Flora returned home to her family in late August canary-yellow and tired from a bout of hepatitis A she had contracted a few days before leaving.112 But soon she perked up enough to take a keen interest in the disquieting rumours from the Balkans. Enemy troops were concentrating along the northern frontier of Serbia, she read in the papers.113 Over the next weeks the news became progressively worse.
On 5th October the Austro-Hungarian and German armies began a savage bombardment of Belgrade and the northern border of Serbia that confirmed the Serbs’ belief that they were poised to invade. Also waiting anxiously were the members of three small Allied naval missions who had been sent to bolster the Serbian army, from Britain, France and Russia. Their aim, first and foremost, had been to prevent the Danube waterway from being used by Germany to arm Turkey, which was fighting the Allies in Gallipoli. Now they were expected to help save Serbia from invasion.
The British Naval Mission, under the Command of Rear Admiral Ernest Troubridge, had arrived in Serbia in early 1915.114 Although it was tiny, only seventy men, the Serbs put their faith in them and the even smaller French and Russian Missions to defend their northern border, and transferred the greater part of their thin forces to the east to face the Bulgarians, who were said to be mobilizing. They also maintained some troops in Serbian Macedonia to the south.
After two days of bombardment, the invasion began. Three hundred thousand Austro-Hungarian and German troops attacked from the north. The Serbian army, only two hundred and fifty thousand strong, was overwhelmingly outgunned and outnumbered, while the Naval Missions were too weak and ill equipped to help stem the attack. Soon after the start of the assault they were forced into retreat. Two days after the fall of Belgrade on 9th October, three hundred and fifty thousand men of the Bulgarian army attacked along the eastern frontier of Serbia, with the sole ambition of achieving the country’s long-standing territorial ambitions in Macedonia.
The defeat of Serbia was strategically vital to Germany and Austria-Hungary. At a stroke it would allow them to deliver supplies via the Danube to Turkey and diminish the threat to the territorial integrity of Austria-Hungary from its restless Slav population. They also hoped that decisive success would bring neutral Romania into their orbit. Germany took charge of planning the attack. Following two bungled invasions of Serbia, it had no intention of tolerating any further Austro-Hungarian military incompetence.
Despite the crushing odds against them the Serbs maintained their unshakable faith that the Allies would come to their rescue. On 5th October the first troops of the Franco-British Expeditionary Force landed in Salonika. Soon after their arrival, the French pushed north into Serbia, joined a couple of weeks later by the British, whose support for the new campaign was lukewarm at best. The Serbs were joyous at the news. Rumours, founded only in hope, grew about the collapse of the enemy. Niš and all the surrounding villages were expensively decorated with flowers, gaily coloured bunting and Allied flags to welcome the troops. Crowds flocked to the station to welcome them. They never came. None of the stories were true.115 By the time the Allies had chosen to act, it was too late to save the Serbs.
Worried sick about missing the action, Flora cut her holiday short. She wrote a few hurried lines to Emily in New York to tell her she was returning to their old hospital in Valjevo, asking her to join her there.116 Then she threw together a few things and raced by train through the cool, autumnal French countryside to Marseilles. There she boarded the Mossoul, an old cargo steamer. It was packed, not just with blue-uniformed French soldiers, but with munitions smuggled alongside the bags of flour in the hold.117 At six a.m. on 21st October she joined the other passengers on the deck as it steamed slowly out of the harbour, past the Indian camps that lined the shore. Among the many passengers standing alongside her, watching as the distant hills, white houses and great cathedral of Marseilles faded into the thick morning mist, were the members of a number of women’s units heading east. The majority were travelling to Serbia. Most were with the Girton and Newnham Unit, the latest sent out by the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, but there were also a few “freelancers” who, like Flora, were returning to Serbia on hearing the news of war.
