In the spring of 1918,
the empire of Austria-Hungary, sprawled across the heart of Europe,
faced the prospect of ruin.
This war had begun as Austria's quarrel, with gaiety and cheers
as the soldiers of the Hapsburg Empire marched to battle in 1914.
The first enemy was Serbia,
the impudent Slav kingdom over the border.
The crushing of Serbia would be a warning to all under Austrian rule
whose national ambitions were coming to the boil.
But war with Serbia meant war with Russia.
Harsh realities soon dispelled the Hapsburg dream.
In 1914, when the Austrian armies marched to aid their German allies
against Russian invasion, they met with disaster.
Counting the fearful Austrian losses in the battles of 1914,
cynical Germans said, "We are fettered to a corpse."
Yet somehow, the corpse revived.
Defending bitterly in the Carpathian Mountains
in the icy grip of winter, the Austrians held off the Russians.
In 1915, Austrians and Germans
hurled the Russians out of Galicia.
At last, with German and Bulgarian help,
the Austrians defeated the Serbs and overran their country.
HEAVY GUNFIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
It was also in 1915 that Austria found herself with another enemy.
Italy, after long hesitation,
and tempted by promises of territorial gains after the war,
joined the Allies.
The Italian prime minister
called this policy "Sacro Egoismo", sacred egoism.
For the first time in history, the outposts of two great armies
faced each other across the Alpine peaks.
WIND WHISTLES
Here, in a region of eternal ice and snow,
of fierce storms and avalanches,
the Austrians held the commanding heights.
TWO-WAY GUNFIRE
Food, munitions, everything the armies needed
had to be supplied by cable railway or by patient mules.
General Cadorna, the Italian chief of staff,
threw his troops against the eastern frontier.
His objective was the port of Trieste.
The way to Trieste, across the River Isonzo,
was blocked by three high plateaus.
Again and again, the Italians attacked these rocky hillsides,
where every shell burst flung out deadly fragments of stone as well as iron.
"It was a battlefield," wrote Hindenburg,
"equal in desolation and horror to the Western Front.
"Indeed, in many respects worse."
By 1916, Austria was gravely weakened.
In the summer of that year,
another Russian offensive, under General Brusilov,
smashed through the front in Galicia.
Over 400,000 Austrians were taken prisoner.
Once again, it was only German help that stemmed the tide.
At the end of 1916, the emperor Franz Josef died.
There was great mourning in Vienna
all over the place, in all classes of the population.
Everybody felt a personal loss.
When, a few days after,
the funeral of the emperor took place, the streets were filled.
The houses, the shops, even some lampposts were draped in black.
We looked at the funeral with a sort of personal grief.
The Kaiser came to pay his respects.
The kings of Bulgaria, Bavaria and Saxony, the German crown prince,
the heir to the Turkish throne and the crown prince of Sweden
all escorted the dead emperor on his journey to the family tomb.
It was the end of an era.
The new emperor, Karl, faced the ruin war had brought on his once great empire.
To preserve its crumbling facade from final collapse,
he entered into secret negotiations with the French,
which came to nothing. The German ambassador in Vienna reported:
"The longer the war lasts, the stronger the simple question,
"'Will Austria-Hungary be able to carry on the fight?'
"Her resources and troops are nearly exhausted.
"Depression is increased by the economic situation.
"The people of Vienna are starving,
"and are driven to despair by long queueing which brings no results.
"We are running the danger that the Hapsburg monarchy will sicken
"and Germany will share in its downfall."
The harsh realities of the war
had bound the Hapsburg empire to Germany. Ludendorff decided:
"The Austrian-Hungarian armies needed stiffening by German troops
"to prevent the collapse of Austria-Hungary.
"To send Germans for purely defensive purposes
does not correspond to our serious situation.
"The Austrian command must know it's necessary to take the offensive."
Seven Austrian and eight German divisions, under a German general,
were assembled in the mountains
in the northern reaches of the Isonzo.
Their objective was to break out into the Venetian plain.
EXPLOSION BOOMS
On October 24th, 1917,
a heavy bombardment by gas and high explosive shell
drenched the Italian positions on the Isonzo.
The Italian trenches, dugouts and shelters
were overwhelmed in a hurricane of fire.
All communications were destroyed.
In snow and sleet showers,
the Austro-German army advanced 14 miles through the mountains.
Many Italians were terrified when German troops appeared.
One glance at the Pickelhaube coming over the hill was enough.
By the end of the first day, the enemy had crossed the Isonzo,
captured the village of Caporetto and taken 30,000 prisoners.
The Italian second army was smashed and in headlong retreat.
