A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  True to form, Flora was spending as many evenings as possible “galumphing”. She had plenty of willing companions. Emily would join her at the end of each working day for a couple of glasses of rakia, Serbian fruit brandy, while they often met the other members of staff under the funeral cards for dinner. Far from discouraging them from excess, the constant reminder of death led their colleagues to live each day as though it were their last. “They won’t let us go to bed early because they say you never know which will be your last night and why waste it in bed when you’ll be a long time dead,” explained Flora.76

  There were also the Vinavers, exiled Polish Jews who were running another hospital in the town, who served them tea liberally laced with rum to keep out the cold on their visits.77 And rarely a day went by without one of them checking on Barton Cookingham as he slowly recovered his strength, although he was still too sick to take part in any galumphing. But Flora’s best drinking friend was “Woolly”, whom she identified only by the fact that he was Irish.78 When beer was rumoured to have been found in the town, he was off like a shot to “scour” for it and her diary is littered with references to going drinking with him.

  Although the constant round of social visits helped to take her mind off the shadow of death that hung over her, she knew that she had every chance of falling ill. Every slight itch was a cause for concern, and she looked over the seams of her clothes regularly for any sign of infestation by the small, flat, greyish-brown insects.79 Woolly too was worried. Over a round of drinks one evening they agreed that “whoever got sick first the other should nurse”.80 Five days earlier, on 3rd March, Flora had ended an unusually long diary entry with what was hardly more than a postscript. “Caught my first louse (on me).”

  The Serbian government was virtually paralysed by the magnitude of the epidemic and appealed for assistance. Sanitary commissions duly arrived from Britain, the United States, Russia and France. The government agreed to implement whatever measures they deemed necessary.81 In March, all passenger trains were ordered to stop running for one month, army leave was stopped, hospitals were cleaned from top to bottom and disinfestation bases were set up across Serbia.82 An educational campaign was also launched to teach the peasant population to fear the louse; however, it was not entirely successful. Many saw measures against typhus as proof of timidity not fitting for a soldiering nation, and took a sort of “gloomy pride” in the ravages of the epidemic.83

  The sanitary measures virtually quarantined Valjevo. With the stoppage of all rail traffic, few supplies reached the town. Tea, sugar, butter, vegetables and meat soon became unobtainable.84 The little food available was so expensive that it was beyond the reach of much of the already sick and miserable population. Soon the remaining inhabitants began to look half-starved. Weak from lack of food, they began to fall victim to the epidemic in even greater numbers.85

  Flora woke on Monday 8th March feeling “seedy”. She had been at work in Valjevo for just over a fortnight. The first breath of spring had not yet blown away the rigours of winter and one bleak, wet day indistinguishably merged into another. She spent the morning, as usual, working at the Gymnasium Hospital. She then shivered through the muddy, roughly cobbled streets to visit another hospital in the town. That evening, relieved that the day was over, she met up with Woolly. “The Irishman declared I didn’t look very well and dosed me liberally with Sleevovitza [Serbian plum brandy],” recorded Flora. By Wednesday and Thursday she was feeling worse but, undeterred, spent the evenings galumphing with Woolly. Emily too was unwell. Three days earlier, on 5th March, she had put herself to bed complaining of headache and chills. Their director diagnosed recurrent fever, a debilitating but rarely fatal illness.

  Both Flora and Emily had suffered bouts of sickness during their time in Serbia. Initially there was no reason to think that, this time, it was anything different. Satisfied that Emily would soon be over the worst, Flora left her in bed to take over the running of the operating room, leaving Milorad, an Austrian POW, to look after her. But Flora’s career as chief surgeon lasted a mere seven days. “Had a temperature and couldn’t get up. Turned out to be typhus,” she managed to scribble in her diary on 12th March. By then there was also no mistaking Emily’s diagnosis. The characteristic rash of typhus was spreading across her body.

