Last Entente troops leave Macedonia

A British chronology of the war records under 15 December 1915 that the last Allied troops in Macedonia withdrew into Greek territory. This refers to the Serbian part of Macedonia, that is, the valley of the Vardar north of the Greek border, which the French and British had entered in October and November to help the Serbs. The date needs explaining. According to the British and Austrian official histories, both the British troops, driven back from Kosturino and Dojran, and the French, falling back down the Vardar from Gevgelija, had already crossed the border on 12 December. For the following days, however, strong rearguards stood just beyond the border, on the Greek side, on a position running from the southern shore of Lake Dojran westwards across the Vardar. Only on 15 December did General Maurice Sarrail order them to move away from the border southwards, towards Salonika.

Away from the border

After the fighting at Kosturino and the retreat from Dojran, Sarrail did not want to keep his tired troops on an unfavourable position by the border. He reckoned with the possibility that the Bulgarians might enter Greece. But he did not want to abandon the stores gathered along the railway, so he left more than half of the forces that had fought in Serbia at the border: the French 57th and 122nd Divisions under General Paul Leblois and two British brigades. The remaining troops left by rail or marched along the roads to Salonika. The British 29th Brigade, which on the night of 11–12 December had taken up a position on the Greek side of the border, received orders from Leblois to watch the border closely but not to cross it even with patrols. They were allowed to fire on the Bulgarians only if the latter violated it themselves.

The Bulgarians did not come. On the evening of 14 December Leblois issued the order to retreat, and at four in the morning of 15 December the 29th Brigade came down from its position under cover of darkness. The British official history notes that the cavalry platoon covering it saw a few Bulgarian soldiers who crossed the border and entered the abandoned positions, but with their rifles slung on their backs. This was taken as proof that the Bulgarians had orders not to enter Greece. The same day Sarrail left two small rearguards by the railways and ordered three French divisions to fall back to the already chosen defence line of Salonika. West of the Vardar the marshy ground was watched by about 1,500 Serbian soldiers, older reservists from the railway guard, who had withdrawn together with the French. The British marched through rain and mud. Some of them reached Sarigöl station, only about 24 kilometres from Lake Dojran, where they boarded trains, only on 17 December. The last French division took its place on the defence line on 18 December.

The Bulgarians at the border

The pursuit stopped on the line from Gevgelija to Dojran. According to the Austrian official history, the Bulgarians refrained from entering Greece at the renewed, urgent request of the German high command. As early as the end of November the chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenhayn, had forbidden crossing the Greek border “in any case, not even with aircraft”. He did not want an attack on the territory of neutral Greece to weaken the position of the pro-German King Constantine I and push the Greeks into the arms of the Entente. The Austrian official history later wondered whether he had thereby thrown away the chance to drive the Allies out of the Balkans while they were weak. Greece for her part promised not to obstruct by force the building of fortifications around Salonika, and her V Corps was ordered to leave the area needed by the Allies. Greek troops were, however, to remain in the city itself.

The entrenched camp

As recently as 4 December, at the conference in Calais, the British had pushed through a decision to evacuate Salonika. The French, Russians, Italians and Serbs opposed it at the conference at Chantilly on 6 December, and on 9 December the foreign secretary Edward Grey and the secretary of state for war, Lord Horatio Kitchener, went to Paris and agreed that the troops should stay. On 14 December Sarrail and the commander of the British forces, General Bryan Mahon, agreed on the line of defence. It ran along the ridges of the hills some ten to fifteen kilometres north of the city, from Lake Langadas through the villages of Ajvatli, Dautli and Naresh to the Vardar and then along its left bank. The French defended its western part, the British the eastern. Over the following months soldiers and local labourers built trenches and dense barbed-wire entanglements here, from which the whole entrenched camp was nicknamed the “Birdcage”. The expedition that was meant to save Serbia thus ended with the Allies shut up in a fortified bridgehead on Greek soil.