It was impossible for us
even to think of abandoning these positions
that had cost hundreds of thousands of lives.
To leave our dead there... we just couldn't believe it.
Still, still we had to withdraw.
An attempt was made to stand on the Tagliamento River, 30 miles back.
But the enemy crossed by a half-destroyed bridge.
The Italians went back again,
400,000 men along roads blocked by refugees.
One of the most tiresome things from a military point of view
was the Austrian motorcyclists and their sidecars with light machine guns
that used to appear from nowhere and disappear into nowhere
after machine-gunning a convoy or a crowd of refugees.
And...we, we felt the whole time
a kind of...shame
that we had been defeated.
Through the exhausted and beaten army, word passed round.
"Andiamo a casa". "We're going home."
By 1917, the majority of Italian soldiers were weary of the war.
An English officer wrote:
"They were desperately tired, physically and spiritually.
"Their food was continually reduced.
"They had to march to the trenches and back heavily laden.
"They were at the mercy of brutal commanders who maintained discipline
"by means of bestial punishment.
"They got a few days' leave once a year,
"two postcards a week to write home,
"no amusements, no relaxation, no rest."
On the Piave River, a mere 15 miles from Venice,
Cadorna managed to rally his troops.
"We have taken the inflexible decision
"to defend here the honour of Italy.
"The Italian nation commands us to die,
"and not to yield."
On the Piave, after a retreat of 70 miles,
the Italians held the enemy at bay.
In under three weeks, they had lost 400,000 men,
of whom 360,000 were either prisoners or deserters.
The approach of the war to within 15 miles of Venice
has produced inevitable changes.
The Ducal Palace is no more than a skeleton, boarded up and emptied.
Shops are selling off their goods.
Venetians who have stayed hope for the best.
The Grand Canal, with its shuttered palaces, has a mournful, noble air.
Most of the gondolas are gone.
Five British and six French divisions were sent to Italy.
The arrival of the British was observed by historian GM Trevelyan:
"The anxiety overhanging that month seemed lifted as they marched by.
"I believe the Italians, civil and military, were as cheered as I was.
"Looking on such men, it seemed impossible that we could be beaten."
General Cadorna now gave way to the younger General Armando Diaz.
Under his command, the Italian army made an astonishing recovery.
The change in the heart of the country was no less remarkable.
Armchair defeatists were silenced, peacemongers put to shame.
In the face of a common danger,
the Italian people at last found unity.
To the Austrian army, Caporetto brought much-needed relief,
and the booty of huge food stores.
It drew together its many races,
Austro, German, Magyars, Yugoslavs,
Czechs, Rumanians and Poles.
BAND PLAYS
Morale improved.
For a while, the troops could relax, on full stomachs.
But at home, there was no such unity.
In winter, 1917, mutual dislikes of different races in the empire
were intensified by unequal food distribution.
Vienna was starving, while Budapest had something to spare.
The harvest was a failure, the administration chaotic.
The rations became smaller and smaller as the war went on.
And the black market flourished, fairly officially.
The quality of the food was terrible.
Bread, for instance, gave many people some eczema.
Potatoes were very short too.
It was bitterly cold. The electricity was cut.
The gas was cut.
The children were really underfed, because they had very little milk.
We had to be very careful to have a drop for everyone.
In May 1918, the Emperor Karl was summoned by the Kaiser.
His secret peace moves had been made public by the French.
His duplicity towards his German ally stood revealed.
Now the Germans demanded that the Austrians attack again in Italy
in support of their own offensive in France.
This time, there would be no German help.
Reluctantly, Karl had to agree.
The key to the whole Italian line on the Piave was the Monte Grappa,
5,000 feet high and dominating the plain below.
It had become a symbol of Italian resistance in the previous winter.
On 15th June, the whirlwind burst on the Grappa.
"Within five hours, our defences were smashed,
"three key positions were lost,
"the Austrians looked down on Bassano.
"But the soldiers at Grappa, worn out and decimated,
"dashed forward to the counterattack.
"In 24 hours, all was over,
"and we could think of the Piave as inviolate."
Elsewhere, Austrian attacks made some headway
against two British divisions in the Asiago Plateau.
Further east, they crossed the Piave on a 15-mile front.
But the attacks were spread over too wide a front.
The Austrians were short of ammunition, transport and food.
Worst of all, the Piave now rose in flood.
Within three days, counterattacks threw them back across the river
with the loss of 150,000 men.
On the sea, too, Austria had suffered a grievous blow.
Two Italian boats on patrol in the Adriatic
torpedoed the dreadnought Szent Istvan,
one of the most powerful ships in the Austrian navy.