  Flora may have been sick, but she was still as wilful as ever. “Can’t stand Milorad,” she declared forcefully in her diary. She asked instead for Hayek, another “Schwabe” who had been working as her “batman” – servant – to take his place.86 Mindful of his promise to her, Woolly also took his place at her bedside, where he could also keep an eye on Emily who lay in the adjoining room. When word of their illness filtered through to a barely recovered Barton Cookingham, he too “crawled up” to visit them.87 But on 15th March Woolly failed to arrive. “Woolly got sick with typhus, they put him in [the] officers ward of the Gymnasium,” wrote Flora who, in the early stages of the disease, was still just about able to scratch a few shaky words in her diary.

  The next day she took a dramatic turn for the worse. For a week her life hung in the balance. She lay prostate, wracked with waves of fever and muscle pain, coughing to expel the thick mucus that lined her throat and mouth. Hayek applied cold compress after cold compress to her burning forehead.88 “Had continual high temperature never less than 41, but Hayek told me afterwards it was always higher than he used to tell me,” recalled Flora. Their director also visited them every day, but it was Hayek who struggled to keep her alive. “Hayek is a brick. He lies on the floor at night but never seems to sleep,” she continued.

  Thought I was going out one night but called Hayek and told him to give me a drink out of the bottle of digitalis the Dr [Director] left by my side, don’t know how much you can drink of this stuff but it did the trick that time (afterwards removed it before I poisoned myself). The nights are pretty awful. A[mericano] unable to get up, she has crawled to the door once or twice and looked at me. In spite of the temperature I’ve never gone off my nut except once for a little while. The Dr told Hayek I’d peg out if temp. didn’t come down next day. See no one but the Dr and Hayek, hear Woolly is pretty bad. Have the window wide open and sometimes hear people outside commenting on it. Hayek told me afterwards he was frozen, but he never complained.89

  On 22nd March, ten days after falling ill, Flora’s temperature finally began to drop. Hayek had got her through the worst. Although shorter bouts of fever returned leaving her “fearfully weak” and “unable to eat or smoke”, she was again able to write a few short notes in her diary. Emily too had pulled through. Woolly did not survive. He died on Sunday 28th March. Emily attended his funeral the following day. Flora was too weak to go.

  Hayek continued to care for Flora and Emily through their convalescence. At a time of near famine in Valjevo, he went to “heroic efforts to cook dainties for them from the only available fare – bully beef, black bread and tea”.90 Emily in turn credited their survival to the altruistic nursing given to them by both Hayek and Milorad. “Being unable to eat, they profited by our ‘rations’ so that their efforts to help us get well are all the more laudable,” she extolled.91 By early April Flora was able to get out of bed for the first time. She set off on short walks with Hayek, who was ready to catch her if she fell. He picked her spring flowers along the way.92

  Barton Cookingham was now strong enough to visit them daily. Flora, who was still too weak to leave her room for any length of time, greatly enjoyed his visits. “American[o] cooked prunes, onions, pancakes etc. on the Primus stove and I looked forward all day to our tea party,” scribbled Flora from her sickbed. By the middle of April, Cookingham was well enough to stand the long trip home to New York State. Flora dejectedly said goodbye to her friend, who left a minor diplomatic incident in his wake. He had also developed sympathies for the POWs and had agreed to smuggle out letters for them, but was found out by the Serbian authorities and forced to hand them over. “Missed C. very much,” wrote Flora sadly in her diar
y the following day.93

  Having survived, Flora and Emily were now immune to the disease, but both were seriously weakened by the bouts of fever that they had suffered. Emily returned to work during the first week of April, although she was unable to undertake anything more than light tasks. It would be another fortnight before Flora joined her. By then, only their director and one other member of staff – a “teetotaller”, noted Flora with a touch of amazement – were left of the original twelve. The others, without exception, had caught typhus. Most had died.94

  By the end of April the spring rains had washed the grime from the streets of the town and the sun shone brightly on the simple stucco buildings and cobbled streets as one hot, clear day followed another. With fewer cases of typhus appearing among their patients and their hospital running smoothly, Flora and Emily were able to enjoy the weather. They had survived, and both were determined to make the most of their summer. They spent the mornings doing dressings and checking on their largely convalescent patients, but usually had the afternoons free.

