Serbian government moves to Brindisi

The British chronology of the war records under 15 January 1916 the transfer of the Serbian government to Brindisi in Italy. Since the beginning of December 1915 Prime Minister Nikola Pašić and his ministers had been working in Scutari, in northern Albania, which they had reached after the retreat through the mountains. According to the historian of Albania Owen Pearson, the ministers and the diplomatic corps boarded the Italian ship Città di Bari at San Giovanni di Medua on 14 January, and it took them to Brindisi. French chronological tables also state that the government left Scutari on 14 January. A dispatch from Brindisi of 17 January, published in the “New York Times”, reported that several dozen members of the government and officials had arrived there from Scutari, together with the ministers of the Allied powers accredited to the King of Serbia.

Why they had to flee

Scutari was no longer safe. At the beginning of January Austria-Hungary had launched the conquest of Montenegro, which proved lightning-fast. The Austrians took Lovćen, on 12 January Montenegro asked for an armistice, and the next day the enemy occupied its capital, Cetinje. There was no longer any army between the Austrians and Scutari that could stop them. The Allies, meanwhile, had decided to ship the Serbian army to Corfu, and the first units had already set out from Scutari for Durrës. The government could not stay in a town that would soon be on the front line. The sea route was risky too. At the beginning of January the Italian steamer Brindisi, carrying several hundred Montenegrin volunteers, had struck a mine and sunk off Medua.

No troops sailed with Pašić. The Regent Alexander and the Supreme Command stayed with the soldiers who were marching south to the ports of evacuation. The ailing Vojvoda Radomir Putnik had already left for Italy earlier, and King Peter I was in Greece.

Only a stopover

The Rome newspaper “L’Idea Nazionale” wrote that the Serbian government would remain in Brindisi for some time. The stay in Italy proved short, however. In Brindisi the ministers met King Victor Emmanuel III, who was visiting the port at the time. Pašić said afterwards that he had been moved by the kindness the monarch had shown the Serbs in their darkest hour, and that he saw no reason why Italo-Serbian friendship should not be as close as possible. These words mattered, because Italy and Serbia were rivals for influence on the eastern shore of the Adriatic.

After a few days, around 18 January according to French works, an Italian cruiser took Pašić and part of the government to Corfu, where the French and the first Serbian soldiers had already landed. The correspondent of the London “Daily Chronicle” described how on 20 January Pašić presided, under the palms in the garden of the hotel where the ministers were staying, over the first meeting of the Serbian government on the island. The ministers turned down the Achilleion, the palace of Kaiser Wilhelm II that was offered to them, because it lay too far from the town and from French headquarters. The British chronology records the formal establishment of the Serbian government on Corfu only on 9 February. The island remained its seat until the end of the war.