Page - 734 - in THE FIRST WORLD WAR - and the End of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1914 – 1918

734 Summer 1917 electrical facilities and lines after the electricity works in Belgrade had been destroyed by the Austro-Hungarian artillery in August 1914. The occupying troops managed to complete the work in just three weeks, by the end of October 1915.1684 From September 1916 onwards, farmers were subject to mandatory cultivation reg- ulations, while those able to work were obliged to do so. Now, the goal was also the ‘apportion of provisions’. Wheat and, above all, maize brought high yields, and in many regions rye was grown for the first time, while sunflowers began to be cultivated for oil production. Even after the war was over, members of the Military Government con- tinued to eulogise the incredible wealth of agricultural produce that Serbia had to offer, and the wide variety of basic and luxury foodstuffs that could be found in the country. However, since the demands made by the Army High Command to increase deliveries knew no limits, in Serbia, also, the substance of the country was increasingly resorted to, and from then on, was merely exploited.1685 Of all the occupied territories, Serbia delivered the most meat, with 170,000 cattle by mid-1917, 190,000 sheep and 50,000 pigs, as well as lead and iron disulphide.1686 Once again, therefore, positive mixed with negative, and the burdens were added to the noticeable improvements. However, one thing had to be acknowledged : in just a very short space of time, the Austro-Hungarian military administration had managed to get the epidemics under control and had indeed brought several major epidemics to an end. During 1914 and at the beginning of 1915, typhus had claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people, alongside cholera, dysentery and other epidemics, which were also conquered by extensive inoculation programmes and improvements in pre- ventive medical services. Another consequence of the epidemics was that schools had all but entirely been shut down, and from the late summer of 1915, teaching had to be re-established. On this issue, extremely harsh words were again exchanged between the Military Government and the Hungarian government, which would not be won round to the schooling plans.1687 However, in the long term, the education offensive by the Imperial and Royal Army could not be stopped, and not only were the old schools refurbished and opened for lessons, but they were also issued to some degree with new teaching materials. After all, re-education was also an important aspect. Secondary schools were built, and in the southern areas of the country, which had only become part of Serbia in 1912, regulated school education was introduced for the first time ever. All the well-intentioned establishments, however, were unable to prevent the fact that as early as the second half of 1916, a partisan movement began to form that caused young men to flee into the mountains and forests to the ‘comit- adji’.1688 The comitadji relocated the centres of their rebellion to the Bulgarian-occu- pied territory, although there were partisan activities in the Austro-Hungarian Gov- ernment General of Serbia, which then escalated and also spread to Montenegro. The rebellion would never be entirely crushed, even though there were indications that at