Page - 472 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

472 War Aims and Central Europe paign as being achieved with the defeat and occupation of Serbia. Neither Greece nor Montenegro nor Albania should be attacked, and there should be no further commit- ment of German troops in this part of Europe. It had to be said here that Falkenhayn could hardly act any differently for foreign policy reasons, since the German Kaiser had made the solemn promise to the Greek King Constantine I that no German and above all no Bulgarian troops would set foot on Greek soil. And it was evidently not of great importance that Greece made no attempt to throw Entente troops out of its country. In all probability, however, Greece would have entered the war on the side of the Entente in the event that troops of the Central Powers had crossed its border. The German Empire wanted to continue to exert influence on the Balkans, but with a minimum of forces. In the process, however, not only German but also Austro-Hun- garian involvement should be limited. At the same time, it was hoped that a reduction of forces could perhaps limit the almost unavoidable disputes to a minimum. According to German conceptions, Bulgaria should play the main role in this region. The task intended for the Bulgarians of controlling the Serbian and Serbo-Macedonian terri- tories doubled Bulgaria’s sphere of influence. It could expand as far as Epirus. When Conrad proposed that Greece could perhaps enter the war on the side of the Central Powers and that it could be offered control of the region between Bitola and Ochrid, Falkenhayn merely responded laconically that this would not be possible because the Bulgarians were pushing forward as far as there. The Bulgarian Prime Minister Rado- slavov did, after all, originate from Ochrid.1116 This was a rather weak argument, since if all the leaders of the states allied to the Central Powers wanted to return to their places of birth or where they had spent their childhood, then countless other difficulties could be expected, since Mustafa Kemal Pascha, for example, the commander in Diyarbakır, had been born in Salonika and visited the military academy in Bitola. Falkenhayn’s thoughts nevertheless certainly had some merit. Since the Macedonian-Greek-Serbian territory, as well as the adjacent Albanian territory, had only been independent from the Ottoman Empire since 1912, namely only three years, they were completely lacking in any stability. To assume the role of occupying power there meant not only the continu- ation of the fight with the Franco-British Army of the Orient but also endless quarrels with Bulgarians, Turks, Macedonians and Albanians  – not to mention Serbians and Montenegrins. During the course of November, Falkenhayn withdrew eight of the ten German divisions deployed in the Balkans. This was far more than had been agreed in Pszczyna and a situation emerged in this way that was not dissimilar to the one that had arisen in September 1915 on the north-eastern front : the Chief of the German General Staff sought to simply remove from the Austrians the instrument that allowed them to con- tinue the campaign. Parallel to this, rumours grew stronger that the German Empire was looking to increase its influence on Serbia. Prince Johann Albrecht von Mecklen-