Macedonia is the wartime setting for Vasili Arda’s account of the Bulgarian front in September 1918, where the Cherna River meets the Vardar. Its exposed river valley frames the soldiers’ effort to prepare for an expected French attack as their army retreats and the front’s defenses grow precarious.

Setting and Strategic Position

On September 18 and 19, the Bulgarian front had already been retreating for three weeks. The small triangle of land formed by the Cherna River’s junction with the Vardar was a poor place to make a stand, even for a single night. The landscape is presented not as secure ground but as a temporary, vulnerable position chosen amid a collapsing front.

Five Krupp 77 mm howitzers faced south toward Greece, where two French divisions remained somewhere beyond the horizon. Vasili stacked 75-pound, two-foot artillery shells in rows beside the gun emplacement. The ammunition and guns give the river junction a precise military function: it is a forward position being readied for combat, not a settled refuge.

Camp and Imminent Danger

As evening came, the soldiers prepared to spend the night in the valley. Captain Hoxa ordered the artillery crews to ready their positions and camps, tie the horses beside the river, and keep the fires to one cooking fire, which was to be extinguished before dark. His warning that two French divisions were nearby made concealment part of the camp’s immediate routine.

The men ate thin barley soup from metal cups as the sun dropped behind the hills on the valley’s western wall. To the south, the last light showed a storm approaching from the Gulf of Salonika. The scene places military danger beside the ordinary work of eating and settling in: the soldiers have only a short evening, and the weather promises to make their night more difficult.

Movement Across the River

The river also marks the limits of the position and the routes connecting the artillery units. Captain Eumen Hoxa rode across the shallow, swift-running Cherna River toward the second and third artillery companies, dug in more than a mile to the north. He ordered his men not to act until he returned, leaving them to watch in his absence. Macedonia’s river landscape thus serves both as a defensive setting and as a corridor between separated units, while the retreat and approaching enemy keep the position’s temporary nature in view.