Under the Devil's Eye

On 5 October 1915 the first contingent of the British Salonika Force landed in Greece. Their mission was to deter Bulgaria from joining Germany and Austria-Hungary in attacking Serbia, and the campaign was, from the British perspective, always destined to be a 'side show'. Men who had joined up to fight the Kaiser's Army after its invasion of Belgium found themselves facing Bulgarians in a remote corner of Europe. They were a forgotten army, their line at Doiran watched over by the infamous Bulgarian observation post 'the Devil's Eye'. As the war progressed the War Office plundered the British Salonika Force's manpower to support offensives in Palestine and on the Western Front. The remaining soldiers were left with fewer and fewer resources to complete their thankless task, and even the defeat of Bulgaria in September 1918 was quickly overshadowed by the events on the Western Front. Alan Wakefield and Simon Moody's study of the forgotten soldiers of the British Army, supported by extensive use of original eyewitness material and rare archive photographs, reveals the story which is a 'missing link' in the history of British participation in the First World War.