Description: No country suffered so terribly during the war as did Serbia. The first blows fell upon her, the bombardment of Belgrade, her capital, beginning on the 29th of July, 1914, and continuing with intermissions until the city was a mass of ruins. The Austrians immediately crossed the Danube and invaded the country but after a year of desperate fighting were driven out, with enormous losses.
For a while Serbia had a respite from the horrors of war, but disease fell upon the land, typhus in its most virulent form raging everywhere. The land was one vast cemetery: nearly a quarter of a million people died. Then came famine, and later the combined German and Bulgarian attack, the former in front, the latter in the rear. Caught between the upper and nether millstone, Serbia was crushed although fighting with desperation against overwhelming odds, sometimes as much as ten to one.
As a nation Serbia ceased to exist. The country lay prostrate under the heel of the conqueror. Then came D'Esperey with his Allied host, sweeping up from Saloniki. The Bulgarians were attacked, defeated, their armies divided and forced to surrender. The Austro-German forces were driven out, and Serbia once again raised its head, a free land.
The hardy troops before us had their share in this bath of blood. Many among them fell that their country might live. They asked no quarter and they gave none: their hatred of the Austrians was too deep; the terrible retreat earlier in the war, when 250,000 men, women and children fought their way for weeks through mountain passes in snow to their knees, without food, without shelter, that retreat in which half of them perished, was too fresh in their minds.
- Excerpt from: The World War through the stereoscope a visualized, vitalized history of the greatest conflict of all the ages / / edited by Major Joseph Mills Hanson.
- Published/Created by: Meadville, Pa.; New York, N.Y.; Chicago, Ill.; London, England:
- Keystone View Company, photographed between 1914 and 1918, published 1923
- Repository: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
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