Re: Blood and Iron

The moment the Serbian Army, which was sent to intercept the Germans in the northern half of the territory that more or less currently remained under the control of the Serbian Provisional Government, surrendered, all hell broke loose among the allies.

This was a severe matter, as this was roughly half of Serbia's remaining combat might, albeit primarily made of conscripts, being sent on a suicide mission. Even with the men sent by the French, British, and Ottomans to assist the Serbians, it was not enough to prevent the complete and total collapse of their northern front.

Worse yet, radio broadcasts were being made across the country, as were any other means of propaganda, whether that be publication, posters, influence in the local churches, et cetera. Where the words being spoken were entirely made to convince the Serbians that peaceful surrender was their guarantee of being treated better than Belgrade was.

Even those who may have had an initial desire to take up arms and attack Imperial occupying forces hesitated to do so when they were called upon by their own leadership to resist such an urge for chaos and violence.

At the end of the day, the Serbians felt like they had been completely and totally betrayed by their own forces, or at least those within the leadership who still wished to cling to their pride in the face of what was clear and overwhelming defeat.

And while the British, Ottoman, and French commanders in charge of their expeditionary forces, which were at most a brigade or two each, convened to discuss their next course of action. Montenegro came under the full assault of some 500,000 plus German soldiers who convened upon it from the north and eastern flanks.

In Bruno's past life, the Serbian Army had been forced to withdraw from their own borders within less than a year of the hostilities' beginning. However, they had fled successfully into Montenegro, where they more or less kept the overall theater of war open until essentially the end of the war in 1918.

This had consumed hundreds of thousands of not millions of men and the resources required to supply them. A mistake Bruno did not intend to make in this life. From the moment Montenegro entered the war, Bruno used the excuse of them ferrying Allied troops and supplies into Serbia as an excuse to completely and totally obliterate them as a sovereign kingdom.

Montenegro was a small kingdom, capable of fielding at most 50,000 men in its army, most of which were wielding vastly obsolete equipment. Facing ten times their numbers in modern German soldiers, deployed via motorized means, in both infantry and logistics. The Montenegrin campaign was over before it began.

The only reason it really held out so long in Bruno's past life was due to its small territory which was supported by hundreds of thousands of Serbian soldiers who fled into its territory following Serbia's occupation by the Central Powers, and because of its access to the Mediterranean which more or less allowed allied material support of their defense.

Two things, however, had occurred in this life that prevented such a result. First and foremost, and also the most unexpected. Was the Greek entry into the war... While the Hellenic Army was inferior in scale, and equipment to the Bulgarian Army.