Belgrade as it is today, showing the Danube in the background, and in the foreground the bridges over the River Sava. The Old Railway Bridge is just visible in the centre of the picture, just beyond the New Railway suspension bridge. Buchan was in favour of the League of Nations (later the United Nations), understandable enough at the time; but he remained a staunch advocate of small, sovereign countries such as Serbia, and felt deeply for the hurts inflicted on them by those seeking to make them part of Germany’s European ‘machine’.
WE wandered among the battered riverside streets, and looked at the broken arches of the great railway bridge which the Germans were working at like beavers. The upper streets of the city were still fairly whole, and there were shops open where food could be got. I remember hearing English spoken, and seeing some Red Cross nurses in the custody of Austrian soldiers coming from the railway station.
It would have done me a lot of good to have had a word with them. I thought of the gallant people whose capital this had been, how three times they had flung the Austrians back over the Danube,* and then had only been beaten by the black treachery of their so-called allies.* Somehow that morning in Belgrade gave both Peter and me a new purpose in our task. It was our business to put a spoke in the wheel of this monstrous bloody Juggernaut that was crushing the life out of the little heroic nations.*
The Serbian campaign began with three notable victories for the Serbs, in the Battles of Cer, Drina and Kolubara. In 1867 Serbia had shaken off centuries of oppression under the Ottoman Empire only to be seized by Austria-Hungary in 1908, and the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, on June 28th, 1914, brought the German Empire in on Vienna’s side. See The Outbreak of the Great War.
That is, the Bulgarians, who had shared Serbia’s captivity under the Ottomans, but sided with Germany in the Great War; they had little reason to love Britain, after Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who was Pro-Turkish, U-turned on William Gladstone’s policy of support for Sofia. The over-stretched British did eventually come to Serbia’s aid, but hesitation in Greece, where King Constantine I flirted with neutrality but Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos supported the Allies, delayed them at Salonica and it was a case of too little too late.
The Old Railway Bridge over the River Sava (which joins the Danube at Belgrade), built in 1884 by the French, was Austria-Hungary’s prime route into the capital. It was destroyed by the Serbs in the small hours of July 29th, 1914 but rebuilt two years later by the occupying powers, who destroyed it again in 1918 as they retreated. It was reopened in 1919.
The loan word Juggernaut came into English during the 17th century, as a reference to enormous wagons bearing the images of Jagannatha, Subhadra, and Balabhadra in processions at the Jagannatha Temple in Puri, Odisha (Orissa) in India. Buchan implies that the German Empire was a crushing bandwagon in the service of a quasi-religious obsession.
Précis
In John Buchan’s adventure story, Richard Hannay and Peter Pienaar are making their away through central Europe to Constantinople during the Great War. They reach Belgrade, and Hannay sees for himself the sufferings of an occupied country. It moves him to admiration for the resilience of the Serbs, and to new resolution in his own mission for the Allies. (59 / 60 words)
