It is a strange kind of war that sees large military units containing Serbs on both sides, shooting and yelling at each other in their common language across no-man's land. By 1914, the Austro-Hungarian army had had Serbian units for centuries, but they had not been used against a Serbian state. So, it is intriguing to imagine the amount of pride and all-encompassing spite that was loaded into the jibes being exchanged, such as “Do you think that we are Turks or Bulgars, who run away?” (162). Rhetorical devices notwithstanding, the first year of fighting along the border between Serbia, on the one hand, and Habsburg Hungary and Bosnia-Hercegovina, on the other, was both deadly and seriously surprising. James Lyon, a researcher at the University of Graz, has written, and partially contextualized, a well-researched, useful account of the military history of this conflict in the closing months of 1914.
The author provides several chapters of background on the Austro-Serbian conflict. These include discussions of the various Yugoslav movements and the Serbian national program, as well as of the Eastern question more generally. A standard description of the assassinations of June 28, 1914 is followed by depictions of Habsburg martial law, Serbian secret societies, diplomatic wrangling and mobilization, and then the battered state of Serbia's economy and military after the two Balkan Wars. Lyon's coverage of Serbian military organization, conscription, equipment, and training is more original, and his analyses of local geography and the war planning of both sides in the conflict are excellent.
Blow-by-blow accounts of the three main battles in the first year of the war, Mount Cer, Mačkov Kamen, and Kolubara, with engaging and effective narrative transitions between them, comprise the lion's share of the book. By year's end, although Austro-Hungarian forces had crossed into Serbian territory several times, won the second and third of these battles, captured Belgrade, and inflicted significant losses on a Serbian army that was weakened by desertion and an egregious lack of munitions, the Serbs had recaptured their capital. They also pushed the Habsburg forces completely out of their country, fought hard enough to win continent-wide respect, and went on the offensive twice, crossing in significant numbers into Habsburg territory. Serbia's ability to hold the Habsburg forces at bay meant that many Austro-Hungarian troops were tied down, while the Danube remained closed to the ships that could have reinforced the Bulgarian and Ottoman allies of Vienna and Berlin.
This book, like any, has its shortcomings. The maps vary considerably in their helpfulness, there are the usual small typographical errors and a few problematic translations (why translate the Hungarian Honvéd as the south Slavic Domobran, for instance?) and, mysteriously, some Serbian toponyms—that is, proper nouns—are italicized. These problems do not detract from the essential argument or the importance of this book, however.
In terms of substantive critique, there is so little Balkan military history in English that a curious reader is indeed left with a sizable wish list of topics and sources that could have been built into a volume such as this. Above all, one might wish to see at least some inclusion of topics from the new military history to supplement this traditional account, and more analysis of what made the commanders, especially Oskar Potiorek on the Austrian side and Živojin Mišić on the Serbian side, such a colossal failure and success, respectively.
In sum, this worthy volume has appeared at the right time to feed our interest in, and add to our understanding of, the Great War, which was tearing Europe apart precisely a hundred years ago. Lyon's study is concrete and adds new knowledge to our considerations, in contrast to many new books on World War I that are primarily interpretive. Above all the author has endeavored to add Serbian-language sources to a chapter of military history usually fueled overwhelmingly by German-language sources, and to shift the center of gravity in our discussions of the Serbian side in 1914 away from Gavrilo Princip and the machinations of the Black Hand and onto the surprising twists and turns of the intense fighting in northern Serbia. The author has achieved these goals, and Balkan specialists can be glad that the number of successful monographs on important trends in our area of specialty is growing, if slowly.
