Alexander I of Yugoslavia

Early life

Alexander Karađorđević was born on 16 December 1888 [O.S. 4 December] in the Principality of Montenegro as the fourth child and second son of Peter Karađorđević and his wife, Princess Zorka of Montenegro. His paternal grandfather, also named Alexander, had been forced to abdicate as prince of Serbia and surrender power to the rival House of Obrenović. Alexander's maternal grandfather was Nicholas I, Prince of Montenegro. Despite enjoying support from the Russian Empire, at the time of Alexander's birth and early childhood, the House of Karađorđević was in political exile, with family members scattered all over Europe, unable to return to Serbia due to their rivalry with the House of Obrenović.

Serbia had recently been transformed from a principality into a kingdom under the Obrenovićes, who ruled with strong support from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The antagonism between the two rival royal houses was such that, after the assassination of Prince Mihailo Obrenović in 1868 (an event in which the Karađorđevićes were suspected of taking part), the Obrenovićes made constitutional changes banning the Karađorđevićes from entering Serbia and stripping them of their civic rights.

Alexander was two when his mother, Princess Zorka, died in 1890 from complications while giving birth to his younger brother, Andrej, who died 23 days later. Alexander spent his childhood in Montenegro. In 1894, his widowed father took the four children, including Alexander, to Geneva, Switzerland, where he completed his elementary education. Alongside his older brother George, he continued his schooling at the imperial Page Corps in Petrograd, Russian Empire. The British historian Robert Seton-Watson described Alexander as becoming a Russophile during his time in Petrograd, feeling deep gratitude for the willingness of the Russian emperor Nicholas II to grant him refuge, where he was treated with great honour and respect.

As a page, Alexander was described as hard-working and determined while also being a "loner" who kept to himself and rarely showed his feelings. Nicholas II invited Alexander to dinners at the Winter Palace, where he was the guest of honour at meals hosted by the Russian imperial family, which was a great privilege for a prince from Serbia's deposed royal family. During his time in Petrograd, Alexander visited the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, where the abbot gave him an icon of Prince Alexander Nevsky and guided him to the grave of Marshal Alexander Suvorov. After his visit to the monastery, Alexander expressed the wish to be a great general like Marshal Suvorov or Prince Alexander Nevsky, saying he wanted to command either a great army or a great armada when he was a man.

Becoming crown prince

In 1909, a scandal broke when Crown Prince George, Alexander's older brother, killed a servant by kicking him in the stomach. Following pressure from powerful figures such as Prime Minister Nikola Pašić and high-ranking officers Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević and Petar Živković, George publicly renounced his claim to the throne in March of that year in favour of Alexander.

In 1910, Alexander nearly died from stomach typhus and was left with stomach problems for the rest of his life. In the run-up to the First Balkan War, Alexander played the role of a diplomat, visiting Sofia to meet Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria for secret talks on forming a Balkan League to drive the Ottoman Turks out of the Balkans. Both Bulgaria and Serbia had rival claims to the Ottoman region of Macedonia, so Alexander, along with Ferdinand's son Crown Prince Boris, travelled to Petrograd to meet with Emperor Nicholas II and request Russian mediation. In March 1912, Serbia and Bulgaria signed a defensive alliance, which Greece joined in May.

Balkan Wars

In March 1912, Alexander met with ten senior military commanders. They agreed to end all internal conflicts in the Royal Serbian Army and fully commit to realising national goals, which allowed space for consolidation before the two successive Balkan Wars.

In the First Balkan War in 1912, as commander of the First Army, Crown Prince Alexander fought victorious battles at Kumanovo and Bitola. One of Alexander's most cherished moments came when he drove the Ottoman Turks out of Kosovo and, on 28 October 1912, led the Serbian army in a review on the Field of Blackbirds. The Field of Blackbirds was where the Serbs under Prince Lazar had been defeated in a legendary battle by the Ottoman sultan Murad I on 28 June 1389, and is regarded by the Serbs as holy ground. It was a great honour for him to pay his respects to the Serbs who had fallen in that earlier battle. In the aftermath of the First Balkan War, disputes emerged among the victors over control of Macedonia, and Serbia and Greece signed an alliance against the Kingdom of Bulgaria.

