Anyway, part of the book deals with the Balkans during World War I. Of course, the Great War started there when the heir to the throne of Austro-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by a Serbian ultra-nationalist. Gavrilo Princip. That led, obviously, to war…though, in retrospect, it’s not clear that Serbia’s conduct was entirely responsible for the outbreak of hostilities. Mostly, maybe, but not entirely. The Austro-Hungarians had been looking for a reason to go to war with the Serbia for quite some time. The death of their crown prince provided a handy excuse.
But, that’s a story for another day.
What I’m interested in right now, though, is what happened immediately after war was declared. Austria (well, Austro-Hungary, but let’s keep things short and simple) invaded Serbia. The very first shot fired in that invasion, and indeed, in the war itself, was from an Austrian gunboat on the Danube.(1) This was the Bodrog, which was a “monitor,” in the language of the time.
Monitors were boats meant to fight on rivers. And, yes, they took the name from the original one that served with the United States Navy in the American Civil War. Most of the bigger nations of the time possessed them, and they were sometimes quite heavily armed. The Bodrog, for instance, or so says Wikipedia, "was armed with two 120 mm (4.7 in)L/35[c] guns in single gun turrets, a single 120 mm (4.7 in)L/10 howitzer in a central pivot mount, and two 37 mm (1.5 in) guns.[1] The maximum range of her Škoda 120 mm guns was 10 kilometres (6.2 mi), and her howitzer could fire its 20 kg (44 lb) shells a maximum of 6.2 km (3.9 mi).”
 | ||
| The Bodrog |
See below for source
It was, in other words, a pretty fearsome weapon, and when it and other Austrian monitors steamed into Serbian waters, there wasn’t much the defenders could do about them. This was particularly unfortunate for the Serbs because first target for the monitors was the city of Belgrade—and, particularly, its civilian population.
The whole business sounds pretty awful. Glenny writes about the civilians watching while their city was turned into a battlefield, “At night almost every street in Belgrade was lit up either by the huge network of floodlights constructed by the Austrian army or by the fires raging out of control at the cigarette factory, saw mill and oil depot. Early on, the waterworks was destroyed, leading to a rapid deterioration in sanitary conditions. Drinking water was soon in short supply, and swarms of mosquitoes tormented the flesh of the hundreds of homeless people who had been forced to abandon their homes to seek shelter in a huge cave in Topčider.”
I’ll spare you the rest of the history lecture. Suffice to say that Serbs did mount a counterattack which stunned the world by driving the Austro-Hungarians out of the country. But, then the Empire struck back, with much German aid, and eventually occupied the whole country. Oh, and in there too was a horrific retreat of the Serbian army across snow covered mountains—a brilliant maneuver, but one which left thousands of Serbian men (and Austrian POWs) dead along the way. If you want to know more, Wikipedia has an entry on The Serbian Campaign of World War I. (2)
But, I’m writing about all of this because I realized two things. First…and I’m embarrassed to admit this…but I was startled to learn that almost from the beginning, the Great War included urban warfare and attacks on non-combatants. Somehow I had gotten the naive idea that most of the Great War’s battles were out in the countryside — like Flanders Field — or in small towns or villages when those places were unfortunate enough to get caught in the action.
Which meant that I somehow had the idea the Great War was minutely less deadly to civilians than the wars that came before it and those many that came after it. I didn’t think that the combatant nations were particularly chivalrous, though that may have played a role, but simply that they conceived of war as something that was done outside the confines of urban areas.
Second, though, I realized that I had never heard of the shelling of Belgrade. Oh, I knew that there had been an Austrian invasion of Serbia, and I had some hazy memory of reading about the war in Balkans after that. But, monitors on the river, shelling women and children, that was new to me.
And I worry about my ignorance. I’m hoping that I simply hadn’t paid enough attention to my history books, and that Belgrade’s sufferings were recorded there for all to see.
