World War, 1914-1918 -- Campaigns -- Balkan Peninsula
to become pro-German for the occasion--he remained interned for some
months.
The Armée d’Orient was now scattered over an immense territory. The
Commander-in-Chief, still General Franchet d’Espérey, remained at
Constantinople with his Staff. The city and the adjoining area was
garrisoned by General Wilson’s inter-Allied Force. At Salonica there
remained fragments of the various Allied armies, commanded by General
Génin, with detachments in other parts of Macedonia, especially in the
old fighting zone, to collect the vast quantities of war material and
to guard the prisoners. The latter were regarded as public nuisances,
difficult to feed, and of little use for labour as there was very
little work for them to do, so that the various Commands who had fought
so hard to capture them were only too delighted when some of them
escaped. The old Italian headquarters at Tepavci was occupied by the
Bulgarian generals and field officers captured by our troops.
The bulk of the Italian Expeditionary Force was now in Bulgaria. The
Dobrugia was occupied by Franco-British, and afterwards by Italian,
detachments. In Roumania, besides some Roumanian divisions, there was
part of General Berthelot’s army; the rest of it was for a short time
in South Russia, together with some Greek and White Russian units,
commanded by General d’Anselme.
The remnants of the A.F.O. and the Serbian Army were scattered about
the new provinces occupied by Serbia, which were destined to form the
new S.H.S. State, principally in the Banat and in Croatia-Slavonia.
Small French detachments were in Montenegro, Cattaro, Ragusa, etc. In
many of these places there were also Italian troops, and at Fiume there
was a mixed Italian-French-British garrison. At Scutari the pre-war
inter-Allied occupation was reconstituted, and a garrison consisting
of a French, an Italian and a British battalion, commanded by General
Foulon, was sent there.
All these troops took orders from General Franchet d’Espérey in
Constantinople. The Italian troops in Bulgaria, in European Turkey
and in Macedonia, belonging to the 35th Division, formed part of the
Armée d’Orient. But the Italian detachments at Scutari and along the
mid-Adriatic coast took orders from the Albanian Command, while those
at Fiume were under the Italian III Army. Neither the former nor the
latter had anything to do with the C.A.A. at Constantinople, whereas
the French detachments in the same places were under it. The British
Army, still commanded by General Milne, was under the C.A.A., but to
a very limited extent, while the British troops in Asia Minor, in the
Caucasus, etc., were also under General Milne, who, as far as they were
concerned, had nothing whatever to do with the C.A.A. The Serbian Army
was now acting entirely on its own.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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