only in the scale of the propaganda effort of the Romanian war newspa-
pers from Iași but also in the religious lenses through which this propaganda
was disseminated and received. While the soldiers were Christs who were
self-­sacrificing for their community, the Romanian nation, Queen Mary was
projected as an encompassing Virgin Mary who takes care of the sufferings of
the self-sacrificed. Maria Bucur has extensively analyzed the way heroism was
defined strictly in masculine terms. Further research is probably necessary to
analyze how this masculine heroism was also imposed on men. Not all men
were glorified during the interwar period as part of the politics of war com-
memoration, but rather only those who were dead. The men who remained in
the area of German occupation were later despised, while the intellectuals who
collaborated with German authorities in line with the Conservative govern-
ment of Alexandru Marghiloman, e.g. Ioan Slavici, Tudor Arghezi, Constantin
Stere, etc., were sent to prison for a while; mutilated veterans hardly found
benevolent support during the interwar period.
The gender of heroism was basically set in a religious paradigm in which
family was a keyword and more important than individual men and/or women,
and the commemoration of those fallen during the war did not necessarily
ignore the hardships of the home front, but used the dead as symbols for the
whole war effort suffered by the population when they were not the motif of
more private religious commemorations. While the public space, especially in
the urban areas, was under the supervision of the Romanian authorities, the
local communities, regardless of their ethnic or religious background, orga-
nized sections of their local cemeteries dedicated to those fallen before build-
ing any war monuments nearby.
152 Hariton

The War Experience in the Romanian Interwar Literature

In mid-August 1916, Romania declared war (only) to Austro-Hungary in the

name of “liberating the brothers from Transylvania.” The nineteenth century
Italian model of Risorgimento (and the German model of unification) had
exerted a huge influence on the way the Romanian political elites approached
their relationship with the multinational Habsburg Empire. Believing they
will only repeat the trip to Sofia from 1913, the Romanian Army crossed the
Carpathians, but in less than two weeks the enthusiasm from the streets of
Bucharest transformed into a deep concern after the disaster of Turtucaia and
during the desperation of the months of September and October. The win-
ter that followed showed only the lack of preparation for war on the part of
Romanians, the irresponsibility of many Romanian politicians, and to some
extent the incompetence of the General Staff. The territory of the Old Kingdom
was transformed into a battlefield and only a few escaped the vicissitudes of
the war that ensued for over a year and a half, either fighting on the front, being
under the occupation of the Central Powers or, at best, being in the back of
the front. Only the unilateral declaration of peace in November 1917 by Lenin
forced the Romanian authorities to take into consideration a separate peace
which was signed in March 1918, but never voted in by the Parliament and/or
sanctioned by King Ferdinand.
The sequence of events which brought Romania on the side of the Entente,
the extremely low level of preparation of the Romanian troops for the war
(mainly the lack of heavy artillery and machine guns), the responsibility of
political and military decisions before and especially after August 1916, were all
highly debated during the 1920s. There were debates about the strategic deci-
sions taken during the war or recollections from the centers of political and mil-
itary decisions authored by Constantin Stere, general Dumitru Iliescu, Nicolae
Iorga, Constantin Kiriţescu and Alexandru Averescu, Gheorghe Brătianu, not
to forget the highly praised memories of Queen Mary; recollections from the
battles written by former combatants, rank and file soldiers or higher officers;
recollections from the battles at Danube and the captivity in Bulgaria; recollec-
tions of daily life during the war belonging to the Mitropolite Pimen of Moldavia
and several other recollections from the period of German o­ ccupation of
Romania authored by Constantin Bacalbaşa and Pia Alimănişteanu; more or
less official accounts of the war by Sabina Cantacuzino, Mircea Vulcănescu,
and even commemorative writings by Vasile Pârvan, the list could go on.
The inter-war period represented a golden era for Romanian high cul-
ture, compared with the pre-war period and especially with what followed
after the WWII. Most of the intellectuals who were affirmed in the 1920s and
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 153

who ­continued to be very active also in the 1930s, were born in the 1880s,
some of them in the 1890s. Being in their late twenties to late thirties, many
of them were mobilized for the Balkan war of 1913 or for the Great War and
the Romanian campaign in Hungary (1916–1919). Many artists like Dumitru
Paciurea (1873–1932), Camil Ressu (1880–1962), Iosif Iser (1881–1958), Nicolae
Dărăscu (1883–1959), Ion Jalea (1887–1982), Cornel Medrea (1888–1964) and
Oscar Han (1891–1976) participated in the WWI, and this was made visible in
their writing, at least for the period up to early 1920s. Also, among the writ-
ers, George Topârceanu (1886–1937) was taken prisoner after the lost battle
of Turtucaia and spent two years as a POW in Bulgaria, while Camil Petrescu
(1894–1957), after fighting on the frontline, was taken prisoner in 1917 by the
Hungarian troops. Mihail Sadoveanu (1880–1961) took part in both campaigns
of 1913 and 1916–1918, but as a journalist, while Ştefan Zeletin (1882–1934)
fought on the frontline. Hortensia Papadat–Bengescu (1876–1955) was a nurse,
while Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972) was also a sanitary.
War literature developed especially during the 1920s. There was no
Romanian equivalent for Henri Barbusse’s Le feu (1916), the French novel
that was fast distinguished with the Goncourt Prize and translated also into
Romanian by Felix Aderca.29 The social-democratic groups were thin in their
number, many of them joining the Liberal party at the turn of the century,
with their moderate agenda consisting in pressing for the land and electoral
reforms already discussed in Chapter Three. Some of them remained in the
area occupied by the Central Powers, while others took refuge in Moldavia
and created Partidul Muncii in early 1917, following the Russian Revolution, or
joined Alexandru Averescu’s Partidul Poporului a year later. Mihail Sadoveanu
authored Bloody files: stories and impressions of the frontline [File sângerate:
povestiri şi impresii de pe front] (1917) and later the novel The Lăpuşneanu
Street (1923); Hortensia Papadat-Bengescu shared her experience in Balaurul
(1923), while Ion Minulescu wrote and published Red, Yellow and Blue [Roșu,
Galben și Albastru] (1924), which sets a love story during the retreat to Iași
from the late 1916. War poetry was written by Octavian Goga, Nichifor Crainic,
Camil Petrescu and several others. Still, the most important novels were Liviu
Rebreanu’s The forest of the hanged. [Pădurea spânzuraţilor] (1922),30 Cezar
Petrescu’s Darkening [Întunecare] (1927–1928) and The eyes of the ghost [Ochii
strigoiului] (1942), and Camil Petrescu’s Last night of love, first night of war
[Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război] (1930). The chronology of
writing and publishing these novels correlates with an intense interest among

29  Barbusse, Prăpădul. Din jurnalul unei căprării.

30  Rebreanu, Forrest of the hanged.
154 Hariton

the reading public in the early 1920s, an interest in the war experience which
later subsided and became quite rare during the 1930s.
Henri Barbusse’s Le feu (1916), Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk,
Arnold Zweig’s The case of sergeant Grischa (1927), Erich Maria Remarque’s
All quiet on the Western front (1929) and Hemingway’s Farewell to arms (1929)
were translated into Romanian as late as the 1960s. However, even without my
attempt to trace their direct reception, it is safe to assume they were known
from their French translations or from the Hollywood versions of Remarque’s
and Hemingway’s novels (1930 and 1932). Hollywood movies were very popular
in interwar Romania and this was visible to some extent in the structure of
the novels by Cezar Petrescu, Mihail Sebastian and others. Only Ernst Jünger’s
1920 version of Storm of steel seems to have been extremely popular, since in
1924, it had already had its fifth Romanian edition, but this must be interpreted
also as an interest for the German point of view, visible also in the number
of translations of books about the battles in 1916–1918. It is not excluded that
Jünger’s novel was circulated mostly among the former combatants of the
K.u.K. army.31
In the following section I give a sketch of three novels and three recollec-
tions which are either very famous or best illustrate the wide palette of atti-
tudes towards war experience.32 These novels are Liviu Rebreanu’s (1885–1944)
Pădurea spânzuraţilor [Forrest of the hanged] (1922), Cezar Petrescu’s (1892–
1961) Întunecare [Darkening] (1927–1928), and Camil Petrescu’s (1894–1957)
Ultima noapte de dragoste, întâia noapte de război [Last night of love, first
night of war] (1930),33 while the recollections taken into discussion are Ştefan
Zeletin’s (1882–1934) Retragerea [The Retreat] (1926), Gheorghe Brătianu’s
File rupte din cartea războiului [Pages torn from the book of war] (1934), and
George Topârceanu’s (1886–1937) Pirin-Planina, epizoduri tragice şi comice din
captivitate (1936).34

31  Jünger, Prin furtuni de oțel.

32  Most of the ideas presented in the following lines were developed in my paper “War
Commemorations in Inter-War Romania: Cultural Politics and Social Context” presented
at the conference “Sacrifice and regeneration. The legacy of the Great War in interwar
Eastern Europe”, University of Southampton, September 13–15, 2007.
33  Rebreanu, Pădurea spânzuraţilor; Petrescu, Întunecare; Petrescu, Ultima noapte de dra-
goste, întâia noapte de război.
34  Zeletin, Retragerea; Brătianu, File rupte din cartea războiului; Topârceanu, Pirin-Planina,
epizoduri tragice şi comice din captivitate.
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 155

While Liviu Rebreanu does not insist on war horrors and Ștefan Zeletin uses
his story of war experience to violently denounce the discrepancies between
the shortages on the frontline versus the abundance behind the frontline, as
well as the incompetence of the Romanian military and political leaders, Cezar
Petrescu and Camil Petrescu (no kinship relation) place their main characters
in the middle of the war experiences, largely depicting fighting moments and
from time to time describing atrocities their characters could observe. In the
case of the last two, Gheorghe Brătianu and George Topârceanu, the first one
is sober in his attitude, while the other one constructs his story as a travel
account into an exotic land, sometimes describing the summary executions
of the Romanian POW by some Bulgarians soldiers when they wanted to rob
them or when they did not have food or water for the prisoners.
Already famous for his first novel, Ion (1920), Liviu Rebreanu developed a
sketch he already published in the same year, Catastrofa (The catastrophe), in
order to depict the drama of his own brother Emil who was an officer in the
Austro-Hungarian army and hanged for treason on the Romanian front while
trying to cross the lines. The main character of Pădurea spânzuraţilor, Apostol
Bologa, is a reserve officer on the Galician front doing his duty, who doesn’t
question too much his own consciousness, which is made clear at the moment
of his assisting the hanging of a Czech officer, Svoboda, who tried to cross the
lines to the Russians. Only in the moment when he found out he was going to
be moved to the Romanian front, he tried to convince his superiors either to be
kept in Galicia or to be sent to the Italian front. After a period of hesitation and
several attempts to cross the lines, he gets arrested and hanged like Svoboda.
“Duty” and “nationality” are the main keywords of the novel, the character
names are symbolically chosen (apostle and svoboda/liberty), but the war
scenes are not present at all, while the horrors of the war are not even sug-
gested. Liviu Rebreanu also wrote the sketch Itzic Shtrul, dezertor (Itzic Shtrul,
a deserter, 1919), the drama of a Jewish soldier in the Romanian army who was
to be executed due to the anti-Semitism of his commanding officer. Ordered
one day to follow his corporal, he is given the choice to desert to the side of
the enemy. Instead of desertion, he hanged himself. One of the caricatures
of Romania Eroica turns on the alleged Jewish cowardice.
Perhaps under the impact of Rebreanu, but also due to the abundant lit-
erature of war recollections, Cezar Petrescu started to conceive his first
novel, Întunecare [Darkening], even though he did not participate directly in
the war. Some chapters were published in Gândirea in 1923–1924, a first vol-
ume was issued in 1927, and only after one year the two volumes were pub-
lished together. Very prolific and widely read in the 1930s, Cezar Petrescu had
156 Hariton