The disaster hastened the end of Austrian hopes.
In the Balkans, Germany's ally Bulgaria stood on the defensive.
Bulgaria had entered the war for territorial gain from Serbia.
In 1915, as the Germans and Austrians invaded Serbia,
Bulgaria struck at her flank.
The Serbs begged for Allied help,
but how could they help this landlocked, isolated country
in the heart of the Balkan mountains?
Only with the aid of Serbia's ally, Greece.
At the invitation of the Greek prime minister, Venizelos,
British and French troops landed at Salonika.
The force owed its existence more to diplomatic necessities
than to the foresight of the military.
The expedition was launched not to defeat the enemy,
but to rescue the remains of the Serbian army,
and prevent the whole of the Balkans from becoming an Austro-German area.
But on the very day the Allies landed,
Venizelos was dismissed by the pro-German King Constantine.
The king declared that Greece would stay neutral.
The Allies were too late to help Serbia.
They found themselves in a neutral country teeming with German spies.
In the bare hills north of Salonika, they entrenched in a vast camp,
known ironically as the "Birdcage".
Here they waited for the Bulgarians and Germans to advance.
But they did not come.
All we prayed for and hoped for was,
"Let us have some fights. Let us get into there. Let us do something."
We joined the army to fight for the old country,
not to flounder about and dig trenches.
As the troops in the Birdcage made roads,
reinforcements poured into Salonika,
British, French, Italians, Russians, Serbians.
It was maybe the most crowded city in the world, and the most polyglot.
Sailors from half a dozen navies, Turks, Albanians and Greeks,
Balkan peasants in their rough frieze dresses, native soldiers,
Algerians, Indians, Ammonites and Senegalese.
Salonika's cafes, cabarets, cinemas and music halls did a roaring trade.
There were never enough for the many strangers within the city.
For nine months, the Allies waited.
There was mistrust of Greek intentions,
mistrust between the Allies,
mistrust of the French commander, General Sarrail.
At last, in the early summer of 1916,
the armies advanced north towards the distant mountains.
HORSE NEIGHS
The Bulgarians and Germans had had time to prepare.
They held all heights in great strength.
No matter where you were, you were under observation.
All they had to do was look down. We couldn't move by daylight at all.
In the heat, the trench lines spread across the Balkan peninsula
from the Aegean to Albania on the Adriatic.
The sun beat down on the stony, treeless heights
on the swampy plains.
The temperature rose to 114 degrees.
The British troops had no sun helmets.
A director of medical services in Egypt thought they were unnecessary.
With the heat came the mosquitoes,
but there were not enough mosquito nets, not enough quinine.
In summer 1916, in every battalion, men went down by the hundred.
Medical services were overwhelmed.
The difficulties of evacuating this flood of sick men were extreme.
In 1916, there were 30,000 cases of malaria. In 1917, 63,000.
In 1918, 67,000.
It was then when you had an attack of malaria
and you had, as a result, a chronic fit of depression,
that it was hardest to keep one's reason.
Long hours in the line, in one's lonely dugout,
as one sat there, and thought,
"Will I ever see home again, and the people I love?"
That was the most dangerous moment for any man to have to face,
and some poor chaps couldn't face it, and shot themselves.
The British army felt abandoned, forgotten.
We are far out of the limelight.
People ask, "What is the Salonika army doing?"
Lloyd George wrote:
"Our Balkan force was a miserable Cinderella among the Allied armies.
"The British War Office never loved it.
"The campaign was a wretched story of neglect, delay,
"and official bungling of essential supplies."
Winter brought a new enemy - cold.
Day and night, armies on both sides
were exposed to the full blast of the blinding sleet, the icy wind.
The temperature fell to 35 degrees below freezing.
Men went down by the score with frostbite.
The German high commands remained on the defensive,
and let Bulgarians hold the line.
It was more advantageous to know that 300,000 of the enemy
were being chained to that distant region
than to drive them from the Balkan peninsula
and thence to the French theatre of war.
The Germans had other preoccupations in the Balkans.
In 1916, Rumania declared war on the central powers,
and Bulgaria found herself with an enemy on her northern frontier.
But Rumanian ambitions exceeded their powers.
"The trouble is, we are such babies, so unlearned in the art of war",
wrote the queen of Rumania.
She set an example befitting a granddaughter of Queen Victoria,
distributing sweets, cigarettes, little crosses and holy pictures.
But crosses and holy pictures were not enough.
The Rumanian army was pitifully equipped and badly led.
In the north-west, German and Austrian alpine troops
came through the mountains to the central plain.
Bucharest, the capital, fell without a struggle.