The other women eyed Flora curiously. To those nervously leaving for Serbia for the first time she was an imposing figure. Not only had she more wartime nursing experience than anyone else, she had survived typhus and could speak some Serbian. She was outgoing, plain-spoken and confident enough to do precisely what she liked, including smoking, which was considered daring and anything but ladylike. Many also looked enviously at her short hair. Soon, the more rebellious followed suit, in a “craze” that swept up the women of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.118 “Flora Sandes on board,” scribbled Dr Isabel Emslie after catching sight of her. “[She is] a tall, handsome woman with short grey hair and a faultless khaki coat and skirt.”119
The ship headed south-east on its long voyage, passing first through the Straits of Bonifacio dividing the rocky coasts of Corsica and Sardinia. The weather was beautiful. “Lovely day, calm as glass,” recorded Flora in her diary two days into the trip as they passed the lights of the African coast.120 Despite the apparent tranquillity, its passengers were all too aware that, beneath the dark waters of the Mediterranean, floating mines lurked and German submarines were on the prowl.121 Neither did the captain let them forget the danger. He put them repeatedly through lifeboat drill, ordered them not to lose sight of their life vests and made them sleep in their outdoor clothing. Above all, they were warned never to show the faintest light on deck at night. Even cigarettes were forbidden, to Flora’s dismay. “Captain Pym scared a couple of the girls to death with his talk of ammunition and submarines,” recorded a fellow passenger.122 For Flora it was all part of the adventure. She nonchalantly reported their first scare in her diary. “Great excitement; was it the enemy!!” she scribbled brightly.123 When the Mossoul left for Salonika on the final stage of its long voyage, submarines were once again reported to be in the vicinity.
“Arrived Salonique 6 a.m. after a very strenuous night dodging submarines and nearly running down a destroyer. Whistles blowing and Captain cursing all night, and everyone getting up and admiring scenery at dawn!” wrote Flora from her room at the Bristol Hotel.124 It had taken them fourteen days to travel from Marseilles, a trip that in peacetime normally took less than a week.125
News had filtered through to her and the other passengers during the voyage that the situation facing the Serbian army was increasingly grim. By the time they reached Salonika on 3rd November, they all knew that the Austro-Hungarian and German armies in the north had made slow but steady progress while the Bulgarians had quickly overrun the south of the country. The news, bad as it was, made Flora’s heart race with excitement. Her worst fear had been that the fighting would be over before she arrived and that she would miss the chance to work near the front. She had also been turning over an idea in her mind ever since, the year before, she had been out riding alongside a Serbian soldier in Kragujevac. “What do you want to be a nurse for?” he had asked her, impressed with her horsemanship. “Your skills are wasted in the hospital wards. Why don’t you join the army instead?” For the first time, his suggestion made her realize that, as a woman, it might just be possible for her to become a soldier, if she really wanted.126 By the time she reached Salonika, there was nothing she wanted more. “I’ve always wished to be a soldier and fight,” she confided to Dr Isabel Emslie on the voyage.127
Chapter 5
Invasion
1915
From the window of her room at the Slavia Hotel in Prilep, Flora looked out onto a stable yard full of donkeys, pigs and “the most villainous-looking Turks [Muslims] squatting about at their supper”. “These,” she wrote in her diary, “are the ones who will come in and cut my throat if Prilip [sic] is taken tonight.” The town was only five miles south of the fighting between the Serbian and Bulgarian armies in the Babuna mountain range, in Serbian Macedonia. The Babuna Pass control
led the entrance to the plain below. If it fell to the Bulgarians they would be able to advance unopposed, first on Prilep and then Monastir, the capital of Serbian Macedonia. The fate of the towns lay in the balance. Although the Serbians were resisting doggedly, they were now barely holding on to the Pass. They were running out of ammunition, they had no big guns to respond to Bulgarian artillery fire and they were far outnumbered by the incomparably better-equipped Bulgarian army.