After the Ottoman defeat and withdrawal from Skopje, Prince Alexander was met with flowers by the local people. He stopped and asked a seven-year-old girl, Vaska Zoicheva, "What are you?" (Pa šta si ti?) When she replied "Bulgarian!" (Bugarka!), the prince slapped her. News of the event spread quickly around Bulgaria. In 1920 and 1921, Serbian authorities searched for the girl's father, Danail Zoichev, and offered him money to renounce the event as fictional, but he refused.

Later in 1913, during the Second Balkan War, Alexander commanded the Serbian army at the Battle of Bregalnica against the Bulgarians. In the aftermath of the war, the Treaty of Bucharest assigned the region of Vardar Macedonia to Serbia. Prince Alexander took sides in the complicated power struggle over how Macedonia should be administered. Alexander bested Colonel Dragutin "Apis" Dimitrijević in this dispute, after which his father, King Peter, agreed to hand over royal powers to him. Although Colonel Dimitrijević had been the mastermind of the 1903 coup that restored the House of Karađorđević to the Serbian throne, Alexander distrusted him, regarding his attempts to set himself up as a "kingmaker" and to turn the Serbian army into a "state within the state" existing outside civilian control as a major threat.

Additionally, Alexander saw Dimitrijević as an irresponsible intriguer who, having betrayed one king, might always betray another. In January 1914, the Serbian prime minister Nikola Pašić sent a letter to the Russian emperor Nicholas II in which King Peter expressed a desire for his son to marry one of the daughters of Nicholas II. In his reply, Nicholas II stated that his daughters would not be forced into arranged marriages, but noted that on his most recent trips to Petrograd, Alexander had kept giving loving looks to Grand Duchess Tatiana during dinners at the Winter Palace, leading him to guess that Alexander wanted to marry her. On 24 June 1914, Alexander became regent of Serbia.

World War I

At the outbreak of World War I, Alexander was the nominal supreme commander of the Serbian army; true command was in the hands of the Chief of Staff of Supreme Headquarters, a position held successively by Stepa Stepanović (during the mobilisation), Radomir Putnik (1914–1915), Petar Bojović (1916–1917) and Živojin Mišić (1918). The Serbian army distinguished itself in the battles at Cer and at the Drina (the Battle of Kolubara) in 1914, scoring victories against the invading Austro-Hungarian forces and evicting them from the country.

The British historian Max Hastings described the Serbian army in 1914 as the toughest in Europe and also the most egalitarian, with none of the distinctions of rank that characterised other European armies, exemplified by the fact that it was the only army in Europe in which officers shook hands with the other ranks. However, the Serbian army suffered major shortages of equipment, with a third of the men called up in August 1914 having no rifles or ammunition, and new recruits being advised to bring their own boots and clothing as there were no uniforms for them. Alexander ordered the Serbian police to conduct searches of houses all over Serbia to see if there were any rifles and ammunition to be seized for the army.

In 1915, the Serbian army was attacked on several fronts by the allied forces of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Bulgaria, suffering heavy losses. On 7 October 1915, an Austro-German army group under the command of German Field Marshal August von Mackensen invaded Serbia and, after encountering fierce resistance, took Belgrade on 9 October. On 14 October 1915, Bulgaria invaded Serbia, and on 16 October the Bulgarians took Niš, severing the railway that linked Serbia to Thessalonika in Greece. Attacked from the north by the Austrians and Germans and from the south by the Bulgarians, the Serbs were forced into the Kosovo region by 25 November 1915.

The massacres committed by the Austrians during their two invasions of Serbia in 1914 had caused enormous panic, and hundreds of thousands of Serbs fled their homes to escape the Austrians, which greatly delayed the movement of the Serbian army. Field Marshal Putnik persuaded Crown Prince Alexander and King Peter that it was better to keep the Serbian army intact to one day liberate Serbia rather than stand and fight in Kosovo as many Serb officers wanted.