  With time on their hands, they volunteered at another hospital. But even this additional work did not keep Flora and Emily as busy as they wished. To pass the time they attended picnics and parties, or walked to a café for beer or slivovitz, in the company of Hayek and sundry others. But as much as they enjoyed these outings, they were not reason enough to stay, and, in early June, there was even less work for them after the Second Serbian Unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals set up a tented hospital on a hillside near the town, with equipment and supplies for two hundred beds.95

  With cases of typhus appearing only sporadically and no new wounded coming in, members of the various British units also had time on their hands. By late spring Kragujevac in particular had a surplus of Allied medical teams and dwindling patient numbers, while Serbian-run hospitals in other towns were grossly understaffed. Katherine MacPhail and a colleague, Adeline Campbell, another junior doctor, decided to terminate their contracts with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals early and leave for Belgrade, where they felt they could be more useful. They took charge of a large building that housed one hundred and fifty typhus patients, replacing an old Serbian doctor who “looked as if he were dying”.96

  Katherine became one of the last foreign doctors to fall sick with typhus in Serbia. One June evening she was carried by stretcher through the streets of Belgrade by some of her POW orderlies to the nearby military hospital, run by the American Red Cross. She was lucky to survive. She was delirious for days and nearly lost a leg to thrombosis. Almost all of her hair fell out and she also suffered severe, permanent hearing loss.97 The American Red Cross took care of her for eight weeks, until she was strong enough to return home to Scotland. Katherine had good reason to be grateful to the Red Cross and, in particular, its thirty-year-old director, Dr Ryan, who had also survived typhus. Although she was almost certainly well aware of the rumours that were beginning to fly among the units in Serbia about Dr Ryan and the Red Cross, she was one of the few to keep them to herself.

  There were plenty of others willing to pass them on. The favourite topic of conversation among the personnel of the various units was each other. The American Red Cross gave them plenty of ammunition for their gossip. In a series of minor scandals, one of its doctors met a woman on a train and “spent three nights with her”, while another was challenged to a duel and had to be smuggled suddenly out of Belgrade.98 But the very worst of the rumours were about Dr Ryan. By the time the gossip about him had travelled from the capital to the units based across the rest of Serbia, it had been embellished, reworked and retold with salacious pleasure. It was not typhus at all he had had, it was whispered. It was gonorrhoea. He kept his nurses “working like slaves”, others said. Over the months that followed, rumours about Dr Ryan continued to grow in force and gather in pace.

  After reaching a peak in April, by the summer of 1915 the epidemic was over.99 Despite the general indifference of the peasant population to infestation, the sanitary measures took effect while the onset of warmer weather reduced the opportunity for the transmission of infected lice. Following on the heels of months of savage fighting, the effect of typhus on Serbia had been devastating. Accurate records could not be kept of the number of dead, but almost certainly one hundred and fifty thousand and possibly as many as two hundred thousand died out of a population of five million.100 The seventy-five thousand POWs had suffered most. Half died during the epidemic and, in Valjevo alone, only three hundred of fourteen hundred POWs survived.101 It is estimated that around thirty-five foreign doctors died of typhus, including James Donnelly, Albert Cooke and Elizabeth Ross.102 Of three hundred and fifty doctors at work in Serbia at the start of the war, one hundred and twenty-six died. One of the latter victims was Flora’s friend, Dr Vinaver.103

  On a hot summer day in mid-June, with new cases of typhus few and far between and work at their hospital “slack”, Flora and Emily returned by train to Kragujevac for a visit to the tented hospital run by the Stobart Unit, one of several trips they made around Serbia that summer. They were keen to revisit the town that they had left hurriedly the previous November, but their main aim was to find something more exciting to do. Between them they had decided that what they wanted most was to work for a field hospital – a mobile first-aid station (or “ambulance”) attached to the army. If they could pull it off, they would have the chance to work near the front in any future fighting, but there was a problem – women were not as a rule permitted to join, as it meant that they would have to live with the army. That day they received a flat refusal. “Went to [Red Cross] Headquarters, saw Guentitch [Colonel Dr Lazar Genčić of the Serbian Army Medical Service] and another man who said we could not join a Regimental Ambulance,” scratched Flora in her diary in annoyance.