Honoré de Balzac as his intellectual model and therefore he wanted to depict

the “human c­ ondition” in the Romanian context. This is why Cezar Petrescu
tried to involve in his novels dozens of characters from all levels of the soci-
ety. The author uses Radu Comșa, supposedly the main protagonist, to pres-
ent the period of neutrality, the comradeship of the soldiers during the war
and the “betrayal of the oaths from the trenches” after the end of the war. Son
of a peasant and an ambitious young man who made himself through his com-
petence, and engaged to the daughter of a powerful Romanian businessman,
Radu Comșa accidentally assisted the large convoys of refugees to Moldavia
during the famous autumn 1916. He felt ashamed for his lack of “proper hero-
ism” and decided to volunteer for the front in spite of the disapproval of his
fiancée and her family’s opposition. Most of the novel presents war scenes,
sometimes comic, but mostly dramatic. It divides humankind (and for him,
this only means men) between the courageous who accepted the duty of self-
sacrifice, mostly peasants, and the cowards, sons of the rich, who were kept
through their families’ interventions in bureaucratic jobs, created especially
for them. In a very pessimistic tone, which encompasses especially the sec-
ond volume, Cezar Petrescu insists, on the one hand, on the “betrayal” of the
courageous by the postwar political leaders at a time when they were either
forgotten or their sacrifice was not properly recognized, while, on the other,
discusses the “betrayal of the oaths from the trenches” (to create a new and
better society) by the former combatants themselves, who preferred individu-
alistic opportunities instead of starting the spiritual revolution they were talk-
ing about in the trenches. Radu Comșa returned disfigured from the war, both
physically and spiritually, the author suggesting this as something emblematic
for all the former soldiers. Comșa is not able—and does not wish—to reinte-
grate in the environment he has left to join the army; he tries to go back to his
peasant origins, but he fails to reintegrate there as well, being disgusted with
the hypocrisy and the petty politics he comes to observe. He assists at a meet-
ing of the former soldiers brought together to discuss the spiritual revolution
they promised themselves in the trenches. The discussion ends in a stalemate
because the participants cannot agree whether the revolution should be inter-
national (thus opting for communism) or strictly national (leading to fascism).
Similar to Cezar Petrescu¸, but openly critical of all decisions of the Liberals,
Ștefan Zeletin violently denounced the incompetence of the Romanian politi-
cal and military leaders. As a reserve officer, he retreated with the rest of the
army from Transylvania and his recollections may sometimes be comical but
they are in fact dramatic: according to Zeletin, the Romanians were able to see
their road back only with the help of the German flares, the rockets used to illu-
minate their road to the Carpathians and beyond; the soldiers were retreating
War Commemorations in Inter-War Romania 157

continuously under the fire of the German heavy artillery, and every time they
would arrive at the indicated lines of resistance, nothing was ready, as if the
Romanian commanding officers had been communicating with the German
General Staff (a reference to the son of Dimitrie A. Sturdza, Alexandru Sturdza,
who unexpectedly crossed over to the Germans during the war). When his unit
arrives at the fortified line at Namoloasa, they find the cannons still oriented
towards east, as if the war was being fought against the Russians, a sign that
no preventive actions had been taken, and an indicator of the incompetence
of the Romanian General Staff. Zeletin’s division between the poor soldiers
and the incapable leadership is similar to Cezar Petrescu’s one, and most
probably this idea was omnipresent in the hearts and minds of a great major-
ity of the former Romanian soldiers during the 1920s. However, this division
between wholehearted soldiers and hypocritical bureaucrats and politicians
is not necessarily specific to the Romanian cultural context, but seems to be
a common characteristic of a great part of the media coverage dedicated to
former combatants in general.
The lack of serious preparation for war and the gap between this real-
ity and the jingoistic rhetoric of the Romanian elites is presented by Camil
Petrescu in the first part of his novel, which describes the atmosphere of daily
life before August 1916, while scenes of war are depicted in the second part
of the novel. Considered one of the best Romanian novels of the interwar
period, and regularly presented by many literary historians as a philosophi-
cal novel which reflects on the conditions of the intellectual versus the mate-
rial and spiritual corruption of ordinary people, this novel surveys the inner
conflict of Ştefan Gheorghidiu. Married out of love with a student colleague,
he suddenly becomes rich after the death of an uncle, a fact which results in
the transformation of his wife’s behavior. Suspecting that she is cheating on
him, Gheorghidiu’s jealousy makes him think permanently about the way to
find out for sure. The beginning of the war finds him as a reserve officer on
the Prahova Valley, from where he participates in the invasion of Transylvania.
A reflection on the human condition in general, and on human charac-
ters in particular, Camil Petrescu’s ultimate message relates more to the
war ­experience. The atrocities of the war (he describes a beheaded corpse
that continues walking) made him realize in the end the insignificance of
his personal unrest in comparison with the human and material destruc-
tions that affected thousands of other combatants and refugees, many of
them wounded and dragging out their lives in trenches and hospitals. The
novel is also indirectly a critique of the frivolity of those remaining behind
the lines (represented mainly by his wife), in line with Ștefan Zeletin and
Cezar Petrescu.
158 Hariton

After the coming back of Carol II to the throne of Romania in 1930, literature
depicting war experiences becomes less frequent, with no other great novel
written in relation to the war experience, but perhaps for Cezar Petrescu’s
Ochii strigoiului [The eyes of the ghost] (1942). Here, a combatant from the
WWI stays in a coma for twenty years, only to wake up in 1937 to find out a
totally new world. As in Darkening, the novel plays on the former combatants’
“betrayal” of their “oaths from the trenches.” A literary fiction and a recollec-
tion at the same time, Pirin-Planina of George Topârceanu is a rather curious
and comic piece, in which the period of captivity in Macedonia is depicted
like a trip to an exotic land with strange animals and vegetation and mem-
orable characters. This is a perfect example of how the memory of war had
become standardized through official politics, the growing indifference to the
war experiences and saturation of the public with the background of 1916–1918
in a period of celebration for Greater Romania, and of coping with the finan-
cial difficulties and the moral crisis brought about by the economic crisis of
1929–1933.
Created and circulated among a limited number of people, these literary
and artistic creations nonetheless represented the most visible expressions of
the cultural climate in general, as well as of the many individuals who read,
consumed or enjoyed these artifacts. Highly debated during the early 1920s
among the political and military players, the experience of the WWI was artic-
ulated during the 1920s through a series of novels, sketches and recollections
that reflected not only the personality of their authors, but the larger cultural
context in which they circulated and which was represented by the individuals
who took part in the WWI.

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 CHAPTER 10

Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of

Forgetting: Post-mortem Interpretations of WWI in
Bulgaria
Nikolai Vukov

The history of modern Bulgarian literature offers an unusual case of the

identification of mortal remains. In January 1954, during construction activi-
ties near the Iliyantsi Fort, a residential neighborhood of Sofia, several earth
pits that had once served as mass graves were accidentally discovered. The
graves, that contained between two and three hundred human skulls, were
soon recognized as holding the remains of victims in the bloody repressions
that followed the terrorist act at the Sveta Nedelya Church on April 16, 1925.1
In the skull bearing the number seventeen, excavators and forensic experts
found a blue glass eye, which was identified as belonging to the famous
Bulgarian poet, translator, and journalist, Geo Milev (1895–1925).2 Additional
proof for the identification was that the skull bore the marks of a series of trau-
mas that were consistent with the wounds that Milev had suffered in the battle

1  The Sveta Nedelya attack took place on Great Thursday, April 16, 1925. A group of radical left
activists of the Bulgarian Communist Party set an explosion on the roof of the church in the
center of Sofia. The attack was a response to the official banning of the Bulgarian Communist
Party after the September 1923 Uprising, the persecutions and murders of its members, and
the introduction of the Law for the Protection of State in the spring of 1925, which legal-
ized the repression of communists and their supporters. The explosion was planned to take
place during a burial service of General Konstatin Georgiev who had been killed by commu-
nists several days earlier. The intent was the murder of the military and political elite of the
state, including King Boris III, who by chance did not attend the service. During the explo-
sion, 134 people were killed and five hundred wounded, some of whom died subsequently.
The majority of the victims were high army officers, but the explosion also claimed the lives
of politicians and ordinary citizens. The terrorist action was followed by the mass arrests of
communist party members, their supporters, and also many ordinary citizens. Those who
were arrested were tortured and imprisoned, and around one thousand of them disappeared
without a trace, presumably killed by the police. A period of martial law prevailed for the
next half year.
2  Geo Milev (Georgi Milev Kasabov, born 1895) was a Bulgarian poet, journalist, and translator,
and the main figure of expressionism in Bulgarian literature; editor of the influential literary
journals Vezni (Scales, 1919–1922) and Plamăk (Flame, 1924–1925).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004316232_012

Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 163

of Doyran in April 1917.3 The identification was not difficult to make, because
among the thousand people who mysteriously disappeared in the month fol-
lowing the Sveta Nedelya terrorist act, no one else had an artificial eye made in
Germany, the final result of twelve separate surgical operations.
The identification of the skull ended the uncertainty that surrounded the
fate of this great figure in Bulgarian twentieth-century literature and confirmed
the suspicion that the poet had been among the victims of the white terror
that ensued after the coup d’état of 1923. Such suspicions had persisted because
of a series of articles he had written against the political regime of Alexander
Tsankov,4 and especially because of the publication of the poem “September”
dedicated to the September 1923 Uprising5 in the journal Plamak that Milev

