FLIGHT IN WINTER,

Present and Future Implications Are Seen in Dr. J. C. Adams' Story of the Courage and Endurance of the Serbs in 1915

by John ClintonAdams. Princeton University Press, 1942, pp.281, $3.00.

MOST PERSONS WHO have not altogether forgotten the Serbian campaign of 1915 will probably recall it only as a minor episode of the First World War. Confronted by an overwhelming combination of Germans, Austrians, and Bulgarians, a heroic and hardfighting army of Serbs was in a few short weeks hurled back upon its southwestern frontiers. Yet that army, while defeated, was never destroyed. Faced with the alternatives of surrender, annihilation, or retreat following the disaster at Kosovo Field, the high command decided to retire westward through the mountains of Albania to the Adriatic, and there the army survived, to fight another day.

Professor Adams has taken as his theme the struggle of the Serbs against the might of the Central Powers and the epic retreat during the winter of 1915-1916, which finally ended in escape. If his book had a subtitle, it might well be "A Tale of Fortitude." It is a story of courage and endurance in a struggle against hunger, cold, exposure, and human enemies. The author justly compares the achievement of the Serbs with the classic retreat of the Ten Thousand Greeks and that of Napoleon's Grand Army from Moscow. Certainly the feat deserves to be remembered, for as he observes, it "possessed that which the history of governments can never have: the quality of timelessness and deathlessness," and "dealt with the human and basic: man and nature."

The story is told with superb artistry in the tradition of the great romantic historians Prescott and Parkman. Yet it is based upon thorough research, and a personal study of the region described. Professor Adams spent several months in Yugoslavia, exploring the sources and talking with survivors of the campaign, but he never allows scholarship to obtrude itself nor to break the continuity of the unfolding drama. The book is distinctive by reason of its literary style, a quality all too rare in the field of military history. The writer knows how to use the English language to secure a desired effect. Thus he describes the devious ways of Balkan diplomacy with a restrained irony and his comments on Allied promises and their long-delayed fulfillment are marked by a cold scorn. When he deals with the horrors of the winter march through the Albanian mountains, he allows the grim facts to speak for themselves, and they carry their own dramatic effect. One of the finest touches of the entire book is contained in the brief Epilogue in which the worn Serbs are pictured after all their sufferings, at rest in the warmth and sunshine of their island refuge at Corfu, with abundant food at last for their famished bodies.

While "Flight in Winter" is primarily a tale of human courage, it is not without implications for the present and future. There are today thousands of these same Serbs under General Draja Mihailovich, holding an "island of freedom" against the Nazis in the mountain fastness of Yugoslavia. One lays down Professor Adams's fine book firm in the conviction that the people who resisted human enemies and the elements in 1915 will again rise. The Serbs are not the sort of people who will read- ily yield their freedom.

LEADER OF PERENNIAL TOP CLASS Clifford H. Smith '79, agent and secretaryfor famous class which has led AlumniFund performance records for many years.