When the sole railway running from north to south was cut by the Bulgarians, it severed the refugees’ only means of escape south, to Salonika and Greece. They were forced back on their tracks into a smaller and smaller section of territory, towards Kosovo. First, the oxen, horses and pack animals began to starve. With no forage left, they were driven on until, exhausted and emaciated, they collapsed and died by the roadside.14 The refugees too began to starve, unable to pay for the little food available. Their condition worsened with the weather. They had no shelter in the open from the relentless rain that fell throughout much of late October.
The weather deteriorated further on the morning of 17th November. The temperature plunged rapidly and it began to rain in torrents upon the already exhausted soldiers and ill-clad refugees huddled out in the open. Then the rain turned to driving snow. Throughout the day it continued to grow colder. The members of the Allied units began to witness the deaths of the oxen and horses that were already on the brink of starvation.15 Soon they began to witness the deaths of refugees. “On all sides were dead horses and oxen, singly and in heaps, half buried in snow, with swarms of carrion crows whirling and croaking overhead,” said a British war correspondent of the apocalyptic scene. “It was a realization of the retreat from Moscow such as I never expected to see. The gaunt, half-starved faces of the passing soldiers did nothing to destroy the illusion.”16
The ambulance of the Second Regiment was engaged in treating the men of the Second and Fourteenth Regiments of the Morava Division, who had been injured in the fighting at the Babuna Pass or taken ill. Although the battle was ferocious, only a handful of its patients were seriously injured. Most had straggled down unaided from the Pass to the ambulance. The regimental stretcher-bearers were only able to carry a lucky few of the badly wounded men down the steep mountainsides. The others died unattended where they fell.
The ambulance was camped on some rocky and treeless ground to the side of a rough and isolated track, well within earshot of the boom of the guns. To the north and east rose the wooded heights of the Babuna mountains, just over a mile away. It was intentionally lightly equipped so that it could follow the Second Regiment at short notice and comprised little more than two or three covered ox wagons, a dozen small bivouac tents and one large bell tent lined with straw. It had just enough capacity to give first aid to twenty injured or sick men at a time, until they could be evacuated by ox wagon to one of the base hospitals.17 They were cared for by a staff of roughly fifty, including a Greek doctor, several medical orderlies and a Serbian girl, about seventeen years old, who lived and worked with the men. The numbers were made up by a guard of heavily armed soldiers.
It was pitch black when Flora arrived at the ambulance on the cold night in mid-November. She was welcomed by its Greek doctor and many of the men, who “were as amiable as only Serbians can be when you rouse them out in the middle of the night and turn everything upside down”.18 In the grey dawn she crawled out of her bivouac tent to get her first good look at the camp. She was struck first by the quantity of weaponry carried by the ambulance. It was a world away from the gentle civility of the British Red Cross. “The entire [Serbian] Red Cross go armed to the teeth,” she wrote admiringly in a letter to her sister.19 She also met her remaining colleagues. “Made acquaintance with the Serbian girl, queer little cuss, more like a soldier, and wears soldier’s clothes sometimes,” commented Flora in her diary that day.20 She had never before come face to face with one of the handful of women in the ranks of the Serbian army and was both impressed and reassured. If the girl could live and work with the army, Flora reasoned, so could she.
