My research project this past summer – “Devouring the Land” – was to study the physical and environmental impact of the Allied Army of the Orient (AAO) on the Salonika front of the First World War. I did this in conjunction with Professor Anastassios Anastassiadis.
The fact that war scars a landscape is obvious. But what is often solely conceived is the damage coming from combat – shell holes, gas attacks, and fields ablaze. Yet war brings with it an oftentimes equally destructive machine, not of bullets or shells, but of bureaucracy, urban occupation, field hospitals, local resource requirements, water pumping, sewage, and other tolls on the local land. The result is that a region’s natural character can be altered irrevocably by even a brief conflict, let alone a front on WWI’s scale and lasting a full three-odd years.
Yet this field is relatively understudied compared to the flashier, combat-oriented histories of the Great War. And in spite of its pivotal nature to the war’s conclusion, the Salonika front in particular is all but forgotten amongst the names of the Somme, Gallipoli, or the Isonzo River. As such, this work with Professor Anastassiadis – melding an environmental and physical history on a less-studied theatre of war – is truly ground-breaking study.
The objectives and research style of the summer were fairly simple. I examined an array of documents which included soldiers’ and nurses’ letters to home, official reports, telegrams, and so on to understand the forms of Allied land damage or extraction, the severity, and when possible the precise locations.
Obviously, whenever something relevant was found (particularly when it came amidst an otherwise unrelated, lengthy document, thereby making it all worth it), it chalked up as a success. But more enjoyable was the overall experience of reading these hundreds of pages and garnering an understanding of the war far more personal than any textbook or documentary. As familiar names come up again and again, or as you realise a certain officer or nurse’s writing style and outlook, the gulf between you and them shrinks. In a way, you get to know them, and the struggles of backbreaking war. It is an intensely personal form of historical research. Furthermore, physically handling some of the documents at the wonderful facilities of Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa was tremendously exciting, and their aid in locating sources was invaluable.
Yet all was not easy, nor is it ever for a historian. The documents examined in this project were primarily internal communications amongst the British, French, Canadian, Greek, and Serbian armies. These communiqués follow a logic obvious to a military professional in the early twentieth century, but are often incomprehensible to a modern reader peering in from a profound distance. Code names, styles of address, abbreviations, and understanding the correct ordering of letters and telegrams was not unlike learning a new tongue, and required significant adjustment in order to make any sense of them. Add in that some communications actually were in another language – French primarily, but also in quite clumsy Anglicised Greek – and many sources required painstaking time to understand. This does not include the added pains of reading hastily scrawled cursive, penned from the battlefields of Macedonia, which has slowly faded in mouldering boxes for a century.
Tackling these difficulties was simply a matter of brute force. After reading hundreds of cartons of correspondence, one begins to ‘speak the language’ and be able to decode the more arcane conversations. Other times, secondary research was required, as officers may sign documents with a nickname. Such examples – quite common in the brotherly camaraderie of a tight British military circle – required looking up war graves or obituaries to ascertain the commanders’ true identities. When the documents were damaged or out of order in some way, context clues – sometimes coming down to literally judging the differences in typewriter ink colour to reunite long-separated pages into a coherent set – became invaluable. The increasingly good translation software available also helped, particularly that of DeepL and its AI-assisted translations.
I cannot say whether I will go on to be a historian professionally. What I can say with confidence is that this past summer has armed me with a far greater understanding not just of this distinct chapter in European history, but of the historical process itself. As I go into my final year at McGill, and perhaps in graduate school beyond, I am certain I will be far more comfortable handling archival materials and using primary sources in a deeper and more thoughtful manner than before.
Finally, I want to again extend my sincere thanks to Mark W. Gallop for this research award and the work it has contributed to. Without it this sort of opportunity for a student like myself could not exist, nor could the field of history continue to be fleshed out in these exciting and novel ways.
