Two years earlier. 1914. The start of the Great War.
At the end of July, the first battle began between Serbia and Austria-Hungary. On a national scale, Austria had power that Serbia could never hope to match, so everyone assumed the fighting would end quickly. However, Russia came to Serbia’s aid, forcing Austria into a much more grueling campaign than it had anticipated. Serbia formed an alliance with Montenegro and prepared to meet the Austrian assault head-on.
After the assassination of the archduke and his wife, Austria couldn’t go home empty-handed. Serbia had even blatantly ignored their ultimatum. The country’s honor was at stake, so they had no other choice but to win.
Serbia also couldn’t back down. If Austria succeeded in their plans for trialism, Serbia would become a vassal state and its culture and people would be assimilated. Their Slavic pride was on the line, so they had to find a way to resist somehow.
The Austrian Army deployed the navy’s shallow-draft gunboats with the goal of using the waterways from the Drina River to the Danube to invade the Serbian capital of Belgrade. The allied army of Serbia and Montenegro mobilized in opposition. Belgrade had been occupied during the summer, but the Serbian and Montenegrin armies had won it back in a counteroffensive. After it fell again in December, a fierce assault by the allied nations drove the Austrian Army out once again.
Serbia had only managed to hold out for this long due to the constant influx of new weapons, with the Balkan Peninsula becoming a huge consumer of weaponry manufactured in other countries. Frustrated Austrian soldiers began killing any Serbian combatants they captured during the fighting. They would line them up on the side of a railroad track, make them kneel, and blindfold them before shooting them in groups.
The tracks rusted with the blood of Serbian soldiers.
But even then, Serbia wouldn’t give in to Austria.
At the start of the following year—1915—Germany saw a short reprieve in the fighting on the Western Front and dispatched troops to help Austria, having formed an alliance with Bulgaria, Serbia’s longtime enemy. The Germans had aligned themselves with Bulgaria on the condition that they split up the territory after the war, which also strengthened their bond with the Ottoman Empire, so they set out to crush the Serbian Army in one fell swoop.
The multinational force composed primarily of Austrian, German, and Bulgarian troops continued their attacks in October of the same year, pushing the allied Serbian forces farther back. The first to fall was Montenegro. By January of the following year, Montenegro pulled out of its alliance with Serbia and surrendered to the German Army after enemy forces pushed their soldiers back almost to the capital of Cetinje.
Wounded and bleeding, the Serbian Army devised a plan to transport refugees and their exiled government across Albania in the dead of winter and settle in Corfu.
As a soldier in the Serbian Army, Milos Krasić experienced all of this, from the first battles with Austria to the final retreat. He hunkered down in trenches and fired his rifle, reverting to his werewolf form at night to feast on Austrian soldiers.
Yet no matter how savage Milos’s acts as a monster were, they paled in comparison to the cruelty he witnessed during the Great War. At this point in time, humans had become far more vicious than monsters. He never left the front, despite knowing that he could not decide the outcome of the war by himself. Milos believed that fighting alongside humans for his homeland would someday make him truly human again. It was a notion that couldn’t be further from the truth for all the people who’d lost their humanity in the war. Unlike all the human soldiers who slowly lost their minds the more they fought, Milos gained a better understanding of the human mind. His heart swelled with pride at the thought that he wasn’t just a monster or a wolf.
But even to Milos, that trek across Albania was a cruel, harsh journey.
The plains had been covered in a deep layer of snow. The group of Serbian soldiers and refugees stretched on for so long that he had no clue where to find the front, which crept slowly toward its goal like a long black snake on the verge of death. Cold and malnutrition sparked a wave of typhus fever, causing people to drop like flies as they crossed the plains. There wasn’t even time to bury them. Everyone looked to the horizon with lifeless eyes.
No one could carry any heavy load across such a distance. Partway across the plains, people began discarding their belongings. They marched on single-mindedly, some relying on nothing but a single cane. Demoralized soldiers deserted, and many of those who stayed succumbed to cold and hunger. People keeled over where they sat every time the column stopped to rest, leaving a horrific number of corpses in their wake. The living sat beside the dead, staving off hunger by chewing on tree bark or roots. Yet still, their pursuers showed no mercy toward the tragic group. Fighting would frequently break out with enemy soldiers, resulting in even more death.
Among these people who wandered like ghosts, hobbling on his own cane, similarly tormented by hunger and fatigue, was Milos. He continued to march, not giving up, his gaze fixed on a single general who glowed like a star at midday.
Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević.
This man had assassinated the king and queen during the May Coup to pull back the veil of despotism and establish himself in a command position within the military. Rumors said he had also been involved in the plan to assassinate the Austrian archduke and his wife. However, in spite of his violent past, as a human, Colonel Dimitrijević shone above all others in Milos’s eyes. The colonel was compassionate, deeply patriotic, and never judged the value of another human being based on their status or position. His one failing was that he tried to involve himself in bureaucracy far too much for a military man, but he could be trusted with any task on the battlefield. In fact, the only thing barely holding this disastrous march together was the colonel’s pinpoint counterattacks against the enemy.
The colonel also used a cane, staggering on it as he pressed forward. His ox-strong body carried Milos’s and everyone else’s hopes upon its back. He was the most reliable person among them, but he had suffered injury and illness many times throughout his life, and the migration across Albania would surely take a huge toll on his body. Even without the attacks by enemy soldiers, the arduous trip could prove lethal to the colonel. Yet he persevered, resolutely leading them.
When the group successfully reached the port and refugees began to climb into boats arranged by the British and French forces, who had rushed to their aid, one of the men serving under the colonel urged him to hurry aboard.
The colonel shook his head, his ever-somber expression never wavering. “I shall not move until everyone is on board. I’ll hold off the enemy until the very end.”
“Please, sir, listen to reason,” the soldier said. “We must get the most important people on the ships first.”
“Nothing is more important to a country than its people. The military exists to protect them. You all should be the ones going ahead of me.”