The Serbian army withdrew through the gorges of Montenegro and northern Albania to the Greek island of Corfu, where it was reorganised. The march across the Accursed Mountains was harrowing, as the Serbian army, together with a mass of refugees, had to cross mountains rising to 3,000 feet in the middle of winter, with average daily temperatures of −20°, while battling hostile Albanian tribes and with the armies of Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Bulgaria in pursuit. Many Serbs died along the way. Alexander repeatedly exposed himself to danger during the march to the sea while his health declined. Upon reaching the coast, the surviving Serbs, who numbered about 140,000, were rescued by British and French ships, which took them to Corfu.

Regency

On 1 December 1918, in a prearranged ceremony, Alexander, as Prince Regent, received a delegation of the People's Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs; an address was read out by a member of the delegation, and Alexander made an address in acceptance. This was considered to be the birth of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. One of Alexander's first acts as Prince Regent of the new kingdom was to declare his support for the widespread demand for land reform, stating: "In our free state there can and will be only free landowners".

On 25 February 1919, Alexander signed a land reform decree breaking up all feudal estates over the size of 100 cadastral yokes, with compensation to be paid to the former landowners, except for those who belonged to the House of Habsburg and the other ruling families of enemy states in the Great War. Under the land reform decree, some two million hectares of land were handed over to half a million peasant households, though implementation was very slow, taking 15 years to complete.

In both Macedonia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, the majority of the landlords who lost land were Muslims, while the majority of their former tenants who received the land were Christians; in both places, land reform was seen as an attack on the political and economic power of the Muslim gentry. In Croatia, Slovenia, and Vojvodina, the majority of the landlords who lost their land were Austrian or Hungarian nobles who usually did not reside in those regions, meaning that, however much they might have resented the loss of their land, it did not have the same political repercussions as in Macedonia and Bosnia, where the Albanian and Bosnian Muslim landlords lived.

In June 1921, a war veteran and communist, Spasoje Stejić Baćo, attempted to assassinate Regent Alexander by throwing a bomb at his carriage. Thrown from a balcony, the bomb became entangled in telephone wires and exploded, wounding several bystanders.

King of Yugoslavia

On 16 August 1921, upon the death of his father, Alexander ascended to the throne of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which from its inception was colloquially known both in the kingdom and throughout the rest of Europe as Yugoslavia. The historian Brigit Farley described Alexander as something of a cipher to historians, as he was a taciturn and reserved man who was loath to express his feelings either in person or in writing. He kept no diary and wrote no memoirs.

The British historian R. W. Seton-Watson, who knew Alexander well, called him a soldierly man most comfortable in a military milieu who was very quiet and surprisingly modest for a king. Seton-Watson described Alexander as having an "autocratic" personality, a man who was first and foremost a soldier who spent "six of his formative years" in the Serbian army, which left him with a "military outlook which unfitted him to deal with the delicate problems of constitutional government and which made compromise hard for him". Seton-Watson wrote that Alexander "...was very courageous, though not ever a man of strong physique or robust health. He had a strong fixity of purpose, great devotion to duty, powers of sustained work. He had great charm and simplicity of manner. He was accessible and very open to opinions—though he rarely acted on them, and though occasionally he reacted with positive violence, as in the case of the Slovene Zerjav who fainted in his presence."

Alexander was consistent in his belief in maintaining Yugoslavia as a unitary state and in his opposition to federalism, which he believed would lead to the break-up of Yugoslavia and perhaps his own assassination. In turn, Alexander's opposition to federalism related to his belief that in a federalised Yugoslavia, the Serbs living in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina would be discriminated against by the Croats and Bosnian Muslims; he once told a Serbian Orthodox priest that federalism would be "stabbing the Serbs in the back".

As a Karađorđević, Alexander was very conscious of the long blood feud between the Houses of Obrenović and Karađorđević that had disfigured Serb politics in the 19th century, and of the fact that the 1903 coup d'état that finally brought down the Obrenovićes had happened because the last Obrenović king, Alexander, was widely viewed as too subservient to Austria-Hungary and as having betrayed Serb interests. Because of the frequent shifts in loyalty within the Serbian army during the 19th century between the feuding royal families, Alexander was never entirely convinced that the Serb-dominated officer corps of the Royal Yugoslav Army was completely loyal to him, and he always feared that if he were seen as betraying Serb interests, as the last Obrenović king had been, he too might be overthrown and killed.