In the south, Field Marshal Mackensen,
with a mixed force of Germans, Bulgarians and Turks,
had pushed up the Danube towards its mouth
and captured the Black Sea port of Constanza.
Three-quarters of the country had been overrun.
The following year, the Rumanians sued for peace.
The Rumanian catastrophe completed the tale of unrelieved failure
for the Allies in the Balkans.
They now resorted to political weapons. The majority of Greeks
weren't pro-Ally or pro-German. They just wanted to be left alone.
But it didn't suit the Allies for Greece to remain neutral.
By political and military pressure,
including a landing at Athens, King Constantine was forced to abdicate.
Venizelos was returned as premier
and Greece was induced to declare war on the Central Powers.
"The conversion of the Greek army from a source of danger to a powerful ally
"changed the aspect of things in the Balkans
and made a renewed offensive possible."
From Corfu came other reinforcements -
100,000 Serbians who had escaped from their country in 1915.
They were dedicated to avenge that terrible defeat.
As Lloyd George put it, they were "ravening to be up and at the foe".
Now mighty events elsewhere impinged on the Macedonian front.
Germany's defeats in the west had weakened Bulgaria's will to resist.
Her peasant soldiers had lived for too long on garlic soup and maize bread.
They'd suffered too long in the mountains without boots or coats.
There was no longer a German army to stiffen their morale.
They began to slip away from the front to their neglected farms.
On 15 September 1918, the Allied bombardment roared out
and the mountains echoed with its thunder.
SHELL FIRE AND EXPLOSIONS
Fire of battle spread quickly from west to east as French, Serbians,
Italians,
Greeks and British attacked the walls of rock that faced them.
The main attack was made by the French and Serbians
over mountains, in places, 7,000ft high.
Within a week, the Serbian army, inspired by the sight of their homeland,
had stormed through the mountains to the valleys beyond.
Now they were retracing the path of their bitter retreat three long years before.
Veles, Skopje,
Uskub, Nis -
the towns of Serbia returned, one after another, into their hands.
ACCORDION PLAYS FOLK TUNE
The Bulgarian commander in chief frantically called on the Germans
for reinforcements.
Hindenburg replied -
"As Your Excellency is aware, Germany is now engaged
"in a most terrific struggle on the Western Front.
"All our forces will be required for that purpose."
Only a small nucleus of German troops remained in Bulgaria
- not enough to rally the demoralized Bulgarians.
"It was impossible to stop their career, even though the pursuing enemy were weak.
"The moment the enemy approached,
the Bulgarians fired a few rounds and then left their lines."
The Bulgarians fell back, leaving behind the debris of a broken army.
"The situation was fast becoming unbelievable.
"We were on the point of rolling up the whole line.
Central Europe was before our eyes."
On 29 September, a fortnight after the first assault,
Bulgaria capitulated.
The first of Germany's allies had cracked.
"The iron thrones are falling," one Englishman wrote.
The way lay open to Constantinople in the east,
to the Hapsburg Empire in the north.
In Austria-Hungary, social discontent had reached a revolutionary pitch,
as it had done in Russia.
Mutinies had broken out among the Slovenes,
Czechs, Hungarians, Bosnians and Slovakians.
Bad news from the Western Front fanned them.
The Austrians asked - "If Germany can't put up a defence,
why don't they end the fighting?"
Austrian dependence on Germany
was coming full circle.
Endurance was near breaking point. One soldier wrote to his mother -
"The life is unworthy of any human being.
"I ask myself how the older men
and young boys in their front positions endure this life.
"Insufficient food. Tattered uniforms.
"No possibility of keeping oneself clean.
I feel convinced that we can't go on like this."
On 16 October, the troops learned that the emperor had proclaimed
a federal constitution giving full autonomy to the empire's nations.
It was too late. One by one, they cast off the Hapsburg yoke.
First the Czechoslovaks, then the Yugoslavs and Hungarians
proclaimed themselves as independent states
- the empire was splitting asunder.
After four years,
the shot at Sarajevo had at last achieved its true purpose.
On 24 October, the anniversary of Caporetto, the Allies attacked
in Italy.
EXPLOSIONS OF SHELLS
For two days, the Austrians hung on tenaciously in the mountains
and along the line of the Piave.
But on the 27th, the Allies broke through the river front.
CONTINUOUS MACHINE-GUNFIRE
Three days later, cavalry and armoured cars
reached Vittorio Veneto, the Austrian headquarters.
The retreat had turned into a rout.
Now, at last, Austrian resistance was at an end.
Her dream of empire was in ruins.
Her imperial eagle was at the point of death.