Bryan Mahon takes command of British forces in the Balkans

The British chronology of the war records that on 28 October 1915 Lieutenant-General Sir Bryan Mahon was appointed commander of the British forces in the Balkans. In practice he had already been commanding them for three weeks. On 8 October he had arrived at Salonika after his 10th (Irish) Division, which had landed there together with the French. The appointment coincided with a change of command at Gallipoli, where on the same day General Charles Monro, named as Ian Hamilton’s successor, was taking over command of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. The troops at Salonika now had a separate commander, independent of Gallipoli, although in administrative matters they remained subordinate to the headquarters at the Dardanelles until January 1916. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign does not mention the appointment itself, but describes in detail how difficult Mahon’s position was at the time.

The cavalryman of Mafeking

Bryan Mahon was born in 1862 in County Galway in Ireland. He served in the cavalry and then in the Egyptian Army, with which he fought in the Sudan under Herbert Kitchener, now Secretary of State for War. He made his name in the Second Boer War. In May 1900 his flying column of about 2,000 men relieved Mafeking, besieged by the Boers for seven months. In 1912, at the age of 50, he became a lieutenant-general, one of the youngest in the army.

In the autumn of 1914 he took command of the 10th Division, the first of the Irish divisions made up of Lord Kitchener’s volunteers. At Gallipoli he was unlucky. When in August the division landed at Suvla Bay, Hamilton split its battalions among different sectors of the front, and Mahon commanded only part of them. After General Stopford was recalled, he refused to serve under the junior General de Lisle and left the peninsula, but soon returned to his division. At the end of September it was this division, withdrawn from Suvla, that was sent to Salonika.

Between London and Sarrail

Mahon was not subordinate to the French commander, General Maurice Sarrail, who on his own initiative had set off up the Vardar to help the Serbs. He received his orders from London, and there the formula long held that the troops had been sent to Salonika solely to enable Greece to fulfil its obligations to Serbia. When Greece refused, the British government did not want to draw its soldiers into a campaign that the General Staff considered lost. Until 22 October Mahon was not allowed to move out of Salonika, and even afterwards he could not cross the Serbian border. Sarrail, meanwhile, constantly asked him for help.

The breakthrough came in the last days of October. Mahon intended to send the 30th Brigade with artillery by rail towards the border and camp it on the Greek side, near the French positions. On 25 October, when everything had been arranged with the railwaymen, the Greek government, which had taken control of the railway in Macedonia for the duration of the mobilisation, unexpectedly forbade the British to camp by the border. They were either to cross it or stay where they were. The next day Lord Kitchener telegraphed Mahon that, whatever happened, he must not fail the French. If it proved necessary to cross the border to support them, he was entitled to do so, and the minister trusted that he would do nothing rash or quixotic. The Greeks also refused the British the use of the station at Dojran, so the soldiers had to be sent along an overloaded line to Gevgelija. The author of the staff war diary noted with irritation that “the Greeks are always doing this sort of thing” and that it was very hard to come to terms with them.

One division

The forces Mahon commanded were still limited to a single division, depleted at Gallipoli. The next British division, the 22nd, was not due to begin landing at Salonika until 5 November. On 29 October the 30th Brigade set off for Gevgelija, and on 31 October two of its battalions relieved French units on the hills north-west of Lake Dojran, already on Serbian territory. On 29 October the commander-in-chief of the French army, Joseph Joffre, arrived in London and the next day obtained the British agreement to cover the railway from Salonika as far as Krivolak, where the French were already fighting the Bulgarians.

Mahon’s position was by no means secure. In November London changed its mind several times: first Monro was to take command at Salonika, then Kitchener decided to make Monro commander of all British forces in the Mediterranean outside Egypt and to leave Mahon at Salonika. On 15 November Mahon set up at Salonika the headquarters of the British Salonika Army and commanded it until May 1916.