The girl helped her settle into her work. “She gave me lots of tips,” Flora recalled later. “Though I had been under the impression that I knew something about camping out and roughing it, having done so in various parts of the world, she could walk rings around me in that respect.”21 She could also speak German with Flora, who was still struggling to learn Serbian. Many of the British women who worked in Serbia during the war, like her, found it bewildering at first. One complained bitterly that it had seven cases, two aspects of the verb (perfective and imperfective) and the dual as well as the plural, and that it even contained six different words for sister-in-law.22
Flora spent her first morning with the ambulance hurriedly working alongside two of its orderlies, washing, disinfecting and dressing the wounds of the injured who were carried to them on the ground outside the tents. During the course of the day a handful of new casualties trickled in. The Greek doctor took charge of the sick, while Flora and the orderlies quickly bandaged the wounds of the injured, ahead of their evacuation. But as they waited anxiously, only two or three ox wagons arrived that afternoon to remove their patients to the nearest base hospital. There were only enough places for the very worst cases. The others – some of whom were “so sick that they could hardly crawl” – faced a walk of several miles to escape the Bulgarians. “One man protested that he would never do it,” wrote Flora, who interceded on his behalf. “However, the ambulance men, who were well up to their work, explained that it was absolutely imperative that all should get off into safety.” If they fell into the hands of the Bulgarians, they told her, they would simply be killed. “Go, brother,” they told him kindly. “Idi polako, polako” (“Go slowly, slowly”). Fortified with cognac from the orderlies and a handful of cigarettes from Flora, he limped off with the others.23
“Sleep in your clothes tonight,” the Greek doctor warned Flora when she returned to her tent for the night. “Don’t even take off your boots.”24 She was fast asleep at one a.m. when a messenger woke her with an urgent wire from Greig asking her to return to Prilep immediately. Flora studied it closely. She decided that, while it was admittedly strong advice to go back, it was not quite an “order”.25 Armed with this semantic nuance, the following morning she suggested uncertainly to her new colleagues that she would like to “stick it out” with them. “I wasn’t sure, you see, whether I’d only be a nuisance and anxiety, but they all seemed fearfully bucked,” she wrote to her sister, “and they seem to think I’ve done something wonderful.”26
That evening, grim-faced, they received the news that Serbian positions on the Babuna Pass had fallen and that the Bulgarians were marching on Prilep. The ambulance lay directly in their line of advance. Flora and the girl worked frantically alongside the men packing up equipment and supplies, taking down the tents and helping the sick and wounded men into ox wagons.27 At eleven p.m. they clambered out of the rain and mud into a covered horse-drawn wagon that lumbered slowly south into the darkness. None of them knew if they had left in time to escape the Bulgarians.28
The fall of the Babuna Pass was a devastating blow to the Serbs. The Pass was the last link between the forces in Serbian Macedonia and the rest of the army to their north. Those in Serbian Macedonia, including the Second Regiment, were only a small segment of the army. Most of its soldiers, to the north, were hemmed in on the Kosovo Plain, surrounded by the invading armies to the north, east and south, having been driven from the rest of the country by the enemy. With them were tens of thousands of refugees and dozens of men and women of the Allied missions. To the west, their passage was blocked by the wall of snow-covered and forbidding mountains that marked the Serbian border with Albania and Montenegro.
When a final, doomed attempt failed to break through to the French and British to the south, the Serbian Chief-of-Staff, General Putnik, knew that only two options lay open to him. He could surrender unconditionally to the enemy or order his men to retreat over the frozen mountain passes of Albania and Montenegro in an attempt to reach safety along the Adriatic coast. On 21st November he chose the latter. For the French and British there was no longer any possibility of breaking through to the Serbian army. The French fell back towards Salonika, joined shortly thereafter by the British. By 13th December the Franco-British Expeditionary Force was back where it started, in Greece, having failed in its primary task of preventing Serbia f
rom ruin.
“It was a lively experience,” scribbled Flora happily in a letter to Sophia describing her narrow escape from the Bulgarians with the ambulance. “I have a hand grenade which a Serbian woman gave to me and which I know how to use, and a revolver,” she boasted to her sister, who likely felt anything but reassured. “We came through Prilep,” she continued. “Our rear men looted the town and set fire to a part of the Bulgarian quarter as we went through, but they didn’t find much to loot. One man told me he broke open three shops to find a pair of boots, and couldn’t get one.”29
The ambulance had fled south through the pitch dark, where it had joined other Serbian units along the road. It was “a most unpleasant night”, wrote Flora, “rumbling along in the dark, not knowing whether the Bulgars had got there first and cut the road in front of us”. At sunrise they stopped a few miles from Monastir to await the arrival of Colonel Milić, the Commandant of the Second Regiment of the Morava Division.