3  The battles near Doyran in 1915–1918, known as the Doyran Epic in Bulgarian historiogra-
phy, were considered to be among the most glorious episodes in modern Bulgarian history.
The German command ordered a pause in the successful progress of Bulgarian troops in the
southwestern Balkan peninsula at Doyran, a small town in Macedonia. The Bulgarian army
built a strong defensive line in the area that withstood the systematic assaults of the Entente
troops for several years. In Doyran, the Bulgarian army fought against French, English,
Italian, Algerian, Moroccan, Senegalese, Zuavi, and Indo-Chinese soldiers, but never gave up
the fortified line. Thousands of Allied soldiers lost their lives in an effort to break the line,
but it remained impermeable, preventing the occupation of Bulgaria by the Entente forces.
Only after the breakthrough at another location on the southwestern Bulgarian front—at
Dobro pole—did General Vladimir Vazov, the commander of the Bulgarian troops in Doyran,
receive an order to withdraw. Thus, he remained undefeated during three continuous years
of battles. For more about Doyran epic, see especially Deliyski, Doyranskata epopeya, 124.
4  Alexander Tsankov (1879–1959) was a Bulgarian economist and politician, leader of the
party Demokraticheski sgovor (Democratic Alliance), and later of the pro-Fascist and pro-
Nazi national social movement. He was Prime Minister of Bulgaria from 1923 to 1926 and
his rule is associated with the brutal suppression of two uprisings, one in June 1923 and one
in September of the same year. He is also associated with the so-called white terror that
followed the attack at the Sveta Nedelya Church in April 1925, during which political oppo-
nents and intellectuals were persecuted and some killed. Among the latter were figures from
Bulgarian intellectual life such as Geo Milev, Sergey Rumyantsev, Hristo Yassenov, Iossif
Herbst, all of whom had fought during WWI.
5  The September 1923 Uprising was organized by the Bulgarian Communist Party with the aim
of bringing down the regime of Alexander Tsankov, which had risen to power during the June
9, 1923 coup d’état against the agrarian government of Alexander Stamboliyski. The uprising
took place mostly in the northwestern and south-central parts of the Bulgarian territory, and
was carried out by communists, agrarians, and anarchists, as well as peasants protesting the
miserable social and economic conditions. Army and police units suppressed the uprising
in the most brutal way possible, killing many participants and provoking a sharp reaction
from much of Bulgarian society, particularly intellectuals. This was reflected in numerous
influential pieces of literature and art from that period, Geo Milev’s poem “September”
164 Vukov

edited.6 In response to this poem, the authorities confiscated the issues of

the magazine, banned the publication, and put Milev on trial. On May 14,
1925, Geo Milev was sentenced to one year in jail and deprived of his civil and
political rights for two years. He appealed against the sentence, insisting on
defending himself without a lawyer, but on May 15 the police arrested him and
he disappeared without a trace. Only three decades later would the details of
his fate be revealed.
The reason for starting the current presentation with the fate of this poet
and his dead body is twofold. On the one hand, it reveals the fate of an entire
generation of intellectuals whose aesthetic education was lit by the stars of
European symbolism, whose adult years were filled with the echo of explo-
sions in the war trenches, and whose lives were thus marked by experience
in the battlefield and lost illusions after the war’s end. Although extraordinary,
the fate of Geo Milev—poet, humorist, playwright, artist, journalist, trans-
lator of Verlaine, Verharn, and Nietzsche, and a leading figure of Bulgarian
expressionism and literary abstractionism—was not all that atypical for the
Bulgarian intelligentsia of the time. Many served as wartime officers in a coun-
try that had not yet built its military system during the three decades after
independence, and many perished either in the Balkan Wars or WWI. Many
more had their illusions crushed by Bulgaria’s two National Catastrophes, the
first being defeat in the Second Balkan War and the annexation of territory to
Romania, the second being the defeat in the WWI, the Treaty of Neuilly in 1919,
and the loss of territory to the newly formed Yugoslavia and Greece. Perhaps,
worse still, they witnessed the tragedy and the political crises of the post-WWI
years, and some of them met their death in the repressions of the 1920s and
1930s. Less than a decade after so many members of the intelligentsia gave
their lives for the liberation and unification of Bulgaria, the state for which
they had died passed a law for its own protection that overtly violated basic

(published in 1924) being among the most inspiring and dramatic expression of resistance
to human destruction. After the establishment of communist rule, the September Uprising
was promoted as the main example of the struggle and suffering of the communist party
during the interwar period, and was called “the first anti-fascist uprising in the world.” About
the significance of the September 1923 Uprising in modern Bulgarian history, see Georgiev,
Septemvri 1923; Kosev, Septemvrijskoto văstanie v 1923 godina; Mihaylov, Septemvri 1923;
Vasileva, Septemvri 1923—geroichna epopeia.
6  The first issue of the journal came out in January 1924, and featured articles, literary pieces,
and translations. Geo Milev’s poem “September” was first published in this journal, together
with the beginning of his other poem “Ad” (Hell). Because of the poem “September,” issue 7–8
of the journal was confiscated and Geo Milev was put on trial. In January 1925, the journal
was banned, and Geo Milev was picked by the police and killed the following spring.
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 165

rights of political and public expression.7 Many of the surviving participants

of the wars became victims of these repressions—very often by police officials
who had been brothers-in-arms, men whom they had fought beside or even
commanded during the war.8
The second reason for drawing attention to the skull of the poet is to
reveal the particular division of memory about WWI in Bulgaria. The shock of
losing the war, the economic and social collapse, and the limitations on
Bulgaria as a defeated country did not provide fertile ground for officially sanc-
tioned commemorations during the early post-war years. The bloodshed dur-
ing the war’s aftermath and the divisions across the political spectrum laid the
conditions for the war’s problematic remembrance in the following decades.
In addition to controversy and trauma, the memory of the dead was further
complicated by the series of political crises and violently suppressed uprisings
that marked the interwar period, and later by the veil of collective forgetting
drawn across WWI after 1945.
The goal of the current presentation is to shed light on some of the contrast-
ing poles that determined the commemoration of WWI in Bulgaria—between
the initial series of victorious battles and the final disastrous defeat at the end;
between the need for commemoration and the unavoidable references to a
lost cause; between public attention to the dead and a political context that all
too often turned against those who survived. In the post-war years, the com-
memoration of the war dead in Bulgaria was marred by the trauma of defeat as
well as by the divisive lines across the political spectrum about who was guilty
for the Second National Catastrophe. These divisions were further sharpened
by the political crises and violently suppressed uprisings that punctuated
the interwar period. Although none of this prevented the emergence of local

7  The Law for the Protection of the State, approved by Legal order no. 2 on January 23, 1924
(published in Darzhaven vestnik 240, January 25, 1924)—was amended and lengthened sev-
eral times in 1925, 1934, and 1941. Aimed at crushing the activities of the political opposi-
tion and opponents to state policies, the law banned political organizations, introduced the
system of so-called political crimes, and severe punishments including long-term impris-
onment and death. The law prohibited the existence of all types of organizations, groups,
and associations that used either illegal means or revolutionary methods to forward their
goals. On the basis of this law, the Communist Party and its affiliated organizations were
proclaimed illegal in 1924.
8  Ironically, most of the military officials who died in the explosion in Sveta Nedelya Church
were soldiers or commanders during the WWI. Among them, for example, was General
Vladimir Vazov, the chief commander of Doyran battles. Yet, many other officers (such as
Geo Milev himself) had also served in the war and were murdered without trial in the repres-
sions that followed.
166 Vukov

practices for commemorating fallen soldiers, the state’s role in initiating its
own commemorations, given its own responsibility for sending the men to the
front and sacrificing them for what was ultimately a lost cause, was necessar-
ily curtailed. The general tone of accusation was sharpened by memories of
the Soldier’s Uprising, which was seen as an example of the state’s merciless
destruction of its own defenders. These memories were exploited by the com-
munist government during the interwar period, similar in a way to the Soviet
agenda of denying the significance of the WWI. This agenda was instrumen-
tal in drawing a veil of collective forgetting across WWI after 1945 in Bulgaria,
when historical writings on this episode of national history were limited to the
riots of protesting soldiers and the extent to which it reflected the expanding
role of the communist party and the approaching socialist revolution. Over the
course of several decades, both research on the WWI and commemoration of
its fallen soldiers became a mere shadow of the rituals of remembrance for the
communists, partisans, and anti-fascists who perished during WWII. Ironically,
it was only at the end of the twentieth century, more than seventy years after
the end of the WWI, that historians began to dedicate more engaged attention,
and commemoration of the war’s dead finally became independent of WWII
ceremonies. The current presentation, by tracing the main episodes in initi-
ating WWI commemorations during the course of the past century, will shed
light on the challenges that surrounded the collective remembrance of WWI
in Bulgaria and the various controversies that placed the experience of this
war into a position of contention, misinterpretation, and a sort of oblivion for
decades after its end.

The End of WWI and Its Aftermath

A key fact influencing the interpretation of the war in Bulgarian historiog-

raphy and public memory is that Bulgaria’s participation in the war initially
involved a series of successful military operations: in Niš, Ovčje polje, Kosovo,
Krivolak (1915), Lerin, Chegan, Bitola, Strumica, Cherna (1916), Tutrakan,
Dobrich, Kobadin, Bucharest (1916), and—the most glorious—in Doyran, the
place where Geo Milev lost his eye. In these battles, Bulgarian soldiers dem-
onstrated supreme heroism, not losing a significant battle until September
1918. However, the lengthy war and resulting economic crises triggered a series
of riots across the country and an anti-military propaganda campaign in the
army, which only grew more heated after the October Revolution in Russia
and the American President Woodrow Wilson’s peace program delivered in his
speech in January 1918. It was after the breakthrough of enemy forces at Dobro
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 167

pole on September 15, 1918 and the sudden retreat of Bulgarian troops that
the anti-war spirit escalated into organized riots. As a sign of protest against
government and king, approximately fifteen thousand soldiers marched to the
capital, where, led mainly by activists of the agricultural union and the social-
ist party, they proclaimed the abolishment of the monarchy and the establish-
ment of a republic. As they approached the capital, the soldiers were met by
army units faithful to the monarchy as well as German troops. A train filled
with sick and wounded soldiers was stopped by the guards and the men trav-
eling on it were brutally massacred. The atrocity only served to motivate the
rebel soldiers to go to the capital once again and deliver another ultimatum
for the government to give up power. On the morning of September 30, how-
ever, the government staged a counter-attack, suppressing the protests with
artillery units. The uprising—subsequently called the Soldiers’ Uprising9—
ended in massacres in which approximately three thousand soldiers were
killed and ten thousand wounded, many survivors from the previous wars.
The manifestation of social protest and riots from the ranks of the soldiers
was hardly unexpected. Similar to other countries engaged in WWI, Bulgaria
had seen a sharp dividing line emerge between the population and the govern-
ing elites at the end of 1916 and the beginning of 1917, erupting in social protests
and riots in major towns of the country and discontent at the war front. The
growing number of dead, problems with logistics and supporting the soldiers
on the frontlines, the unforgiving prolongation of the war effort, and news
about economic and social problems behind the lines led to the ongoing esca-
lation of social tensions. The last phase of the war in the summer of 1918 was
particularly challenging. The soldiers, exhausted by three years on the front,
repelled by the moral disintegration behind the lines, influenced by the anti-
military propaganda of socialists and agrarians, were in a state of revolution-
ary restlessness. Countless letters and warnings were sent to Sofia by soldiers
stating that if a peace was not signed by the middle of September, they would
leave the front. Many soldiers stated in no uncertain terms that they would not
stay in the trenches for another winter. In the rear, the situation was even more
dire. The total mobilization carried out by Bulgaria had led to a deep economic
crisis, a sharp decrease in agricultural and industrial production, unemploy-
ment, food shortages, and speculation on goods and prices.10 The army itself
suffered from shortages of food, clothes, arms, and munitions, and this also