Marriage and foreign relations

The lavish royal wedding to Princess Maria of Romania was intended to cement the alliance with Romania, a fellow "victor nation" in World War I that, like Yugoslavia, had territorial disputes with defeated nations such as Hungary and Bulgaria. For Alexander, the royal wedding was especially satisfactory as most of the royal families of Europe attended, which showed that the House of Karađorđević, a family of peasant origins who were disliked for slaughtering the rival House of Obrenović in 1903, were finally accepted by the rest of European royalty.

In foreign policy, Alexander favoured maintaining the international system created in 1918–1919, and in 1921 Yugoslavia joined the Little Entente with Czechoslovakia and Romania to guard against Hungary. Hungary refused to accept the Treaty of Trianon and made territorial claims against all three states of the Little Entente.

The principal enemy of Yugoslavia in the 1920s was Fascist Italy, which coveted much of modern-day Slovenia and Croatia. The origins of the Italo-Yugoslav dispute lay in the Italian contention that Italy had been "cheated" at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference out of what it had been promised in the secret Treaty of London in 1915. It was largely out of fear of Italy that Alexander signed a treaty of alliance in 1927 with France, which consequently became Yugoslavia's principal ally.

Crisis and dictatorship

Starting in 1926, an alliance of the Serb Democrats led by Svetozar Pribićević and the Croatian Peasant Party led by Stjepan Radić systematically obstructed the Yugoslav parliament to press for federalism in Yugoslavia, filibustering and filing nonsensical motions to prevent the government from passing any bills. In June 1928, the disputes between the opposition and the government deputies escalated when Puniša Račić from Montenegro took out his handgun and shot Radić on the floor of the parliament. The charismatic Radić, the "uncrowned king of Croatia", had inspired intense devotion in Croatia, and his assassination was seen as tantamount to a Serb declaration of war. The assassination pushed Yugoslavia to the brink of civil war and led Alexander to consider the "amputation" of Croatia as preferable to federalism. Alexander mused to Pribićević: "We cannot stay together with the Croats. Since we cannot, it would be better to separate. The best way would be to effect a peaceful separation like Sweden and Norway did". When Pribićević protested that this would be an act of "treason", Alexander told him he would think further about what to do. Alexander appointed as prime minister Father Anton Korošec, a Slovene Catholic priest, with a mandate to stop the slide towards civil war. On 1 December 1928, the lavish celebrations organised by the government for the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes led to rioting in Zagreb that left ten people dead.

In response to the political crisis triggered by the assassination of Stjepan Radić, King Alexander abolished the Vidovdan Constitution on 6 January 1929, prorogued the Parliament, and introduced a personal dictatorship (the so-called "January 6th Dictatorship", Šestojanuarska diktatura). One of the first acts of the new regime was to carry out a purge of the civil service, with one-third of civil servants being dismissed by May 1929 in an attempt to address popular complaints about rampant corruption in the bureaucracy. On 3 October, he also changed the name of the country to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and replaced its 33 oblasts with nine new banovinas. Of the banovinas, only one had a Slovene majority, two had Croat majorities, and the rest had Serb majorities, which especially angered the Bosnian Muslims, who were left in a minority in every banovina.

Because the banovinas were drawn along new borders that did not correspond to historical regional boundaries, the reorganisation caused considerable resentment, especially in Bosnia and Croatia. In a bid to weaken regional loyalties, the banovinas were named after geographical features rather than historical regions and were governed by bans appointed by the King. In the same month, he tried to banish by decree the use of Serbian Cyrillic to promote the exclusive use of the Latin alphabet in Yugoslavia.

Restoration of constitution

In 1931, Alexander decreed a new constitution that transferred executive power to the King. Elections were to be by universal male suffrage. The provision for a secret ballot was dropped, and pressure on public employees to vote for the governing party became a feature of all elections held under Alexander's constitution. Furthermore, the King could appoint half of the upper house directly, and legislation could become law with the approval of one of the houses alone if it were also approved by the King. The 1931 constitution kept Yugoslavia as a unitary state, which enraged the non-Serb peoples, who demanded a federation and saw Alexander's royal dictatorship as thinly disguised Serbian domination. In the parliamentary elections of December 1931 – January 1932, the opposition parties' call to boycott the vote was widely heeded, a sign of popular dissatisfaction with the new constitution.

