An early eighteenth-century map shows just how awful the region must have been to operate in. The lack of features, the sheer relentless flat marshiness north of the river, meant there was no point that could be defended and a trapped army could starve to death or be wracked by malaria with little intervention needed from the enemy. The sheer, wild ungovernability of the Danube can even now still be seen in the chillingly alien bogs visible from the Sremski Karlovci bus – an unpassable mess of water, mud and thick reeds, itself a relatively tiny residue of what dominated the area before
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