SIX THOUSAND BOYS

November 1915. The Serbian army, under assault from combined German, Austro-Hungarian, and Bulgarian forces, reaches a decision with no alternative: retreat — not through Serbia, but across the frozen mountains of Montenegro and Albania, toward the sea.

Around 400,000 people set out — soldiers, government, civilians who refused to stay behind under occupation. They walked without food, through snow, through mud once the snow finally gave way. Some Albanian tribes attacked them along the route. People died of hunger, typhus, exhaustion — the footstep that simply never comes.

Among those who set out were roughly 6,000 boys, born in 1897 and 1898 — seventeen, eighteen years old, the last reserves, children sent to save whatever could still be saved. About 500 survived.

The official report filed by General Božidar Terzić to Prime Minister Nikola Pašić puts the toll at 243,877 missing, dead, killed, or captured that winter. Other sources cite lower, no less tragic figures — somewhere between seventy and a hundred and fifty thousand. The exact number, as with so many Golgothas, remains impossible to fix: many never even got a grave, only a mark beside the road.

Those who survived made it to Corfu — the “Island of Salvation” — to be reorganized and sent back into the war two years later, on the Salonika Front.

They called it the Albanian Golgotha. Not because it was a metaphor. Because it was exactly that.

Try to picture six thousand boys. Not the number — the faces. Now picture only five hundred left, and understand that this isn’t even the cruelest figure of that winter.