Page 50 - Stradanje i humanizam

Together with numerous casualties and the newly arrived refugees from Bosnia and Srem, Valjevo Reiss and the writings of numerous foreigners. Continuously, days and nights, the lines of weak
was also flooded by refugees from the war-affected territories, Šabac, Loznica and the villages between
the rivers Drina and Sava. They told terrible, almost unbelievable stories on the crimes perpetrated by
the Austro-Hungarian army. The witnesses spoke of the living who perished in the houses set on fire,
tied to stacks of hay, murdered and buried in places they lost their lives in. ”Peasant women come to
visit their dead martyrs, buried in orchards“ – wrote Archibald Reiss about what he had seen and what
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these very graves will always witness about. Оn countless murders of women and children, interning
to concentration camps, breaking of necks of imprisoned soldiers, rapes [...] The survivors pertained, as
evidenced later also by the composition of units which perpetrated the worst crimes one can think of,
that these were mostly done by the Croats and the Hungarians. Duplicity of the Austro-Hungarian
monarchy was reflected also in the special units from the territories of Austrian and Hungarian lands
and so it became evident that the units of ”Austrian Germans“ had taken almost no part in the crimes at
all.
The municipal authorities took care that even the smallest space was used for their accommodation
and to provide food and clothing to them. The surrounding villages were also brimming. The offered
possibility to be evacuated further into hinterland was rarely used by anyone in the hope that the war
would stop and that they would return to their hearths, not far from Valjevo, soonest. For quite some
time, trenched battles persisted at enormous loss of lives on both sides – throughout September and
October. It was then that one of the biggest dramas of the already exhausted people, and probably the
biggest one of the entire war started to take the form of an almost total annihilation of the population. A
time of death started on 6 November 1914. The majority of the remaining Serbian defense positions
were demolished under fierce artillery fire. The Serbian army, tired, decimated, without sufficient
ammunition, started to retreat. In front of it, alongside it, mixing with soldiers' lines walked the almost
entire remaining population of Azbukovica, Podrinje, Mačva, Posavina, Tamnava and Podgorina
towards Valjevo. Women, who were the only one able bodied, hauled the elderly, the children, their
possessions onto the carts and set on their way to uncertainty. The long columns were also noticed by
Austrian airplanes that reported that these stood still or were hardly moving at Kamenica, Koceljeva,
Ub or on the access roads to Valjevo, mostly at ascents and bridges. Desperate soldiers abandoned their
units temporarily, when passing by their homes in an attempt to help their loved ones. They thus risked
death penalties and additionally weakened opportunities for defence. They often put small livestock on
the carts or pushed it in front of them, knowing they would find nothing upon return and that they
needed supplies to live on while fleeing. It is general knowledge, that at the first enemy crossing the
territory, there were special units organized to pillage livestock and property left behind and carry it
across the Drina. Fear of a certain and painful death was stronger than the hope that they would be
spared. The population knew of horrendous torture that their compatriots had been exposed to, digging
of eyes, murder of children and everything that the world learned later from the reports of Archibald
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children, women and elderly – hungry, exhausted and left to themselves – walked the only possible road
for days and nights. The supplies of bread and flour they carried were not sufficient, next to nothing was
left in their bags and on carts. They were hurrying towards a city that could barely make ends meet and
was at the brink of destitution. The large warehouses of flour in Prahovo where it was transported to
from Russia, were too far away and there was rarely anything to be bought in the immediate vicinity.
Doctor Tienhoven who kept a diary states: ”Аnd after the horrors at the beginning of the war, the
people took to fleeing in a mortal fear. In the afternoon we see those wretched columns arriving on foot,
thousands and thousands of them with women and children, with the sick, the disabled, exhausted, with
some rescued possessions on their backs, in carts with furniture [...] They are starved, thirsty, and there
is scarcely any food for these endless refugee lines [...] Refugees labour through the streets in a never-
ending line, sit in despair, fall never to rise again“. 22
Numerous graves around the houses, in orchards, along the roads and all the places possible, that
already marked Podrinje and Mačva, in the areas that had suffered the terrors of war, pepperred the
paths trodden by refugees. Often there was no one with any means to transport the dead to cemeteries,
and this happened later during the typhus epidemics across the country. Weak women and their elderly
dug shallow, provisional graves that later became permanent cemeteries. At this time they were to be
seen at every step, in Valjevo and in the surroundings. Obviously moved, looking at the misery
surrounding him, doctor Tienhoven says ”The famished martyrs walked for days and nights, falling
down in exhaustion. How many children perished in this Calvary? The parents would dig up a small
hole, use branches to make a cross and mark the grave of their darling. I saw hundreds and hundreds of
such simple crosses made of branches [...]“ 23
The front could no longer be defended, the army retreated towards Valjevo, but even the city could
not be substantially defended. At a joint session of 8 November 1914, the Supreme Command and the
Government decided to continue fighting refuting suggestions to capitulate which seemed the only
acceptable solution. It was only the individual, desperate resistance of the defenders that prevented the
retreat not to turn into a total disaster. To add to the misery of refugees, rains began, the road turned into
mud and the women and children fleeing to Valjevo and further afield in light and drained shoes and
clothes attempted to reach salvation with final drops of their strength. Many – the children, the elderly,
the ill – remained in some field by the road, forever. Valjevo was the gate of hope and salvation for all the
refugees, for all the wounded and the sick, for all who were retreating. The city had become then what it
would be continuously several months later – not only a place of suffering but also of hope. It had
already become a city-hospital, each street was a combatants' avenue with all the buildings, taverns,
hotels, houses, warehouses, schools. All that was put to the service of medical treatment. But at that
moment, Valjevo became much more than the obligations called for. The dedication of citizens and
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