9  The Soldiers’ Uprising is also known as the Vladaya Uprising after a village near the main
road to Sofia, on the route where the soldiers were attacked by the police.
10  As General Vladimir Vazov, the commander of the Doyran defense line made the follow-
ing remark: “Our army appeared honorable in every respect, however the rear and the
168 Vukov

caused riots in some of the army units and ultimately to the demonstrative act
of putting down arms in September 1918.
The end of the uprising actually marked the end of the war for Bulgaria,
which, despite initial glory on the battlefield, had led to catastrophic demo-
graphic, economic, and political conditions. The dead and missing numbered
101,224 (126,047 if those who died from disease and epidemic are included),
the wounded 150,026, the captured and those taken hostage after the Salonika
Agreement, 112,000.11 The economic consequences were immense and the
ideal of national unification, the primary purpose for participating in the war
in the first place, lay in ruins. According to the Neuilly Peace Treaty, signed
the following year, Bulgaria lost territory covering more than eleven thou-
sand square kilometers and had to pay enormous war reparations. Its regu-
lar army was dismissed and the Bulgarian population had to be resettled from
territories that were now controlled by neighboring countries.12 The Neuilly
Treaty marked the beginning of the most difficult period of development for
the Bulgarian state since its reappearance on the map of Europe with the 1878
liberation. The end of the war was accompanied by visions of gloom: thou-
sands of killed, crippled, and blind; waves of refugees, returning prisoners, and
invalids; countless mourning families, widows, and orphans. The Bulgarian
people, already at the end of their reserves of strength, continued to wallow in
deprivation and m ­ isery—a reality that would stay with them for more than a
decade. Furthermore, in the context of international isolation and economic
depression, the country had to solve a number of internal issues, chief among
them being political crises that lasted an entire decade, the rapid turnover of
several governments, escalating political tension, and periods of authoritarian

rear intelligence were corrupt, egoistic, and greedy for wealth.” See Deliyski, Doyranskata
epopeya, 75.
11  These statistics are even more appalling when considering that this was the third war and
the second defeat in five years. Bulgaria fought in the two Balkan Wars from 1912 to 1913,
the first on the winning side against the Ottoman Empire, and the second on the losing
side against its former allies. In the First Balkan War, 33,219 Bulgarian soldiers died and
53,465 were wounded. In the Second Balkan War, 20,606 died and 50,303 were wounded.
12  In terms of territory, Bulgaria lost Southern Dobrudja, access to the Aegean Sea, and even
the western borderlands that had never been disputed before. The reparations payments
assigned to the Bulgarian state were onerous. The Bulgarian army was slashed to the bone
and many of its troops turned to mercenary opportunities. The army was decreased to
eight infantry regiments, three thousand borderline troops, an insignificant artillery, a
small cavalry, three engineer and two cyclist troops. The air force and navy were shut down
completely. For the first historiographical reflections on the Second National Catastrophe,
see Bankov, Prichinite na pogroma; Kapchev, Narodniya pogrom pred durzhavniya sud.
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 169

rule. Enmity and lack of compromise were established as a norm in political

life and often led to violent clashes and bloody persecutions, a state of affairs
that climaxed with the uprising of September 1923 when thousands of rebels
lost their lives.
This uprising and its bloody suppression gave impetus to Geo Milev’s dra-
matic poem, but it was the repercussions of the banning of the Communist
Party that offered the pretext for Sveta Nedelya terrorist attack and laid the
foundations for the new wave of persecutions in which the poet met his death.
In the following section, we will explore the evolution of WWI commemora-
tions in Bulgaria in order to better understand the significance of his death.

Commemorating the Dead during the Interwar Period

By the end of WWI, some hundred thousand Bulgarian soldiers had not
returned from the battlefields. With few exceptions, the dead were buried
in the location of the battles where they died, their graves marked by simple
memorial markers usually made by surviving brothers-in-arms. After the war,
most of these graves remained outside Bulgaria’s new borders and as a rule
were destroyed and left without commemorative markers by the authorities
in the countries where they were located. The Bulgarian state was not permit-
ted to take care of the war graves outside of its territories and family members
were prevented from paying visits to the battlefields, thus limiting the develop-
ment of so-called “battlefield tourism” that characterized the commemorative
activities in victorious countries. Because of this state of affairs, the monu-
ments that were erected generally did not rely on a spatial relationship to the
site of death nor did they involve the incorporation or burial of soldiers’ actual
remains. Most were erected by local communities to commemorate their own
members who died in the war.13 In general, monuments or signs where death
was presented by symbolic (rather than spatial) references commemorated
the thousands of known and unknown graves of Bulgarian soldiers. Apart
from the direct reference to the location where they originated, the identity of
the dead in these monuments was constituted exclusively by names in a com-
mon list and, if known, dates and locations of death. The sculptural figure that
usually stood upon these memorial plynths was of a soldier in an attacking or
guarding position, signifying the military aspects of the soldiers’ deaths.

13  A brief presentation of this topic with the emphasis on the input of women in commemo-
rative practices after the war can be found in Vukov, “The aftermaths of defeat,” 29–47.
170 Vukov

These commemorative forms played an important role in emphasizing

local and regional identities—each one clearly expressing its tragic share in
the wars of the nation. Before WWI, public commemorative signs in small
towns and villages were a rarity. In larger towns and in the capital, monu-
ments to the Russian-Turkish War and the Liberation of Bulgaria, as well as
busts of major national liberation fighters occurred in the pre-WWI period. At
best, public memorialization in smaller locations comprised signs on graves
dedicated to fallen Russian soldiers or memorial plaques to the dead in the
Serbian-Bulgarian War. Thus monuments to the dead of WWI became the prin-
cipal occasion for smaller communities to engage in public commemoration.
Similar to the situation in many other countries, the memorial experience
was dictated by the enormity of the dead as well as by the distant location of
the soldiers’ death sites, which eliminated the possibility of private or indi-
vidual commemoration in the village or town cemetery. In fact, private com-
memoration was customarily carried out by family members burying clothes
when they heard of the death of their sons, fathers, brothers, and husbands.
In such a way, the public monuments in local communities functioned as an
additional, supra-personal act of respect to the dead, and a collective sign of
the contribution that the communities had made to this tragic experience
of the nation. Most of these monuments were built with donations collected
by the communities themselves, with the participation of local institutions
such as schools, churches, and the municipality. These acts of charity during
the tough post-war years of poverty and economic constraint were particularly
impressive and showed the commitment of the Bulgarian people to preserve
in public representation the memory of those who perished during the war.
Aside from local cases of commemorating fallen soldiers from a particular
town or village, there were also efforts during the war years and the immediate
post-war period to construct military cemeteries for the war dead. However,
due to the specific conditions of the war in Bulgaria—namely, that most of the
battles took place in territories that fell outside the borders of the state after
the end of the war—the only military cemetery of this kind that remained
was the one in Tutrakan, a town on the Danube River where another major vic-
tory had been achieved by Bulgarian troops.14 Already during the war, a ­grateful

14  This operation took place on the Northern Front at the Romanian border and was moti-
vated in part by the goal of taking revenge for the intervention of Romania in the Second
Balkan War, when it betrayed Bulgaria, attacking it, and contributing to its defeat. As a
result, Southern Dobrudja, a territory with predominantly Bulgarian population, was sub-
sequently subsumed into Romanian territory. Because the participation of Bulgaria in
WWI was largely driven by the idea of retribution for the injustices and territorial losses
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 171

population had built the memorial Military Cemetery 1916 at the location of
Fort Six on the Romanian defensive line where they had buried Bulgarian,
German, and Romanian soldiers who had died during the battle. At the initia-
tive of the Tutrakan charity committee, a so-called Brotherly Mound was also
raised there. The Fourth Preslavska Division decided to build a national park
with an ossuary in memory of the dead soldiers at their headquarters. A special
charity fund was established in an effort to achieve this initiative.15 After the
end of the war, the second Romanian occupation of Southern Dobrudja pre-
vented the building of the planned chapel and ossuary. However, in 1922, the
local population built an obelisk on which the following phrase was written in
the Bulgarian, German, Romanian, and Turkish languages: “Honor and glory to
those who died heroically for their Fatherland.” In the interwar period, celebra-
tions of the Tutrakan Epic were held in nearby towns that remained within
Bulgarian territory (Shumen, Razgrad, and Russe). Only after the Kraiova
Agreement and the return of Southern Dobrudja and Tutrakan to Bulgaria on
September 21, 1940, were the commemorations at the cemetery renewed. In
1941, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle, the first big national cel-
ebration of the epic was held and charity campaigns for building the chapel-
ossuary started again. In the following year, wooden crosses were substituted
with stone ones and the brotherly mounds were restored. However, due to the
intensification of WWII and the onset of the communist period after the war’s
end, attention to the site was once again postponed until the 1980s.16
The participation of Bulgaria in three consecutive wars within a period
of seven years created a situation where they wasn’t enough time to specifi-
cally commemorate the fallen in the first two wars—that is, the two Balkan
Wars. Thus, the majority of the monuments that were built in these com-
munities listed the fallen in the Balkan Wars and WWI together. Frequently,
lists of WWI dead were added to the lists on monuments of a more general

that the country suffered after the Second Balkan War of 1913, the military operations in
Dobrudja and on the Northern Front and were a logical and expected step. In the begin-
ning of September, the Bulgarian army crossed the border with Romania and entered
Southern Dobrudja. Within a week, the Bulgarian troops regained most of this territory,
eliminating most of the Romanian army in the area, and virtually assuring Romania’s exit
from the war. The largest and most important victory of the Bulgarian troops was the
one at the Tutrakan fortress, taken by Bulgarian forces in early September. This battle
is sometimes called the Romanian Verdun and is known in Bulgarian historiography as
the Tutrakan Epic. Around eighteen hundred Bulgarian soldiers and officers, thirty-four
Germans, and more than eight thousand Romanians died in the battle.
15  See Boychev, Tutrakanska epopeia, 117.
16  Ibid., 118.
172 Vukov