Through the bare floorboards Flora could hear the singing of the Serbian soldiers who crowded the café below. Even this chorus did not drown out a heated quarrel that was taking place just outside her room. Someone was making a violent effort to break the lock on her door, and Flora could hear the boy attendant arguing with him. She did her best to take her mind off the inauspicious surroundings by writing in her diary, while smoking one cigarette after another. With her in the sparsely furnished room were her campbed, sleeping bag and tea basket. She also had her revolver. Before she went to bed she reassured herself by thinking, “If I live through the night, things will probably look more cheery in the morning.” To improve her chances she tucked the revolver under her pillow.
In the middle of the night she was suddenly awakened by the sound of shouting and banging. She grabbed her torch, fumbled for her revolver and sat bolt upright in bed. “That’s done it,” said Flora to herself. “It’s like my rotten luck that the Bulgars should pitch on tonight to come in and sack the town.” As she sat motionless, the revolver gripped tightly in her hand, the noise moved away from her door. With a sudden rush of irritation she realized that it was only two drunks staggering along the corridor to bed. Telling herself not to be “more of a fool than nature intended”, she turned over and went back to sleep.1
Flora had arrived in Salonika only the week before, her plans in disarray. She had been told on arrival that not only would she have to abandon her hope of returning to Valjevo, she would have to give up all thoughts of working in Serbia.2 For a few disheartening hours, she “generally foraged round trying to find a way up to Serbia” by wandering the narrow, cobbled streets and busy cafés in search of anyone who might know how to get there.3 At last, she saw a glimmer of hope. “You can’t travel directly north,” she was told, “but the trains are still running to Monastir.” The town, to the north-west of Salonika, was only thirty miles from the fighting.
Two days later, on 5th November, Flora had jumped on the early morning train brimming with excitement. With her travelled a handful of others who had also found themselves stranded in Salonika. Among them was Elia Lindon, one of the rebels with cropped hair who had sailed with Flora on the Mossoul, who had been hoping to return to Serbia, where she had worked in the spring of 1915.4 By the time they stepped wearily down onto the platform of the dark station in Monastir eleven hours later, they had agreed to work together as close to the fighting as possible.
Early the next morning Flora rose from her bed in a room on the outskirts of town and pulled on a Serbian uniform.5 Although she as yet had nothing but a faint hope that she might find a way to join the army, she liked how it looked and saw no reason why she should not wear it if she wanted to. That afternoon she walked along Monastir’s wide central boulevard and down a narrow side street to seek advice from Charles Greig, the British consul, at his residence in a simple, two-storey stucco building.
Greig was thirty-five years old, educated at Harrow, Oxford and Cambridge, and conscientious to a fault about his duty to ensure the safety of his British subjects. Flora was equally determined that he would help her get closer to the front. “Could you help Elia and me get to Prilep?” she asked. “The town’s still in Serbian hands,” he replied, “but there’s not much point you going as they’re expecting to have to evacuate any minute. It’s only a few miles from the fighting and the road there is threatened by Bulgarian comitadjis [irregular forces].” He paused thoughtfully, then told her that he had to accompany a small British party there in two days’ time. “You can come if you’re absolutely sure you want to,” he told her. “We’ll see if you’re needed in the hospital.” Two days later Flora threw her knapsack, campbed and rug into a lorry and clambered on board alongside an escort of three or four soldiers for the twenty-five-mile journey north. They were “armed to the teeth”, she noted with a shiver of anticipation as the lorry rumbled slowly north behind a car carrying Elia and Greig. That afternoon they reached the town safely.6
Flora could sense the prospect of war in the air. Prilep’s cafés, small hotels and tree-lined streets were thronged with soldiers, winter was closing in, food was getting increasingly expensive and the Serbian population were readying themselves for sudden flight. Desperate to get the excuse she needed to stay, she approached the hospital that afternoon. Its director was far from happy about taking on the responsibility for a British national. “Not a very enthusiastic reception,” she recorded. Nonetheless, he “accepted the inevitable with a very good grace” when he realized that she was not going to take no for an answer.7
