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The principal enemy forces were stationed in the Vardar Valley and to the eastward through Dovatupete to the Struma Valley, and to the westward through the district of Subotsko and Vodena to Florina. A part of the reconstituted Serbian army has also been landed at Saloniki. Artillery fire has occurred daily during the past month."
After Stephen returned to Serbia he made an alliance with Hungary, which gave him back Belgrade and northern Serbia; it was at this time that Belgrade first became the capital, the political centre having in the course of fifty years moved from the Vardar to the Danube.
Some districts of east-central Macedonia, which were genuinely Bulgarian, were included in Serbian territory, as Serbia naturally did not wish, after the disquieting and costly experience of June and July 1913, to give the Bulgarians another chance of separating Greek from Serbian territory by a fresh surprise attack, and the further the Bulgarians could be kept from the Vardar river and railway the less likelihood there was of this.
By November 2, 1915, the French were at Gradsko, where the Tcherna joins the Vardar River, hoping to get in touch with the Serbians who were defending the Babuna Pass and whose guns they could hear pounding over the ten miles of intervening mountain ridges. The British bore little of this fighting, having made their advance over toward Lake Doiran.
The part assigned to the British contingents under General Milne, which had taken over the front from the Vardar eastwards past Doiran and down the Struma to the sea, was the somewhat thankless one of pinning the Bulgars to that sector and preventing them from reinforcing the threatened line in the west.
If this horrible war, with its countless victims, has any meaning, it can only be found in the liberation of the small nations who are menaced by Germany's eagerness for conquest and her thirst for the dominion of Asia. The Oriental question is to be solved on the Rhine, Moldau and Vistula, not only on the Danube, Vardar and Maritza."
Serbia, shut out from the Adriatic, had no alternative save to seek her economic outlet down the valley of the Vardar towards the Aegean, and in so doing she came into violent conflict with Bulgarian aspirations in Macedonia.
Farther down in Macedonia, concentrated around Uskub, Veles, and stretched down along the Vardar toward the Greek frontier at Doiran, were another 25,000 men under the command of General Bojovitch.
Bulgaria for its own part naturally refused to waive its claim to central Macedonia, well knowing that the master of the Vardar valley is master of the Balkan peninsula.
She also secured cultural privileges for the Kutzovlachs in Bulgaria. The Servians, who before the second Balkan war would have been satisfied with the Vardar river as a boundary, now insisted upon the possession of the important towns of Kotchana, Ishtib, Radovishta, and Strumnitza, to the east of the Vardar. With the assistance of Roumania, Bulgaria was permitted to retain Strumnitza.
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