type—for ­example, a monument to the dead in the wars for national libera-
tion. In terms of the design of these monuments, they were generally small
obelisks or pyramids with memorial plaques attached to their sides. Few of
the monuments erected by local communities exceeded this modest memorial
form. Only in rare cases were they adorned by a military cross or a soldier’s flag,
and sculptural figures would top monuments mainly in cases of state spon-
sored memorial initiatives that began to be build in the mid-1920s. For the most
part, memorial lists or stele, whether placed beside a separate monument or
representing the sole memorial form in the village, were the most widespread
form of commemoration initiated by local communities. The locations of the
memorial plaques were most often the local school, church, municipality, or
cultural house (chitalishte). It is important to note that in all these monuments
and commemorative lists, no distinctions were made along ethnic or religious
lines. Only the names of the fallen would indicate their affiliation to different
ethnic or religious communities.
Parallel to local commemorations for paying tribute to the dead, the state
began to sponsor initiatives for public monuments as early as the 1920s. Due to
the loss of the war and the poor economic conditions of the post-war period,
these monuments were also characterized by relatively modest forms, rarely
including more than the figure of a soldier or a military cross as decoration.
Most of them came in the simple form of “a soldier’s monument to those who
died for the liberation of Bulgaria.” Although not restricted during the first
post-war years, the appearance of these monuments became possible only
in the late 1920s when the country slowly began to recover from the National
Catastrophes, that is when it could afford the financial means for such memo-
rials, and when a more self-assured feeling about the future of the country
began to emerge again. The bones of approximately four thousand Bulgarian
soldiers who participated in the Balkan Wars and WWI were brought from
distant battlefields and interred. Monuments to unknown soldiers appeared
in towns such as Botevgrad, Haskovo, Kardjali, and Krumovgrad. The funds
for these monuments were provided by the Ministry of War and by various
organizations of war veterans and military organizations. Combining the com-
memorations to the fallen in several wars for liberation, these monuments
expanded on the joint commemoration of several national historical events,
listing together soldiers who fell on the fronts of WWI with figures from the
nineteenth century liberation struggle and the dead from the 1885 Serbian-
Bulgarian War.
Commemorations for the dead involved not only memorial building, but
also commemorative rituals, which were manifested on the family, commu-
nity, and state level. Within the realm of the family, the memory of the dead
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 173

was marked according to the traditional calendar of special days and followed
the pattern of folk commemorative rituals. In addition to the burial customs,
which, absent the body, customarily included the burying of the clothes of the
dead man, there also existed an established system of commemorative acts
observed for every member of the community. Among them, the Soul’s Days
(four in number in the traditional Bulgarian calendar) were observed to affirm,
in accordance with the Christian doctrine, the immortality of the soul and the
undying memory that the living have of the loved one.17 Other rituals included
gathering the family together, visits to the grave, pouring water and wine over
the grave, and sharing food with other people for the benefit of the departed
soul. The gravesites without bodies in local cemeteries served to attach the
dead members to their communities of origin and to involve them in the cycle
of commemorative acts that would assure the appeasement of their souls and
the sustenance of their memory.
The greatest of these Soul Days during the year is the one that takes place
on the Saturday before Saint Archangel Michael’s day (November 1) and is
widely known in Bulgarian as Arhangelovska zadushnitsa. The day is dedicated
to Archangel Michael, the saint venerated as the leader of celestial forces and
a fighter against the dark spirit, a protector and guide of human souls in their
path to the beyond. The Orthodox iconography depicts the saint with a spear
in his hand, trampling the devil underfoot. It is no coincidence that after WWI,
this Soul’s Day was renamed “Soldier’s Soul Day,” as a tribute to the wars that
Bulgaria had fought before the 1920s all of which had begun on the eve of
November. Thus the day was fixed as a day of commemoration for all soldiers
who died for the Motherland. The tradition of linking war commemoration
to this day can be traced back to a time soon after the Serbian-Bulgarian war,
in which the army lost an enormous number of soldiers at Slivnica on the eve
of the saint’s day. In that case, Bulgaria still managed to achieve victory and win
the war. Almost immediately after the end of this war, solemn commemora-
tions and festive celebrations were carried out in many regions of the coun-
try. Frequently, military parades in memory of the fallen took place with the
participation of local authorities, schools, and public organizations. As a sign
of commemoration, the day had acquired significance already in the pre-war
period as a time for celebration and ceremony in the public calendar and as a
military holiday for army units, thus demonstrating the consolidation of state
ceremonies around the values of military virtue and honor in battle.
The military cross or cross of valor, which adorns most of the war monu-
ments from that period, held a special place in the rituals of honoring war

17  For more about these, see Vakarelski, Bulgarski pogrebalni obichai.
174 Vukov

heroes. It was a symbol of the gradual overcoming of grief for the dead and
its replacement with a discourse of vitality and an affirmation of the revival
of the state for which the soldiers had given their lives. Thus, it created a stark
contrast with the state’s negligence in admitting the culpability of the political
elite for triggering WWI and its responsibility for the subsequent death tolls.
The failure to take responsibility was coupled with forgetfulness about the
protestors murdered in the Soldiers’ Uprising. This general tendency was also
reflected in attitudes towards war veterans, many of whom were persecuted,
suffered a violent death during the post-war political uprisings, or commit-
ted suicide due to disillusionment with post-war reality. Ironically, many high
officers who had been spared far more violent battles, died or were wounded
in the ruins of the Sveta Nedelya Church, and other war veterans were killed in
the repressions that followed the terrorist attack.
In the early 1930s, state commemoration of those who had perished in WWI
was enabled by the relatively calm political situation and the passage of time
since the war, allowing for a more dignified and distanced treatment of the
dead. In terms of the international context, the country had gradually over-
come its isolation, facilitated in part by the relaxation of reparations payments
agreed to at the Lausanne Conference in 1932, the improvement of diplomatic
and trade relationships with Soviet Russia and Yugoslavia, and the Salonika
Agreement with the countries of the Balkan Pact, which dissolved the military
clauses in the Neuilly Treaty and the Lausanne Convention. Although there
were still reminders of the humiliating situation during the post-war years,
these were also signs of hope, indications that the decade of disastrous eco-
nomic and political conditions might soon be over. In political terms, the early
1930s saw a relative stabilization in the political scene with the continuous rule
of the People’s Bloc (1931–1934) and the introduction of a number of economic
measures and the declaration of political amnesty in 1932. During this period,
although the issue of war commemoration was not in the foreground of public
and political debate, the remembrance of the dead in the wars for national
liberation and unification received unreserved state support. It was during
this time that the national monument to the dead in the Russian-Turkish war
located on Shipka Peak, which had long been unfinished, was finally com-
pleted. Several other larger memorials to the dead were also constructed. In
the ceremonies connected to these sites, the fallen in WWI were incorporated
into the pantheon of all those who had died for the motherland, and rituals of
mourning acquired a solemn and emotionally restrained overtone.
Although the highly emotional themes of loss and the deprivation of
orphaned children continued to be manifested in various memorial forms,
the prevailing symbolism was one of the sober apotheosis of soldiers into the
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 175

national pantheon. This general approach was motivated both by two efforts:
first, the desire to reassert the ability of the state to overcome the trauma of
the National Catastrophes, and; second, the need to move on and forget the
traumatic events of the immediate post-war years during which time the state
had turned against its citizens and defenders. Throughout the recurring initia-
tives of commemorating the war dead in the 1930s, the state was strengthening
its message of military valor and power, while, at the same time, withholding
commemoration from the many victims of violence during the war’s after-
math, many of whom had been survivors of the war itself. Particularly those
who were killed during the Soldier’s Uprising and the September 1923 Uprising
were excluded from commemorative attention until after the end of WWII.
There was, however, another trend in the commemoration of Bulgaria’s war
dead during the 1930s. With the creation of Alexander Tsankov’s People’s Social
Movement, which included in its program the ideas of Italian and German
Fascism, and with the coup d’état of May 19, 1934 staged by the political move-
ment Zveno, the Military Union, the right-wing Agricultural Union activists,
and the People’s Social Movement, many of the military overtones of pub-
lic commemoration were embraced anew, and what was extracted from the
memory of the war dead was the thirst for legitimate revenge. During a period
of harsh political measures (including the dissolution and prohibition of all
political parties and organizations along with the confiscation of their prop-
erty, censorship, a ban on most political activities, the promulgation of laws
for the protection of the state, the introduction of a corporate organization
of society along the Italian fascist model), the Second National Catastrophe
after WWI was used as a justification for military actions. Despite the relative
pacifism of the mid-1930s, which involved the dissolution of the Military Union
(1935–1936) and a State Law for preserving the moral and material strength of
the military by prohibiting all of its public and political activities, the tendency
to appropriate the memory of the dead and transforming it into a platform for
embracing fascist ideas continued into the mid-1940s. The strengthened role of
King Boris III in political life, his increased influence among the military corps,
and the gradual imposition of authoritarian rule, only served to exacerbate the
trend. In commemorative terms, this led to both the enhanced glorification
of the war dead and to a new militarization of Bulgarian society prior to and
during WWII.
The Communist Party and its affiliated organizations pursued a different
approach to commemoration during the interwar period. Having organized
numerous protests against Bulgaria’s participation in the war, it had lobbied
to persuade the soldiers at the front of the futility of the fight, and virtually
caused Bulgaria’s exit to the war with the Soldiers’ Uprising. After the end of
176 Vukov

the war, the Communist Party remained steadfast in condemning the war
experience and in refusing to incorporate it into historical continuities. This
policy of historical evaluation, largely in line with Soviet Russia’s attitude
and its policy toward the remembrance of WWI dead, differed critically from
the position of almost all of the other Bulgarian political parties and move-
ments in the interwar period and to a large extent formed a tradition of its
own. While the disasters of the war provided a pretext for claiming that almost
all post-war governments were illegitimate, Communist Party participation in
state-­supported commemorations during the 1920s and 1930s was strictly
avoided (and was not actually expected or welcome) as an expression of oppo-
sition to the state that sponsored them. In terms of this political and ethical
estrangement, the Party followed the ideological line of friendship with the
Soviet Union and insisted on focusing attention on those who had fallen in
social and class struggles as well as on heroes of international socialist move-
ments (such as the Spanish Civil War) rather than national ones. In addition,
those who perished in working class strikes and the dead rebels of the Soldiers’
Uprising (in which figures affiliated with the socialist ideas had a crucial input)
were an especially fruitful memory source for the Communist Party, particu-
larly those who from the June and September Uprisings of 1923, during which
many Communist Party members were killed or imprisoned. The insistence on
commemorating the latter rather the soldiers who died in WWI dead created a
very specific situation during the interwar period in Bulgaria, one that would
also influence the post-1944 commemoration of WWI dead.
However, for a time during the interwar period, the rift between these
contradictory approaches to commemoration was resolved in favor of the
national cause. Public monuments to those who had fallen during the wars
for national liberation continued to be built in the 1930s and early 1940s, with
a few notable examples, such as the monument to Mother Bulgaria in Veliko
Tarnovo, dedicated to the dead from the four wars between 1878–1918. From
1941 to 1944, a wide scale action for finding and maintaining military cem-
eteries where Bulgarian dead lay buried was undertaken in the territories
under Bulgarian administration in Macedonia, Greece, and Serbia. Thus, long
deferred initiatives for building monuments to fallen Bulgarian soldiers in the
territories outside the state borders were resumed after two decades. It was
also during this period that a number of new monuments to fallen Bulgarian
soldiers were raised at WWI battle sites. These would later be destroyed with
the evacuation of Bulgarian armed forces from Greece and Yugoslavia in 1944.
After the Kraiova Agreement of 1940, Southern Dobrudja was returned to
Bulgaria and monuments to the war dead from this region were also initiated.
Several villages were renamed for the heroes in the battles of the Northern
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 177

