Bitola (MONASTIR) - April 5, 1917 - Rudolphe Archibald Reiss

After this war two towns will stand out as typical martyr cities against which the fury of the enemy was especially directed Rheims in the west and Monastir-Bitolj in the east.
Obviously, Rheims is much larger and far better known than the capital of South Macedonia, but this has not prevented the latter from being subjected to the same martyrdom as the proud French city. I even believe that the number of civilian victims is greater in Monastir than in Rheims.

I am once more in Monastir.

It is a lovely summer's day.
I walk down the streets and I note that there is no longer a house in Bitolj that has not been touched by the bombardment. If comparatively few houses are laid entirely in ruins, this is only due to the flimsiness of their construction. Many of the projectiles pass through these thin walls without exploding, and when the explosion occurs the effect is not so great.
The inhabitants go about their business.
Housewives go out to buy up the few vegetables brought to town by peasant women.
People wash their linen in the Dragor, while the children play in the streets.
Some of the shops are open.
You can buy old trash, which escaped the plundering Bulgars, or possibly tobacco or the little filigree trinkets which are made in this place. The shutters of all these shops are only half drawn up, so that they may be lowered all the quicker when the bombardment begins again.
Small boys sell French and Serbian newspapers in the streets. Little " lustros " shoeblacks make a few coppers out of the soldiers who have their dusty boots " shined."
But all this population there are still from twenty to twenty-five thousand inhabitants in the town is depressed and nervous.
Even the children have forgotten how to laugh.
There is too much mourning, too much wreckage, too much suffering.

For more than 1,000 civilians have fallen victims to the bombardment.

The prolonged sojourn of the people of Monastir in basements without any sanitary appliances has led to an appalling increase of tubercular diseases, such as phthisis. Moreover, the promiscuity in these cellars has also resulted in the propagation of certain contagious diseases.
It is true that the Serbian and French civil and military authorities are doing what they can to alleviate the situation, but their resources are very limited in this Oriental town cut off from the world by the bombardment of an enemy who does not respect the laws of war.

Why was Monastir not evacuated of its civil population ?

First of all, because it is very difficult to find a place where to put this twenty thousand or so of hapless beings. The Macedonian towns and even the villages occupied by the Allies are already filled to overflowing with Serb, Macedonian, and Greek refugees from Bulgaria and Asia Minor. And then these poor creatures are attached to their last remaining possession, their house, which is often a mere ruin riddled with shells. They prefer being killed at home to an exodus. It is not unnatural, it is the mentality of the poor, to whom fate has never been very kind.
As I am walking about the streets and questioning people, the Bulgaro-Germans are bombarding the outskirts of the town. But even now they are beginning to send shells of every calibre full into the heart of the town. The projectiles go whistling over our heads on their way to demolish yet some more dwellings and to wipe out yet some more innocent lives. As by magic, the streets are cleared and the inhabitants precipitately take to their cellars, where the asphyxiating gases will seek them out.
Pom !
Fifty yeards in front of me a handsome, well-built edifice collapses.
A 150 has caught it squarely.
Already there are some casualties.
Small boys are reduced to gobbets of bleeding flesh.

What have these poor children done to Wilhelm of Hohenzollern or Ferdinand of Coburg ?

Let these two beware lest history bestow upon them the sobriquet of " the baby-killers."
Whatever is the good of this bombardment of an open town ?
I have myself several times ascertained that the town of Monastir does not harbour a single gun. Is it simply the pleasure of giving pain that prompts the enemy gunners to exterminate a hapless civil population which had already suffered sufficiently from the war?

Excerpt from the book:
THE KINGDOM OF SERBIA: INFRINGEMENTS OF THE RULES AND LAWS OF WAR COMMITTED by the AUSTRO-BULGARO-GERMANS: LETTERS OF A CRIMINOLOGIST ON THE SERBIAN
MACEDONIAN FRONT By Rudolphe Archibald Reiss
Published 1919