September 1918

Those poor beggars. To us, they looked to be either young boys or old men. Dressed in rags, starving. They just threw their guns onto a pile at the side of the road and shuffled off into the distance. My Grandfather, then serving as a Driver in the Army Service Corps, remembered watching the Bulgarian surrender at the end of September 1918. War in a land without a name Southern Serbia, Alf called it where maps now place (Northern) Macedonia or FYROM from Salonika’s dubious attractions to a frontline where even water had to be delivered by mule or lorry train. His war was a sideshow to a sideshow: out of the birdcage, out of the garden. Where boredom and malaria took a greater toll than bullets and shells. Tiadatha’s braves moved out over Muckydonia to face the Bulgar and the Hun. Soil too shallow for trenches; in this land you froze in winter, baked in summer fought mosquitoes and ennui in between, watched all the while by an enemy from Crowns Big and Small and the Devil’s Eye.   Then from Dobra Polje to Doiran the line began to move – following Desperate Frankie’s urgent plan to capture the Vardar and Strumica. In the bloody aftermath, corpses packed standing in lorries the easier to transport, silent sentinels of death. So standing on that dusty road he watched that vanquished army walk away to a shattered land that had bleed so much but now could not bleed anymore. Bulgaria - the first Central Power to fall. An end forming the birth pang of fractious new nations: freedom’s allure mingled with nationalism’s latent dangers. There were no winners in that, Alf said. He was no military hero, never keen on the soldiering life. There because he had to be, yearning to go home: after going through that, I wouldn’t even join a library his response. I owe it to his memory to staunch centenary ‘celebrations’ because there were no winners in that. Nothing for idiot politicians to exploit, nothing to glory in, not after what he saw on the road from Doiran. For Alf and all those of the Entente or Central Powers who fought in 'Southern Serbia' and the Salonika Front. Serb, Greek, Bulgarian, Yugoslav, French, British, Irish, German. It was the beginning of the end and a century on, we still haven't lived up to your legacy, or honoured your suffering and loss.