Front—General Toshevo, Polkovnik Dyakovo—and memorials erected for

them. In many cases when local initiatives did not result in a monument
before the end of the WWII, they were erected after 1944 as collective monu-
ments to the dead in the wars fought for the Fatherland between 1915–1944,
thus merging military struggle and sacrifice over the course of several decades.
This was a forerunner of how the commemoration of WWI dead would be
handled throughout the post-WWII period in Bulgaria. Even when appearing
(generally randomly) in memorial ensembles during the socialist period, refer-
ences to the WWI dead were, almost without any exception, overshadowed by
those who fell in WWII.
Still, despite the widespread practices of commemorating the dead through-
out the inter-war period until the mid-1940s, the memory of those who had
died in the trenches of WWI failed to become a symbol that united the nation
and consolidated the shattered image of the state after the Second National
Catastrophe. On the contrary, beyond showing uniform respect to the dead,
the memory of the war was riddled with divisions and contradictions. What
had the soldiers fought for? For what principle had they laid down their lives?
National unification, which had once again turned out to be a futile ideal? For
the state, which had thrown them into the slaughterhouse, and subsequently
failed to justify either the struggle or their death? What was the purpose of the
sacrifice and what was the message of those who, after years in the trenches,
repudiated their own actions by rioting back in the capital? And, more impor-
tantly, what could possibly justify the sacrifice of these soldiers when, in peace-
time, those who survived were faced the violence and repressions carried out
by their compatriots? The inability to answer those questions provided a ter-
rible criticism of the war and caused discord throughout the entire interwar
period.
Both during the war and after, the state failed to deal responsibly with the
political uses of the national cause, and its policies tended to undermine
rather than inspire loyalty to its power and institutions. While on the one hand
pursuing the systematic commemoration of the fallen, the state simultane-
ously turned against those who survived the war and, rather than taking on
a conciliatory role in the wake of the lost national cause, contributed to the
sharpened polarization of the entire society. In fact, with all the variations on
the meaning and nature of sacrifice, the practice of commemorating fallen
soldiers was perhaps the only area where the state could respect and honor
the dead, and at the same time seek to nurture coherence and unity. However,
in the context of the post-WWI war period and the violence that erupted—­
violence both against the state and initiated by the state against political oppo-
nents and ­former brothers-in-arms—the preservation of the war memory in
178 Vukov

acts of ­collective commemoration was an ironic replica of the unity that was
not possible to reestablish in society at large. It was a reminder of a sacrifice
that remained a futile one, both in terms of its failure to inspire a guiding ideal,
and in terms of the new circle of violence and death that came in its wake.

Commemorating the War Dead during Communist Rule and After

After the establishment of the communist regime, the remembrance of WWI

was in part determined by the position of the Communist Party during the
interwar period, but was also influenced by a number of other factors:
the Communist Party’s denial of WWI’s significance and labeling it an “imperi-
alist war” that did not deserve special memorial attention, the overshadowing
of WWI by the violent and the traumatic events during the war’s aftermath; the
shift of attention towards those who had fallen in WWII, who, due to their ideo-
logical affiliations with the Communist Party, were a more valuable memory
resource for the regime after 1944. Throughout the entire period of the com-
munist rule, the memory of the dead in the Balkan Wars and WWI was associ-
ated with the stigma of the National Catastrophes and the loss of territory that
these wars had brought to the country. While not disclaiming the noble aspects
of pursuing the national ideal of unifying lands where Bulgarians lived into
one state, post-1944 ideology emphasized the “imperialist” character of WWI
and the criminal intentions of the Bulgarian bourgeoisie in placing the country
into world combat, once again on the side of the defeated nations. In keep-
ing with this interpretation, attention to WWI was largely downgraded at the
expense of the preceding Balkan Wars (particularly the first one), and when
these wars were commemorated at all, it was generally targeted toward “all
those who died for national liberation and unity.” Sometimes, the phrase “the
dead in the wars at the beginning of the twentieth century” was used, but, even
in this case, the emphasis fell on the victorious battles of the Bulgarian Army
during the First Balkan War. On occasion, there would be autonomous com-
memorations for the WWI dead, but in terms of official ritual and memorial
building, they tended to be combined with the fallen soldiers from the Balkan
Wars, thus forming an inseparable unity of the dead in the nation’s wars, mak-
ing them largely indistinguishable from one another, with no group having a
separate identity.
This tendency in memorial attention was also reflected in the historio-
graphic literature about WWI generated during the communist period. As con-
cluded by scholars during the last two decades, the participation of Bulgaria in
WWI was one of the “inconvenient topics” about which monographs were not
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 179

published and ceremonies not held.18 The sole exception to this rule was the
Soldiers’ Uprising, to which special monuments were built in the main loca-
tions where it occurred (Kyustendil, Radomir, Vladaya, and Sofia), and ritual
gatherings held promoting the uprising as an epitome of the soldiers’ revolu-
tionary spirit against the bourgeoisie and emphasizing the Communist Party’s
influence in the ranks of the army at that time. The “class and party approach”
that was used to interpret WWI during the communist period was comple-
mented with political censorship and the need to maintain good relation-
ships with Bulgaria’s neighbors, including Romania, a Warsaw Pact member,
Yugoslavia, a “socialist state,” and, Greece, a state with which the Communist
Regime sought rapprochement.19 Thus, Turkey was the only neighboring coun-
try over which Bulgarian had enjoyed wartime victories that could be acknowl-
edged. However, because it fought on Bulgaria’s side during WWI, the emphasis
logically fell on the battles in Thrace during the Balkan Wars.20 Thus, as regards
Turkey, the focus in historical writings and school textbooks was on the cap-
turing of the Odrin (Edirne) fortress and the other armed victories against the
Ottoman Empire, whereas military successes during WWI—including opera-
tions in Tutrakan, Dobrich, Kubadin, and Doyran were disregarded, receiving
almost no historiographic attention. While the specific understanding of “good
neighborly relations” during the communist period prevented paying tribute
to the soldiers who died in the wars of liberation and unification,21 triumphant
historical episodes—such as when the Bulgarian army fought against its sub-
sequent “liberator,” the Russian troops,22 in Dobrudja—were either ­forgotten
or stigmatized because of the regime’s position on Bulgarian-Russian and

18  Markov, Golyamata voyna i bulgarskiyat klyuch za evropeyskiya pogreb, 1914–1916, 9.

19  Markov, Golyamata voyna i bulgarskata strazha mezhdu Sredna Evropa i Orienta,
1916–1919, 11.
20  Ibid.
21  Ibid., 15.
22  Bulgaria gained its liberation from the Ottoman Empire after the Russian-Ottoman War
of 1877–1878. Although motivated mostly by the geopolitical and geostrategic ambitions
of the Russian Empire for political and economic control of the of Bosphorus and the
Dardanelles straits and of the Balkan peninsula, the war nevertheless brought about
the reappearance of the Bulgarian state on the map of Europe and thus was legitimately
viewed as a war of liberation. Approximately seventy thousand Russian soldiers died in
this war (during the communist period this number was inflated to two-hundred thou-
sand), and monuments, military cemeteries, and memorials were dedicated to the dead
by the grateful Bulgarian population. In the years after the war, and to some extent up to
the present, Bulgaria perceived Russia as its “liberator” and it was generally assumed that
Bulgarians would never raise arms against Russian soldiers. This assumption was proved
180 Vukov

Bulgarian-Soviet friendship. As a result, a number of historical episodes in

WWI, and particularly activities on Bulgaria’s Northern Front, were systemati-
cally disregarded.
The disregard for the Bulgarian soldiers who died in WWI is even more
remarkable when compared to the attention paid to the victims of the vio-
lent and traumatic events that took place during the first years after the war
ended. A systematic policy emerged soon after 1944 of commemorating the
victims of the class conflicts, social riots, and uprisings of the interwar period,
and particularly of the September 1923 Uprising, which was used as an illus-
tration of the brutality of the post-war regime against which the Communist
Party fought. Starting in the mid-1950s, a variety of actions were taken to keep
the memory of this uprising alive, including the building of memorials, the
implementation of political rituals, and the creation of historiographical and
literary texts. Similarly, during the same period, the narrative about the noble
character of the partisan and anti-fascists struggle led by the Communist
Party during WWII led to a large number of commemorative initiatives hon-
oring these special dead and far greater attention in general being dedicated
to WWII at the expense of all previous military engagements. Paradoxically,
well until September 1944 when Soviet troops crossed the Danube and entered
Bulgarian territory, Bulgaria, an ally of Nazi Germany, did not have troops at
the fronts and its military involvement was limited to the occupations of ter-
ritories belonging to Yugoslavia and Greece. Bulgaria’s actual involvement
as a combatant in WWII only began with the mobilization of the Bulgarian
army on September 9, 1944 and its participation in military operations with
the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany—a phase of the WWII that acquired
the term the Fatherland War of 1944–1945 in the Bulgarian historiography
generated during the communist period.23 Although the number of soldiers
who died in these operations numbered in the several thousands,24 any com-
memorative attention to them would have been incompatible with the honor
and glory attributed to Soviet soldiers, participants in the partisan guerilla war,
and to communist activists in general. Moreover, similar to the repressions of
­veterans and soldiers in the aftermath of WWI, many of the surviving soldiers

