Authors

Gwendal Piégais¹;  ¹ Université de Bretagne occidentale, France

Discussion

In 1916, Russia lent its French ally more than 40,000 russian soldiers in exchange for arms and ammunition. 24,000 of these men (two brigades) were sent to fight on the Macedonian front, under French command. On this Balkan theater, the Allied forces had to face enemies just as formidable as the Germans or the Bulgarians: a very rugged terrain and malaria.
This paper proposes to examine how Russian forces have handled the environmental factor on the Macedonian theater. The environmental context turned out to be one of the most severe causes of erosion of the Allied forces. For the Russian command present there, adapting to the combat conditions in the mountains was a daily challenge. As for malaria, it alone was the cause of a quarter of the soldiers evacuations from the combat zone.
Adapting to this environmental context was a technical and material challenge, but also a political one. The Russian forces present on this theater lacked the resources to be autonomous in terms of logistics and health, and therefore often had to rely on French material. This situation caused many tensions between the two allies for the management of this health and environmental issue, which turned out to be an issue of sovereignty. At the troop level, this sanitary situation, and the very nature of the theater where the soldiers fought, became one of the major arguments for calling for a return to Russia, and denouncing the injustices of their fighting condition.