In response to the impoverishment of the countryside caused by the Great Depression, Alexander reaffirmed in a speech the right of every peasant family to a minimum amount of land that could not be seized by a bank in the event of a debt default. In 1932, he issued a decree suspending all debt payments by farmers to banks for six months and forbade any further bank foreclosures against farmers. Alexander's measures preventing banks from foreclosing on farmers who were unable to pay their loans saved many peasants from ruin and prevented economic distress in the countryside from turning political, but in the long run his policies did not solve the economic problems of the rural areas. The losses suffered by the banks and their inability to foreclose on delinquent loans made them unwilling to issue new loans to farmers. As Yugoslav agriculture, especially in the southern parts of the country, was underdeveloped, farmers needed loans to modernise their holdings, but the banks' unwillingness to lend made agricultural modernisation impossible in the 1930s.

In September 1932, Ante Trumbić gave an interview to The Manchester Guardian in which he stated that life for ordinary Croats had been better when they were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and suggested that perhaps the Croats would be better off if they broke away from Yugoslavia to form their own state. This public expression of scepticism towards the unitary arrangement of Yugoslavia was a bitter blow for Alexander, who had always respected and liked Trumbić. On 7 November 1932, Trumbić and Vladko Maček of the Croatian Peasant Party issued the Zagreb Points, which demanded a new constitution that would turn Yugoslavia into a federation and stated that the Croats would otherwise demand independence.

Foreign policy

Starting in 1933, Alexander became worried about Nazi Germany. In March 1933, the French minister in Belgrade, Paul-Émile Naggiar, told Alexander that France was seriously concerned about the stability of Yugoslavia, warning that the King could not continue to rule in the face of opposition from the majority of his subjects and that Paris was starting to view Alexander as a liability. Naggiar predicted that the new regime in Germany would challenge the international order created by the Treaty of Versailles sooner or later and that France needed Yugoslavia to be stable and strong, which led him to advise the King to adopt federalism for his realm.

One point of agreement between Alexander and Mussolini was their shared fear of the unification of Germany and Austria, which would make Germany a direct neighbour of Yugoslavia. Alexander had no desire to have Germany as a neighbour, which led him to support the continuation of Austrian independence. Despite his distaste for communism, the King gave support, albeit in a very cautious and hesitant way, to the plans of French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou to bring the Soviet Union into a front meant to contain Germany. In 1933–1934, Alexander became a proponent of an alliance between Yugoslavia, Greece, Romania, and Turkey, which was achieved in 1934 with the creation of the Balkan Pact.

Although the Balkan Pact was directed primarily against Italy and its allies (Hungary, Albania, and Bulgaria), Alexander hoped the pact might provide some protection against Germany. After the coup d'état in May 1934 in Sofia, Alexander hoped that Bulgaria would also join the pact. The new Bulgarian government had begun suppressing the IMRO. In September 1934, Alexander visited Sofia to improve relations with Bulgaria. The Bulgarian political organisation that had taken power in the 1934 coup, Zveno, supported the unification of Bulgaria and Albania with Yugoslavia, which aligned with Alexander's policy of "the Balkans for the Balkan peoples".

Assassination

After an attack by the Ustaše on a gendarmerie station in Velebit in November 1932, Alexander said through an intermediary to the Italian government: "If you want to have serious riots in Yugoslavia or cause a regime change, you need to kill me. Shoot at me and be sure you have finished me off, because that's the only way to make changes in Yugoslavia."

In 1934, French Foreign Minister Louis Barthou attempted to build an alliance meant to contain Germany, consisting of France's allies in Eastern Europe, such as Yugoslavia, together with Italy and the Soviet Union. The long-standing rivalry between Benito Mussolini and King Alexander had complicated Barthou's work, as Alexander complained about Italian territorial claims against his country and Italian support for Hungarian revisionism and the Croat Ustaše.

As long as France's ally Yugoslavia continued to have disputes with Italy, Barthou's plans for an Italo-French rapprochement would remain stillborn. During a visit to Belgrade in June 1934, Barthou promised the King that France would pressure Mussolini into signing a treaty under which he would renounce his claims against Yugoslavia. Alexander was sceptical of Barthou's plan, noting that hundreds of Ustaše were being sheltered in Italy and that Mussolini was rumoured to have financed an unsuccessful attempt by the Ustaše to assassinate him in December 1933.