wrong during WWI on Bulgaria’s Northern Front, when Bulgaria and Russia faced each
other as enemies and engaged in battles that were won by the Bulgarian side.
23  This name was coined following the Soviet example and disregarded the fact that the
military operations took place in territories outside the “fatherland” of the Bulgarian sol-
diers: namely, in Yugoslavia, Austria, and Hungary.
24  Although there are some doubts as to the precise number, it is generally accepted that
approximately thirty-five thousand Bulgarian soldiers perished in this last phase of WWII.
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 181

and officers from the WWII battles against Nazi Germany were arrested and
persecuted after their return home. The assumption that they belonged to the
military elite of the state before communist rule was sufficient reason for per-
secuting them in humiliating fashion during the disastrous civil war in the first
year after 1944.25 An even greater irony was that some of these soldiers and
officers were also veterans from WWI and this was the second time they had
the misfortune of being welcomed home with hostility by the very state that
had deployed them to the frontlines.
In general, although several important monuments were dedicated to sol-
diers who perished in the Balkan Wars, WWI, and the Fatherland War from
1944–1945, commemorating these dead was not the focus of political rituals
during the communist period. In those years, what prevailed were monuments
to Soviet soldiers, communist activists, and various partisan groups that were
active during World War II and whose activities covered the entire territory of
the country. Not only were there no new memorials to WWI dead, but some
of the previous initiatives for building monuments to its fallen soldiers were
stopped, and there was no policy developed for the preservation and mainte-
nance of existing memorials. While poor relations between Bulgaria and its
neighbors prevented initiatives for maintaining war graves and military cem-
eteries outside the territory of the country, the situation within the country
for maintaining the existing monuments was hardly better. The lists of names
on some of the existing memorials in towns and villages were lengthened
with the addition of those local soldiers who died during the the Fatherland
War, but this did not help much in terms of general maintenance. In many
cases, the old monuments were in the shadows of newly constructed monu-
ments to communists and WWII partisan fighters, and the contrast between
the old and new was stark not only in terms of design, but also in terms of the
silence and lack of special rituals and ceremonies that accrued to the older
monuments. Some of the old WWI monuments were revamped with red stars
and other communist symbols, which improved their position within the new
ideological context. However, this was the exception. The more common case
was that monuments from the interwar period were poorly maintained and
received little public attention until after the end of the communist period.
After 1989, the post-communist period opened new conceptualizations of
history, memory, and representations of the national past, and brought about
a thorough transformation in all spheres of political, social, and cultural life.
In the first post-socialist years, there was a major impetus to dissolve previous
ideological interpretations and initiate new forms of historical identity and

25  Deliyski, Doyranskata epopeya, 123–124.

182 Vukov

collective allegiance. Many of the monuments related to communist ideol-

ogy were either toppled or redesigned, and new monuments were erected in
the public landscape. In this context, the previous void of attention to WWI
provided a convenient opportunity. Nevertheless, after almost five decades of
communist obsession with monument building and memorial initiatives to
the pet figures of the ideology, Bulgarian society was reserved during the first
half of 1990s about new projects involving monuments. Gradually, however,
the inclination toward monument building reemerged. Aside from memori-
als to the victims of the communist regime that were created in a number of
Bulgarian settlements, the other major form of expression were memorials
that bore a dedication for “all who died for Bulgaria” as a way of overcoming
the previous narrative about “all who died in the struggle against Fascism.” This
represented an effort to create a new collective identity of the dead and to inte-
grate within the public pantheon those who had been excluded before 1989.
One example of such an initiative was the monument for “all who died for
Bulgaria” erected in Razgrad in northeastern Bulgaria. The concept for the
monument dated back to the 1940s, but its realization was only possible after
1989 because of ideological constraints. The aim of the monument was the col-
lective commemoration of Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Armenians who per-
ished in Bulgarian wars. The monument features a sculpture of Saint George
Victorious, surrounded by two arches and wrapped in the image of the cross of
valor. On the occasion of the unveiling, the ceremonial roll-call and fireworks
were preceded by a religious ritual, a tradition established after the political
changes of 1989. On Saint George’s Day in 1995, another monument in honor of
the war dead was unveiled in Balchik, also in northeastern Bulgaria, and a sol-
dier’s monument for all who died for Bulgaria was dedicated at a ceremony in
Montana in northwestern Bulgaria. The concept for the monument in Montana
had emerged eighty-two years before, he decision to build the monument hav-
ing been made in 1913. WWI and the ensuing period of disunity delayed the
project, and after 1944, the communist regime confiscated the money that had
been gathered to finance the project. As a result of a lively controversy that
took place during the communist period about what monuments should be
located in the town center (particularly those to the 1923 September uprising),
this war memorial actually became the first “non-communist” monument in
Montana. It listed the names of eighty-five officers and soldiers, was decorated
with a military cross, and a quote of a famous verse by the Ivan Vazov, the
Bulgarian national poet: “Oh, Bulgaria, they died for you!” Later, a white stone
lion was placed at the monument’s base.
In fact, many of the memorials built after 1989 resulted from initiatives to
create collective monuments to the war dead from a given region, thus filling
Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 183

a gap that had been left during communist rule. In 1996, a project was created
for a pyramid to be dedicated to all soldiers from the Aytos region in south-
eastern Bulgaria who perished during the period from 1885 to 1945. The idea
was to depict a female figure symbolizing a mournful Mother Bulgaria beside
a pyramid upon which the names of four hundred soldiers whose bones are
gathered in the ossuary are listed. A similar approach for commemorating the
dead was followed in a 1996 initiative in Pernik in western central Bulgaria to
create a monument dedicated to the Unknown Soldier listing the names of
all the soldiers who died in Bulgarian wars from Pernik and nearby villages.
Monuments to those who died in the Balkan Wars, the WWI, and the Fatherland
War were erected in 1996 in the villages of Nikyup in north central Bulgaria
and Tsarvenyano in western central Bulgaria. The purpose of these monu-
ments was to remind the living about their shared duty to Bulgaria. A similar
monument to commemorate the memory of all the dead in the wars between
1885 and 1945 was unveiled in the town of Tryavna in north central Bulgaria.
In 1997, the municipality of Plovdiv organized a committee to plan a monu-
ment for the Unknown Soldier that would commemorate all who died for
national unification. In 2000, a monument to the dead in the two world wars
was built in Russe.
Examples of such commemorative initiatives in post-1989 Bulgaria are so
numerous that they cannot all be enumerated here, but even the brief mention
of a few of them allows us to define this trend in cultivating certain memory
realms during the two decades after 1989. New monuments have been primar-
ily aimed at the memory of the war dead, leaving out anti-fascists and par-
ticipants in the resistance movement, the latter no longer being an object of
joint commemoration or a part of the local pantheon. Most of the new monu-
ments are dedicated to the war dead from a specific area and clearly focused
on soldiers who perished in the Balkan Wars and WWI as a way of overcoming
official neglect of these soldiers and monuments to them throughout the com-
munist period. According to Bulgarian law, all military monuments belonged
under the protection of the Law for Monuments of Culture, but issues regard-
ing their preservation were never put on the agenda until after the political
changes of 1989. In the early 1990s, the miserable condition of many of these
memorial objects came to public attention, and campaigns were initiated to
facilitate their restoration. During the period up until 1997, financial means
for the reconstruction of more than two thousand war monuments in Bulgaria
were collected in a campaign called “Thirteen Centuries of Bulgaria.” In a spe-
cial declaration, the then Minister of the Defense proclaimed that “war monu-
ments would no longer be left without proper preservation and maintenance,
and that the Ministry of Defense would take responsibility for their future
184 Vukov

maintenance.”26 Although many war monuments built in the 1920s and 1930s
remain in wretched condition, a number of these memorial objects have been
restored and renewed, and new ones have been built.
During the second decade after the political changes, a new interest in
building new monuments to the war dead emerged, as well as in the restora-
tion of older military memorial sites. In 2001, a monument was constructed in
Balchik, in the shape of a cross of valor with a cannon gun directed towards the
sea. It was dedicated to those who defended the town from attacking Russian
torpedo boats during WWI. A particularly impressive monument was built in
the municipal gardens of Stara Zagora in southern central Bulgaria. The monu-
ment features Saint George the Victorious and a dragon atop a marble column;
on the base are inscribed the names of the men from the region who died for
the liberation and national unification of Bulgaria. Indeed, there are many
such monuments in various towns and villages around the country specifi-
cally dedicated to local soldiers who perished during past wars that have been
revived nearly a century after the events. Made possible by donations gathered
by local communities, these monuments usually are dedicated to those who
died in the wars of 1912–1918 and WWII, listing among the latter only those
who died on the front, that is specifically excluding the previously glorified
partisans and anti-fascist resistance fighters. In some cases, one can observe
attempts to retrieve the previous identity of a war monument that had been
reshaped during the communist period into a monument to fallen partisans.
For example, in Peshtera in southern central Bulgaria, a large commemorative
ensemble dedicated to those who dead in the anti-fascist struggle, was changed
after 1989 into a monument to the dead in the wars for national liberation, the
transformation being accomplished by merely replacing previous ideological
symbols (red stars and sculptural compositions), substituting a cross of valor,
and making a new list of the dead.
The creation of new monuments to the war dead after 1989 was also accom-
panied by fundamental transformations in the system of public and political
rituals that took place in connection with these monuments, mainly on holi-
days and anniversaries. The annulment of previous communist holidays and
special days and their substitution with new ones ushered in a transformation
of ritual elements, introducing many that referred to Orthodox religious prac-
tices and army rituals of the interwar period. A particularly telling example was
the so-called Day of Bravery on May 6 celebrating the Bulgarian Army, which
was proclaimed a day of national significance in 1991. The military h ­ oliday
celebrated during the communist period, the anniversary of the first day of