But, what concerns me is the possibility that the battle of Belgrade is less well known to everyone, not just me, and that is it less well known because it simply isn’t covered as much in English-language texts…and maybe not in French, German, and Dutch ones either. And that the reason it is less well known is because that the city’s sufferings did not particularly and uniquely impact Western Europeans and Americans. And so, since the killings were somewhere out there…beyond the pale…among those Others…it didn’t really matter.
If that sort of willful blindness is at work, then you understand why the tale of Belgrade’s ruin sort of slipped below the horizon. And, if Belgrade, then other things might similarly be subject to directed amnesia—like, for instance, the relative indifference that the West seemed to have shown about many a slaughter—the Holocaust, the destruction of the Armenians, the Gulag, Nanjing, Cambodia, Rwanda, the former Yugoslavia (again the Balkans), and so many, many other places and times.
That is concerning because it suggests that we are only troubled (let alone moved to provide help) only by what we see…and what we see greatly depends on what we are allowed to see by greater powers than ourselves. And those powers may not be particularly interested in what is just and what is humane.
Which worries me because it suggests that perhaps there are terrible things happening right now… in places like Congo and Iraq and Xinjiang…but we are shamefully unaware of them, because it is not in the interests of the elite that we be otherwise.
That’s bad enough…but there is more…
You see, we are now Great and Powerful ourselves. America is the sole remaining superpower in the world. But, all greatness fades. All empires tumble. There may come a time…perhaps even in our lives…when we are not the focus of the world’s fascinated attention.
When that time comes, and should we also be the subject of massacre and horror…will we discover, too late, that we too are ignored, that we too are left the perish…
Because it is not expedient for the Great and the Powerful…
To save us?
*
Two quick asides: One, if I had bothered to research the issue even a little bit, I’d have known that urban areas (at least towns) were being attacked and civilians were being killed from the minute the Great War began in 1914. Indeed, a quick Google search on my part just now revealed that while soldiers seemed to have formed the bulk of those killed in the Great War, civilians made up a lot of the dead. In an article on the British Library site, “The ‘German Atrocities’ of 1914,” Sophie de Schaepdrijver notes that “the war started with massacres of civilians,” mostly Belgian and French who ran afoul of the invading German army. (3)
And, two, I talk about how we ignore genocides if they seem to be far away. Someone could quite legitimately point out that we have had our own genocides right here, and not that long ago—for example, the near extermination of Native Americans. That’s true, of course, but maybe you could argue that in the nineteenth century, massacres going on “way out west” were psychically distant, in that it required days or weeks of travel to actually reach the places where they were happening, newspapers were often more concerned with events in the cites of the East Coast, and there were few among the national elites who had anything to gain from protecting “the Vanishing American.”
Or, maybe my thesis is just fundamentally flawed. If so, I’m willing to (reluctantly) accept that judgment.
But, still, even so, I think I am right to be concerned about national destiny, and whether or not we might find ourselves without friends at some dreadful moment in our future.
Footnotes:
1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yugoslav_monitor_Sava
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serbian_campaign_of_World_War_I
3) https://www.bl.uk/world-war-one/articles/civilian-atrocities-german-1914
Source on photo of Bodrog: By Foto Kilophot G.m.b.h. Vienna(Life time: N/A) - Original publication: Vienna, 1914 as a postcard. Immediate source: http://www.kuk-kriegsmarine.it/navi/monitor-fluviali/bodrog/bodrog.html, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=44208609
~~~
Please check out my new book, Padre: To The Island, a meditation on mortality, grief, and joy, based on the lives and deaths of two of the most amazing and unconventional people I ever met, my mother and father.
Michael Jay Tucker is a writer and journalist who has published material on topics ranging from the Jazz Age to computers. (Among his small claims to fame is that he interviewed Steve Jobs just after that talented if complicated man got kicked out of Apple, and just before the company’s Board came begging him to come back.)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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