Pleased as she was that she had managed to “gradually edge” her way to the front, it came as a shock when Greig returned to Monastir that evening, taking the British party with him.8 Elia too had decided to leave. “After the first satisfaction of getting my own way in spite of hell and high water,” scribbled Flora that evening in her dismal hotel room in Prilep, “when I waved the cars goodbye I felt the loneliest thing on earth.”9 A week later, safely away from the fighting, Elia arrived in the small town of Gevgelija near the Greek border, where the Girton and Newnham Unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals had set up base. She explained to the women of the unit that she had been evacuated as the Babuna Pass was on the brink of falling to the Bulgarians, but that Flora had refused to leave.10
“Woke up about 6.30, very much surprised to find myself still alive,” scratched Flora in her diary the morning after her arrival in Prilep. She brewed herself a quick cup of tea and then dashed down to the military hospital to start work, hoping that she would find it sufficiently disorganized to give her the justification to stay. She was not disappointed. The staff of four or five doctors and “2 nondescript females who hinder in the hospital” were barely coping. They were also running worryingly short of beds, bedding, medicine and equipment. Although very few of their patients were wounded, their wards were crowded to capacity with about one hundred and fifty men, most of whom were sick with dysentery. Flora threw on her grubby white overcoat and set to work. “Dressed a few wounded in dressing room, usual Serbian style, half a dozen incompetent people falling over each other,” she jotted scathingly in her diary later that day. “Then went round the rooms, and, as I expected, found plenty to do.” Two days later she reported that they could take no more patients and were having to turn men away.11
Although by then there was enough for “a dozen nurses” to do, she knew that she would be evacuated to Salonika along with the other members of staff when Serbian positions on Babuna fell.12 Her one chance of staying, she knew, was if she could find work with the army. She had worked for a military ambulance briefly with Emily in Osečina, and she saw no reason why she should not join one again. The closest one, a few miles to the north of Prilep, belonged to the Second Regiment. When she heard that her hospital director was travelling back to Monastir, she asked if he would secure the official approval she needed to join it. He arrived back the next day with her papers. During the late afternoon of 13th November, she packed her things and left the hospital. She had been there less than a week.
While Flora was sitting in her hotel room contemplating the wisdom of her actions, the German, Austro-Hungarian and Bulgarian armies were continuing to make relentless progress through Serbia, despite grimly determined resistance from the Serbian army. Initially the Serbs were driven by the belief that they only needed to hold the enemy at bay for long enough for the Allies to come to their rescue. But when the half-hearted Allied response failed to save them, the Serbs fought desperately to slow the advance and prevent being
encircled. It was impossible for them to take the offensive. Every man was at the front, there were no reserves, and their lines were so thin that they were forced to rush troops from one crisis to another to prevent their flanks from being turned.13
Civil administration in Serbia began to collapse. Telephones stopped working, the postal service ground to a halt and the publication of newspapers ceased. Banks closed and Serbian money began to lose its value. Transportation and communication links were destroyed, making it more and more difficult to deliver food, which became increasingly scarce for both humans and animals. As one town after another fell to the invading armies, a mass of terrified refugees fled before the onslaught.
The largely female British missions within Serbia were faced with a stark choice. They could remain with their patients and be taken prisoner, or they could join the throng of refugees. Most heads of units gave their members the choice. With a handful of exceptions, the few men of British nationality – who faced the possibility of being interned for the duration of the war – joined the retreat. Of the women, about half chose to stay. None of them knew what would happen to them when they fell into enemy hands. Those who decided to leave joined the endless processions of ragged and hungry refugees. Jumbled among them were automobiles, Serbian field hospitals, foreign diplomats, ox carts, packhorses and farm animals, alongside columns of troops, artillery and cavalry, all moving at the same slow pace. With them came two groups whose suffering was especially pitiable: roughly twenty-seven thousand schoolboys aged between twelve and eighteen who had been ordered by the government to flee to save them from internment or from being forced to join an enemy army, and the thirty-five thousand Austro-Hungarian POWs who had survived the typhus epidemic of the spring. Flora’s friend Hayek almost certainly would have been among them.
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 9