Mussolini had come to believe that it was only Alexander's personality that held Yugoslavia together and that if the King were assassinated, Yugoslavia would descend into civil war, allowing Italy to annex certain regions of the country without fear of reprisal from France. However, France was Yugoslavia's closest ally, and Barthou invited Alexander for a visit to France to sign a Franco-Yugoslav agreement that would allow Barthou to "go to Rome with the certainty of success". Because three of his family members had previously died on a Tuesday, Alexander refused to undertake any public functions on that day of the week. On Tuesday, 9 October 1934, however, he had no choice, as he was arriving in Marseille to begin a state visit to France to strengthen the two countries' alliance in the Little Entente.

While Alexander was being driven slowly in a car through the streets with Barthou, a Bulgarian assassin, Vlado Chernozemski, stepped into the street and shot the King twice, as well as the chauffeur, with a Mauser C96 semi-automatic pistol. Alexander died in the car, slumped backwards in the seat with his eyes open. Barthou was also killed by a stray bullet mistakenly fired by French police during the scuffle following the attack. Lieutenant-Colonel Jules Piollet struck the assailant with his sword. Ten people in the procession were wounded, including General Alphonse Georges, who was hit by two bullets as he tried to intervene. Nine people in the crowd that had come to see the King were wounded, four of them fatally.

In literature and popular culture

The song "Don Juan" by the British synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys (the B-side to their 1988 single "Domino Dancing") contains the lyrics "King Zog's back from holiday, Marie Lupescu's grey and King Alexander is dead in Marseille".

Rebecca West's travel book Black Lamb and Grey Falcon opens with the author's anxiety over the assassination, which she hears about while recovering from surgery and then discusses with an uninformed nurse. This prompts a meditation on the manifest and latent impacts of prior assassinations on world events. Later, she describes a newsreel of the assassination in detail.

In Upton Sinclair's historical novel Wide Is the Gate (the fourth novel in the Lanny Budd series, published in 1941), the assassination is attributed to the Nazi German government. The novel claims that the Croatian assassin obtained funds and a forged passport from the head of the German foreign policy department.

A heavily fictionalised version of the assassination serves as the opening to the novel The Second Assassin by Christopher Hyde. The gunman is changed to a Croat, while an Irish hitman kills both him and Barthou using a rifle, undetected in the confusion. The plot is depicted as having been masterminded by Nazi Germany to eliminate both Alexander and Barthou at the same time.

Ivan Vazov's poem "Па ща си ти?" ("What are you?") depicts the incident in which Crown Prince Alexander asks a little girl from Skopje her nationality and slaps her in the face when she answers, "I'm Bulgarian." The poem emphasises the suffering of the Macedonian Bulgarians under Serbian rule.

The 2021 television series Alexander of Yugoslavia, directed by Zdravko Šotra, depicts his life and reign.

References and notes

Bibliography

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DiNardo, Richard L. (2015). Invasion: The Conquest of Serbia, 1915. Santa Barbara: Praeger. ISBN 978-1440800924.

Farley, Brigit (2007). "King Aleksandar and the Royal Dictatorship in Yugoslavia". In Bernd J. Fischer (ed.). Balkan Strongmen: Dictators and Authoritarian Rulers of Southeastern Europe. Central European Studies. West Lafayette, IN. pp. 51–86.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)

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Kovrig, Bennett (January 1976). "Mediation by Obfuscation: The Resolution of the Marseille Crisis, October 1934 to May 1935". The Historical Journal. 19 (1): 191–221. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00018367. S2CID 153681564.

Marković, Marko (2003). Povijest Crne legije: Jure i Boban (in Croatian).

Passmore, Kevin (2003). Women, Gender, and Fascism in Europe, 1919–45. Manchester University Press. ISBN 0719060834.

Seton-Watson, Robert (January 1935). "King Alexander's Assassination: Its Background and Effects". International Affairs. 14 (1): 20–47.

Strachan, Hew (2006). The First World War – A New Illustrated History. Pocket Books. ISBN 074323961X.