German name--has a glorious past and surely a magnificent future.
When the Serbs came back to Belgrade in December 1914, the total of
Austrian prisoners was more numerous than the Serbian combatants. But
35,000 of these prisoners, together with 250,000 Serbs of all ages and
106 Serbian and Allied doctors, were now to succumb to the plague of
typhus, which the Austrian troops had carried from Galicia. Hospitals
were hurried out from France and Great Britain; heroic work was done
by women and by men; doctors operated day and night--in the hospitals
the patients were so closely packed that it was impossible to step
between them.
"In Skoplje," says Colonel Morrison, who in civil life is senior
surgeon to the Queen's Hospital, Birmingham--"in Skoplje a British
unit was installed in a large factory accommodating over 1000 medical
and surgical patients. Besides their inherent unsuitability the
premises were detestably insanitary and the floor space overcrowded to
its utmost capacity. On the ground floor I saw 250 men lying on sacks
of straw packed closely together, covered only by their ragged uniform
under a blanket. Gangrenous limbs and septic compound fractures were
common, the stench being overpowering; yet every window was closely
shut." He tells how seven out of the members of the British staff went
down with typhus. At Užice he found over 700 patients crammed into
rooms containing about 500 beds; many were lying on the bare floor;
others were on sacks of straw; others on raised wooden platforms in
series of six men side by side. Often one would see an elderly
warrior, who had been wounded a week or two previously, being jolted
along in an ox-cart with several civilians who were suffering from
typhus--all trying to find a hospital that could take them in. And
meanwhile it was necessary to reorganize the army: all the men between
the ages of seventeen and fifty-five were called to the colours,
including those whom the doctors had declared to be totally unfit for
military service.
THE TREATY OF LONDON, APRIL 1915
On April 26, 1915, the negotiations were concluded between France,
Great Britain, Russia and Italy; the Treaty of London was signed and
the Italians had become our Allies. By this Treaty we and France and
Russia undertook to give them, if we were victorious, a very large
increase of territory--over which, by the way, we none of us had any
right of disposal.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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