THE SERBIAN CAMPAIGN.

When the great army of Germans and Austrians entered Serbia at Belgrade and other points along the Danube and began to drive the Serbian forces to the south, they met with immediate and continued successes.  Bulgarian troops meanwhile pressed the Serbians on the west and by the end of November it seemed as if the entire territory of Serbia was doomed to the fate of Belgium.  But on the south, allied troops, including a great body of French who had been landed at Saloniki in Greece and made their way northward, disputed the advance of the invaders and at several points drove back the Bulgarians, thus holding the southern territory of Serbia for their ally in the same manner that Flanders was being held by the Allies for Belgium.

CHAPTER XXV

SECOND WINTER OF WAR

In all the arenas of the great struggle, the winter campaign of 1915-16, the second winter of the war, was accompanied by unparalleled hardships and sufferings.  It was, in fact, described by Major Moraht, military expert of the Berliner Tageblatt and the best known German military critic, as “the most terrific campaign in the world’s history.”  Hundreds of thousands of men of all classes, in all the armies stretched along the battle fronts east and west, struggled against wind, weather, and winter amid conditions of the most extreme self-denial.  Speaking for the Teutonic forces in January, Major Moraht said:  “On our western and eastern fronts and along the lines held by our Austro-Hungarian allies, the conditions under which we must stubbornly hold out are such as never in the history of the world’s most terrible campaign had to be endured before.”  The winter was exceptionally severe and men were invalided by the thousands, owing to frost-bites, despite ingenious precautions and the fact that their spells in the trenches were reduced considerably.

The conditions faced by the Austrians and Italians in the Alps and on the Isonzo were especially appalling.  Thus a detachment of Austrian and Alpine troops, engaged in patrol duty, met its doom in an avalanche in southern Tyrol.  Only one out of twelve was rescued alive, and he lay buried under snow for fourteen hours before he was rescued.

Added to the sufferings of the fighting men during the winter the sum total of human misery in Europe when 1916 dawned was vastly increased by the awful conditions prevailing in Poland and in Serbia.  Poland, a land long recognized as given over to sorrows, had been crossed and recrossed by hostile armies.  It had been harried, almost destroyed.  Towns and food supplies, fields and granaries, were obliterated.  The cattle had been driven off by the invaders and the people were left starving.  The misery of Belgium a year before was as nothing compared with the misery of Poland amid the rigors of winter, and the unhappy country clamored for the help of happier