26  Bulgarska armiya 14914, 14–20 (April 2000).

Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 185

the September 1923 Uprising, was changed to a day in the religious calendar,
Saint George’s day, resurrecting a tradition dating back to the years before 1944.
After the changes, the first celebration of May 6 as an official holiday in Sofia
included a ceremonial procession with authentic military flags that had been
used during the wars for national liberation and unification of Bulgarian lands,
a liturgy in honor of Saint George, the laying of wreathes in front of the tomb
of the unknown soldier, and the playing of forgotten military marches. In all
the larger towns of Bulgaria, military honors were held and flowers laid in front
of monuments dedicated to the heroes of the national liberation struggle.
Over the subsequent two decades, there were few significant changes in the
way the military holiday was celebrated. For the most part, it retained its post-
1989 basic form, combining military and religious ritual, commemorations to
the war dead, and a festive parade celebrating past military victories. While
these tendencies are discernible in many post-1989 national holidays, they
are also indicative of the special emphases that was placed on the memory
of the WWI dead and their new standing in both the national pantheon and
in the ritual systems of religious and public sanctification.
It is also important to mention in this context the development of policies
for the proper care and maintenance of memorials that had been erected dur-
ing the interwar period. Launched already in the 1990s, these policies were
enhanced further with the approach of the one hundredth anniversary of
WWI. Both state and private initiatives were started to restore the monuments
in the worst condition, to renovate plaques and inscriptions, and to improve
the squares and gardens that surrounded them. There was also a particularly
strong interest in Bulgarian military cemeteries and monuments outside
of the national borders. A coordinated effort was made by the Ministries of
Defense and of Culture, the National History Museum, other state institutions,
and historians and military specialists to visit the location of war fronts in
Serbia, Macedonia, and Romania, to assess the conditions of war graves and
memorials related to WWI, and repair them if necessary. At the outset, many
of these initiatives were regarded with reservation and sometimes suspicion
by the government authorities in neighboring countries, but gradually—and
particularly after Bulgaria joined the European Union—these efforts began to
be achieved with greater ease. After decades of neglect and no official state
involvement, it will take a long time for the majority of these memorial sites to
be restored, but the first steps have been taken, signifying the end of enmities
with neighboring countries and the healing of traumas related to the legacy
of WWI. Nevertheless, the new policies of the Bulgarian state to get involved
in the commemoration of soldiers that died during these wars fronts and to
maintain memorial sites cannot entirely heal the wounds made by decades of
186 Vukov

i­ndifference, abuse of the memory of the dead, and the violent treatment of
returning soldiers and of the patriotic ideals for which they they had fought.
Ironically, many of the monuments to the fallen remain limited in scope to
local communities and only in rare circumstances are they formally linked
with policies of the state to remember the Bulgarian war dead and to show
respect for those who survived the war. We may only hope that despite the
vacillating interest of the Bulgarian government during the last century,
the post-1989 policies to honor the WWI dead will not be short-lived.
In conclusion, I would like to return to the point where I began: to the
unearthed remains of a WWI veteran who was a victim of the wave of politi-
cal repressions during the post-war period, a poet, whose life and death had
been veiled in mystery until the 1950s and whose biography was posthumously
appropriated and adapted to communist ideas which he might have never
embraced. The artificial eye of the poet holds a double-bound reference: on
the one hand, to the glorious victories at Doyran where Bulgarian soldiers
fought valiantly against a number of other nations, and, on the other hand, to
the inglorious post-war events during which the state turned against its own
defenders. On the one side—surviving the trauma of war, and on the other—
the fate that so many veterans suffered in the interwar period. It is with this
contradiction that I would like to end the current chapter, leaving the final
word to Geo Milev, specifically his poem Glavata mi—kŭrvav fener (My Head—
a Bloody Lantern), published in 1920 in the collection Zhestokiyat prusten
(The Cruel Ring):

My head—
a Bloody lantern with broken glass,
lost in wind, rain, and fog
across midnight fields.
I die under elevation 506
and resurrect in Berlin and Paris.
There is no century, no hour—there is Today!
. . .
Oh, Sphynx, with a merciless grimace of laughter
frozen, stony, eternal, and evil—
facing the endless, fearful, universal Egypt:
Oedipus in front of the dark gap—
lost in wind, rain, and fog.27

27  Translated from Bulgarian by author.

Commemorating the Dead and the Dynamics of Forgetting 187

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Index

Alecsandri, Vasile 139 dobrovoljska divizija 18

Alimănişteanu, Pia 152 dorobanti 140
Alvaro, Corrado 134 Duke of Aosta 131–132
Angelow, Jürgen 65
Apponyi, Albert 40 Eastern Front 1–2, 87, 95, 130
Arghezi, Tudor 151
Arhangelovska zadushnitsa 173 Fabijančič, France 22
Attenborough, Richard 21 Fabijančič, Vladislav 22
Avakumović, Jovan 78 Falkenhayn, Erich von 2
Averescu, Alexandru 152–153 Fischer, Fritz 2
Fort, Iliyantsi 162
Bacalbaşa, Constantin 152 Franz Ferdinand (Archduke) 56, 87
Barbusse, Henri 153 Franz Joseph I (Emperor) 97
Berce, Josip 22
Bertolini, Elio 131 Gadda, Carlo Emilio 134
Blašković, Pero 90, 93–94 Galić, Lovro 90
Brătianu, Gheorghe 152, 154–155 Garibaldi 133
Brătianu, Ion C. 139 Glas Juga 22
breakthrough at Caporetto 19, 93, 134 Goebel, Stefan 4
Brumă, Niculescu 143 Goga, Octavian 153
Brusilov, Alexei 2 Greater Romania 137, 148, 158
Bucur, Maria 147–148, 151 Grigorescu, Nicolae 140
Burghard, I. 142
Han, Oscar 138, 153
Cankar, Ivan 22 Hašek, Jaroslav 154
Cantacuzino, Sabina 152 Hemingway, Ernest 21, 154
Caragiale, Ion Luca 140 Hötzendorf, Conrad von 57, 62
Carol I (King) 146
Carol II (King) 146, 158 Iliescu, Dumitru 152
chetniks 3, 61 Iorga, Nicolae 152
Clark, Alan 21 irredente 125
Congress of Berlin 85 Iser, Iosif 143, 153
Coșbuc, George 140 Isonzo Front 1, 19, 25, 33, 45, 85–95
Crainic, Nichifor 153 Italian Front 97, 103, 105, 109, 123–136
Creţulescu, Manasiu 143 italianita 125, 132–135
Cristea, Miron 143
Črna roka 87 Jahier, Piero 134
Csonka, Mihály 40, 42–48, 52 Jalea, Ion 138, 153
Jenko, Avgust 22
D’Annunzio, Gabriele 127, 133 Jovanović, Đorđe 81
Damian, Emilian 142 Jünger, Ernst 154
Dărăscu, Nicolae 153
Dem Rădulescu, Mircea 144 Kalser, Franz 61, 66
Die Bosniaken 86 Karst Front 123
Doberdo 57 Kästner, Erich 71
dobrovoljci 22–23 King Aleksandar Obrenović 56
190 Index

King Alexander Karađorđević 22, 81 Neuilly Peace Treaty 164, 168

King Boris III 176 Nevski, Alexander 150
King Ferdinand 152 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 164
King Michael 146 Novaro, Angiolo Silvio 127
King Petar Karađorđević 57, 81
Kiriţescu, Constantin 152 October Revolution 166
Kladivarji 22 Oslavia 132
Klavora, Vasja 21, 91 Owen, Wilfred 123
Klemenčič, Lovro 22
Konopicky, Theodor 65–66 Paciurea, Dumitru 138, 153
Koselleck, Reinhart 5 Panzini, Alfredo 124
Kozak, Juš 22 Papadat–Bengescu, Hortensia 153
Kraiova Agreement 171 Pârvan, Vasile 152
Krauß, Alfred 60, 61 Pašić, Nikola 56
Kriegsüberwachungsamt (KÜA) 112 Petrescu, Camil 142, 153–155, 157
Kulmer, Miroslav (Count) 99 Petrescu, Cezar 153–158
Petrescu, Costin 142
Lausanne Conference 174 Petrescu, Dragoş 142
Lăzărescu, Emilian 143 Piero, Pastorino 134
Le Beau, Aurel von (Lieutenant General) 59, Pirandello, Luigi 125
63 Plamak (journal) 163
Lenin 152 Popescu, Ghiţă 143
Lesevereine 112 Popović, Andra 21, 29
Lidell Hart, Basil 21 Potiorek, Oskar 30, 65
Liulevicius, Vejas G. 2 Povše, Janez 21
Prelesnik, Josip 20
Mackensen, August von 2 Preporod (newspaper) 18, 22
Malaparte, Curzio 134 Primožič, Ivan 31, 92
Malešič, Franc 89 Prinčič, Edvard 25
Manciulea, Maria 142 prostovoljci 18–19, 22, 29
Manolescu, Ion 145
Marghiloman, Alexandru 151 Queen Mary (Regina Maria) 143, 147,
Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso 134 151–152
Marpicati, Arturo 134
Medrea, Cornel 138, 153 Radenković, Mara 72–73, 77
Michael the Brave 139–140 Randazzo, Giovanni 133
Milev, Geo 162–166, 169, 186 Rebreanu, Liviu 153–155
Military General Governorate 75, 79 Reed, John 29
Mitropolite Pimen 152 Remarque, Erich Maria 154
Mlada Bosna 87 Ressu, Camil 143, 153
Mogoş, A. 142 Revista Cultul Eroilor (monthly) 144
Monelli, Paolo 134 Rigoni, Mario 127
Monte Sabotino 133 Risorgimento 126, 129, 133, 137, 152
Monte San Michele 133 România Eroică (journal) 142–144, 147, 155
Mussolini 131–133 Rosetti, C.A. 139
Russian-Turkish War 142–143, 170, 174
Nagy, Lajos 39
National Radical Party 56 Sadoveanu, Mihail 153
Nenițescu, Ioan 140 Sahighian, Ion 143
Index 191

Salis-Seewis, Johann Graf 78 Thompson, E.P. 21

Salonika Front 28, 58, 78 Thompson, Mark 34
Salsa, Carlo 123, 134 Topârceanu, George 153–155, 158
Săndulescu, Amilcar 145 Tošić, Viden 68
Sauro, Nazario 125, 130 Traversi, Giannino Antona 126–127, 130
Sbisà, Carlo 133 Treaty of Rapallo 131
Schärf, Adolf 93 Treaty of Trianon 142
Sebastian, Mihail 154 Tsankov, Alexander 163, 175
Sekulić, Isidora 79–80
Selva, Attilio 123 Ungaretti, Giuseppe 2, 21, 134
Serbian Front 58, 97
Serbian-Bulgarian War 170, 172 Vazov, Ivan 182
Sherman, Daniel 5 Verginella, Marta 21
Şirato, Francisc 138 Verlaine, Paul 164
Skerlecz, Ivan (Baron) 99 Viteazul, Mihai 144
Slataper, Scipio 128 Vulcănescu, Mircea 152
Slavici, Ioan 151
Sofficit, Adengo 134 Walter, Christopher 150
Southwestern Front 1 Wendland, Anna Veronika 111
Stănescu, Albin 142 Western Front 1, 5, 12, 55
Stephen the Great 139 Wiener Kriegsschule 58
Stere, Constantin 151–152 Wieviorka, Annette 134
Stoica, D. 142 Wilson, Woodrow 166
Stones, Norman 2 Wyschogrod, E. 6
Stuparich, Giani 128, 134
Sveta Nedelya (terrorist attack) 162–163, 169 Zanantoni, Eduard 59–60, 66
Svoljšak, Petra 21 Zeletin, Ştefan 153–157
Živković, Mihajlo 24
Teodoroiu, Ecaterina 143 Župančič, Oton 22
Thalerhof internment camp 113–121 Zveno (political movement) 216
The National Catastrophes 204, 213, 215, 219 Zweig, Arnold 154