Serbian army assembled on Corfu

A British chronology of the war records under 10 February 1916 that the remnants of the Serbian army had been assembled on Corfu. The date is a conventional one, because the transports from Albania had been going on since mid-January and were not yet over. According to the British official naval history, by 9 February all the Serbian soldiers had been taken off from the area of Durrës. From then on the port was covered only by an Italian brigade, about 8,500 men with 36 guns. Some units sailed from Durrës straight to Corfu; others made their way on foot or in small vessels to Vlorë and there transferred to large transports. According to Serbian accounts the shipment from Vlorë lasted from 28 January to 19 February.

The numbers grew by the day. On 9 February the correspondent of the Paris Petit Parisien estimated that there were already about 75,000 Serbs on the island. On 18 February the London weekly The Near East wrote that an army of not much fewer than 100,000 well-equipped soldiers was taking shape on Corfu. According to figures from the French mission, by 19 February almost 139,000 soldiers and civilians had been brought to the island.

A harbour full of ships

The reception of the army was directed by the French. The British correspondent Gordon Gordon-Smith wrote that General Piarron de Mondésir, the admiral de Gueydon in command on the island and the French diplomatic representative conferred every day, so as to do without reports and needless correspondence. They organised two bases. The naval base landed the soldiers and unloaded supplies from France and Britain, and the land base distributed them. Corfu harbour had never seen such traffic. Dozens of transports arrived every day, and steamers of every size crowded the roadstead. Boats were what was most lacking. French sailors used everything that floated: ships’ boats, barges, fishing boats, even rafts. According to Gordon-Smith they were soon landing 20,000 men and 1,200 tons of supplies a day.

Bread, meat and boots

Bread was the most urgent need. There was no shortage of flour from France, but there was nothing to fire the ovens with, because the wood of olive and orange trees was unsuitable. The French requisitioned all the private ovens on the island, and ships went to Greek Epirus for firewood. Until the engineers had built field bakeries, bread was issued sparingly. After that two bakeries, each with 32 ovens and together with 490 bakers, worked day and night and baked more than the whole army and the refugees accompanying it needed. Every soldier received a pound and a half of bread a day. Meat was a problem. The French generously handed out frozen beef from Australia, but the Serbian soldiers had never seen such a thing before and threw the frozen pieces straight into boiling water. The result was meat as tough as a tyre, and they had to be taught to thaw it first.

The soldiers arrived in rags and in boots that were falling apart. New uniforms were sent by France and Britain, and boots were bought in the United States. They were issued, however, only once the men had been assigned to regular units: companies, battalions and regiments.

A new army

The force that assembled on Corfu had neither artillery nor wagons, because all the guns and vehicles had been destroyed before leaving Serbia. What remained were the officers’ horses, a few thousand pack and riding horses, and a handful of mountain batteries and machine-gun sections. The veterans quickly returned to duty, but thousands of young recruits without any training had come with the army, and they first had to be fed back to health. According to the British official history, the army’s chief of staff from January was General Petar Bojović.

The army was reorganised into six infantry divisions and a cavalry division, with French arms and equipment. The divisions kept their old regional names: Danube, Drina, Šumadija, Timok and Morava, joined by a new one, the Vardar. Before the autumn offensive of 1915, however, each name had stood for two divisions, one of first-levy reservists and the other of older classes, whereas now there were only six. The names of the three armies were also kept, although each had only two divisions and by Western standards amounted to little more than a small corps. In April the first re-formed units were ready to move. From 11 April to the end of May the army was shipped to Salonika. According to the British official history it numbered 120,000 soldiers there, including 3,000 Serbs who had reached Macedonia earlier, while about 25,000 sick, wounded, recruits and unassigned officers remained on Corfu and in North Africa.