THE WORST AND TERRIBLE SERBIAN SOLDIER COMING ACROSS A DEAD COMRADE IN THE SNOW DURING THE GREAT SERBIAN RETREAT.

Serbian soldier coming across a dead comrade in the snow during the Great Serbian Retreat, 1915.

Today 107 years ago, on November 25, 1915, the Great Serbian Retreat through Albania began.

In October 1915 Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria launched a joint invasion of Serbia. Being heavily outnumbered in troops, resources and artillery guns, on November 25, 1915, the Serbian Army began a retreat through Montenegro and eventually Albania. Some 220,000 Serbian civilians also joined the soldiers in their retreat.

The weather was terrible, roads were muddy, and the winter was extremely tough, especially through the Albanian mountains. Food and water were scarce and disease was widespread too. Some Albanian tribal bands also committed massacres on the Serbs, as a revenge for Serbian massacres on Albanians during the Balkan Wars.

By January 1916, the Serbs had reached the Albanian coast, and on January 18 the first Serbian units were shipped to the Greek islands of Vido and Corfu. The rest of the surviving Serbs, some 150,000 troops and civilians, had been shipped by February 21.

Some 70,000 Serbian soldiers and 140,000 civilians died during the retreat through Albania, mostly from starvation, thirst, disease and hypothermia. But due to exhaustion and disease, thousands of more Serbs died while on Vido and Corfu, at first 300 soldiers a day. In total, some 10,000 Serbian soldiers died on Corfu and Vido.

5,000 of these were buried in 27 Serbian cemeteries, while the rest were buried in the ocean called the Blue Graveyard, due to a lack of burial grounds. After recovering the Serbs joined the other Allies on the Macedonian Front in Salonika in April 1916, where they fought till the end of the war in 1918.

The Serbian retreat through Albania is today considered one of Serbia's greatest tragedies in their nation's history.

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"Only a few miserable remnants escaped into the Albanian mountains, losing the whole of their artillery and everything else that they could not carry. There was no longer a Serbian Army." ~ Erich von Falkenhayn. Thanks for reading, leave your thought in the comment section below.

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