British army officer Christopher Birdwood Thomson was told by a Serbian general in Belgrade in 1913 that after the 3rd Serbian Army defeated the Turkish forces in Kumanovo, they entered the city and wiped out entire villages—massacring men, women and children in their homes, and forcing others to flee to their deaths from famine and cold. In 1920, he wrote: "Nothing more terrible has taken place in any part of the world, or in the whole history of war".