  She had also travelled to Kragujevac to see how her old friend Nan MacGlade was getting on as Mabel Stobart’s chief administrator.104 She almost certainly found her suffering from the chagrin that was affecting many of the women who had reached Serbia that spring. They had left Britain hot on the heels of reports of the great danger they could face, arriving with heroic visions of battling typhus and rescuing the wounded under fire. But with the epidemic at an end and Serbia’s enemies occupied elsewhere, they were crushingly disappointed by what appeared to be little more than a pleasant summer interlude in the Balkans. “Don’t worry, there will be lots more opportunities of dying uncomfortably,” the doctors of the unit assured them, while Serb authorities begged them to stay.105 “It’s only the lull before the storm,” they insisted, in the firm belief their enemies were only biding their time before attacking again.106

  On their return to Valjevo, still no closer to finding the work they wanted, news reached Flora and Emily that the new director of their hospital, Panajotović, had been given a transfer to a field hospital. Flora lobbied him relentlessly on behalf of both of them. When he finally agreed to take them with him, Emily was equally delighted. “We were very glad to have this wonderful opportunity,” she said proudly. “It was the first time that any women had been allowed to go with the army as dressers.”107

  At the end of June, when Flora and Emily left with Panajotović to join the Third Reserve Field Hospital, Hayek came with them. The hospital lay just outside of Osečina, a village in the rolling green countryside north-west of Valjevo, near the Bosnian border. Although the trenches that divided Serbia from Austrian-occupied Bosnia were only a few miles distant, the fighting between the armies that summer was desultory and its staff of a doctor and a few orderlies received a mere trickle of patients.

  Before the molten heat of high summer descended upon the hospital, Flora and Emily rose each day in the cool of the early morning. They left their tent on a hill and walked down a steep slope to check on their patients, dress wounds and hand out medicines. Emily was called in to serve as an anaesthetist from time to time, whenever the doctor performed an operation. Otherwise they had the afternoons to themselves. “Nothing ever doing in Hos
p. in afternoons, the men asleep,” scribbled Flora.108 With Hayek constantly in tow, they spent the remainder of their days walking in the countryside, reading, horse-riding or bathing in the river to escape the oppressive heat. Hayek continued to do what he could for Flora and Emily. “Hayek got about 3 kilos of strawberries for us,” recorded Flora on 12th July. Later that month, he toiled through the heat to cut steps up the hill to their tent. But in reality he was a POW with few rights, and it was Flora and Emily who were now looking after him.

  To their regret, with conditions in Serbia gradually returning to normal, the work did not provide the challenge and excitement they craved. “The operations were not very important and were over in August, leaving us with nothing particular to do,” recalled Emily.109 Flora too was disappointed that war had not recommenced. “The advance they talked of does not seem [to be] coming off, all is quiet, no sign of war, so Americano and I have been deciding to go home.”110

  On 30th July they began a slow trip home, stopping en route in Kragujevac. Taking Hayek with her, Flora went to visit Colonel Genčić. She did not make clear her reasons for her visit to him. Perhaps it was a routine visit; perhaps she was trying to make arrangements for the POW who had saved her life. She was not in the least worried about having him with her. He had been permanently by her side since she fell sick with typhus and had been free to go everywhere and do everything with her. But Flora failed to take into account that, since last meeting Genčić, she had defied his refusal to allow her to work in a field hospital. He was now in no mood to make any further accommodations for her. There and then, despite her desperate pleas on his behalf, he sent Hayek to work in a military hospital. She managed to win him a single concession, a promise that he would not be put to work repairing the roads. All she could do the next day was to visit the barracks where Hayek had been sent to beg the captain in charge to look after him.111 Flora then sadly said goodbye to the loyal, chivalrous Hayek, who at this point disappears from history.