But where was the first great blow to strike?  Naturally, not only the General Staff, but the whole army and population waited in deep anxiety.  This tension lasted over the last days of July, into the first week of August, 1914.

Then, on August 6, 1914, some Bosnian peasants, Serbs, appeared and reported that they had seen great bodies of soldiers moving along the mountain roads toward Syrmia, in northeastern Bosnia.  Two days later, early in the morning, two Austrian aeroplanes whirred over the River Save and circled over Krupani, Shaoatz and Valievo.  The last doubts were then dispelled; the attack was coming from the east.

And finally, on August 12, 1914, the message flashed over the wires that the outposts had seen boats in movement, full of soldiers, behind an island on the Drina, opposite Loznitza.  Near that town, and in fact along the whole lower course of the Drina, the river has frequently changed its channel, thus cutting out numerous small islands, which would serve as a screen to the movements of troops contemplating a crossing.  Pontoon bridges could be built on the farther side of almost any of these islands without being observed from the other shore.  This was exactly what the Austrians were doing.

Suddenly, on August 12, 1914, there came a burst of rifle fire and the boom of heavy field guns, and a fleet of barges, under cover of this fire, emerged from around both ends of one of these islands and made for the Serbian shore.  The two battalions of Third Reserve Serbians, stationed there as an outpost, trained their old De Bange field guns, of which they had two batteries, on the oncoming swarms and began firing.  But the Austrian fire became heavier and heavier; a blast of steel pellets and shells swept through the cornfields and the plum orchards, tearing through the streets of the village and crumpling up the houses.  The breastworks of the small Serbian detachment were literally the center of a continuous explosion of shells.

When a full tenth of their number lay dead or disabled, the Serbians began retiring across the cornfields and up the slopes leading to the heights behind Losnitza.  There, on higher ground, which offered more effective shelter, they made a determined stand and continued their fire on the Austrian masses.

Having crossed the river, the Austrians threw up defensive breastworks and dug elaborate trenches, thus fortifying their crossing.  Next they built a pontoon bridge, and then the main Austrian army poured across; a whole army corps and two divisions of a second.

Meanwhile, on the same day, August 12, 1914, a similar event was happening at Shabatz, on the Save, where that river takes a sharp southward turn and then swings up again before joining the Danube at Belgrade.  Here the country is a level plain, really the southern limit of the great plain which stretches up to the Danube, past Belgrade and so into Hungary.  Here, too, the Austrians screened themselves behind an island in the river, then hurled their forces across, driving the feeble detachment of Third Reserve Serbian troops back across the plain up into the hills lying to the southeast of Shabatz.  Then the advance guard of the Austrian Fourth Army occupied the town, strongly fortified it and built a pontoon bridge across the river from their railroad terminus at Klenak.