Milić had already heard of the presence of an Englishwoman travelling with the army. When he rode up with his headquarters staff he found her standing around a blazing fire with the men of the ambulance. He was fascinated by the khaki-clad thirty-nine-year-old nurse who stood before him in boots and breeches and who spoke to him as if she was every bit his equal. He was impressed too by her plain-spoken and direct manner, her obvious enthusiasm for working near the battlefront and her apparent fearlessness. She was far from what he had expected.
Flora too was curious to meet the middle-aged, lean commandant. Although his well-kept uniform, polished boots and trimmed moustache lent him an air of authority, he entirely failed to intimidate her. He was “a perfect old dear”, she wrote to her sister.30 Like Flora, he could speak German. She was pleased more than anything to find another person with whom she could easily communicate. “We… had a great powwow,” she recalled of their meeting. “My first impression of him was that he was a real sport, and later on, when I got to know him very well and had the privilege of being a soldier in his regiment, I found out that not only was he a sport, but one of the bravest and most chivalrous gentlemen anyone ever served under.”31
Milić could see that his men took comfort from the fact that a British woman had chosen to stand by them at a time when they were on the verge of defeat. More than that, Flora’s company provided a much needed respite for him from the near impossible task he had on his hands. Although his Second Regiment had been ordered to act as a “rearguard” in an attempt to keep the Bulgarians at bay, he had no big guns to answer the enemy’s artillery, his soldiers were outnumbered four to one, and the Serbian front lines were so thinly manned that the Bulgarians could simply walk round them. All he could do was to rush men from one point to the next in a doomed attempt to stem the advance. At night, to get his mind off his troubles, he would stay up playing chess with Flora. “The Commandant and I were very evenly matched,” she wrote. “We used to have some tremendous battles, sometimes long after everyone else was asleep, and always kept a careful record of who won.”32
Milić became Flora’s protector, mentor and friend. Three days after they met, he invited her to remain at his regimental headquarters, on the premise that she could work for the small field ambulance attached to it. “As it is closer to the front,” explained Flora in the letter to her sister, “I accepted and behold me now installed afresh.”33 Next, he assigned her an orderly, Vliaho. Having grown up with servants, his appointment hardly merited a comment in her diary. Vliaho brought her supper each night, ensured she had a place to sleep and, most importantly, helped with her belongings. “I hadn’t very much [luggage],” wrote Flora, who nevertheless had considerably more than anyone else.34 Her new Serbian colleagues, no doubt assuming that all Englishwomen travelled thus, took her and her luggage in their stride. But she was less happy when Milić assigned a guard to the wagon she had been given to live and sleep in. He “spat and hawked violently all night” she grumbled irritably in her diary.35
The guard aside, Milić did not attempt to coddle Flora. Once he learnt of her keen interest in the progress of the battle, he lent her his second horse, a white half-Arab called Diana who could gallop “like the wind”, so that she could join him on his visits to the shallow Serbian trenches in the hills.36 Milić was greatly impressed by her riding skills. “The Commandant seems awfully bucked that I can ride, and declares they have a small cavalry detachment of 30 of the best riders in the Reg. and that I’d better belong to that,” wrote Flora excitedly in her diary. “They seem bent on turning me into a soldier, and I expect I’ll find myself in the trenches next battle!”37
On 22nd November Flora arrived in the village of Topolchani in the company of Milić, his staff and the regimental field ambulance. In the three days since she had joined them she had travelled with them as they had slowly retreated south towards Monastir, losing one position after another to the Bulgarians. It was “heartbreaking” for Milić, Flora could see, to be forced to abandon more and more territory to the enemy. Still, he steadfastly refused to throw his men’s lives away on battles they had no prospect of winning.38
She was there with Colonel Milić, his staff and a Greek doctor when the Bulgarians attacked through the cover of a driving blizzard the following morning. From the doorway of a house by the roadside, she listened as the muffled crack of rifles shattered the grey calm. “There we stood about in the snow and listened to a battle which was apparently going on quite close,” described Flora. “Although we strained our eyes we could see nothing – there was such a frightful blizzard. A company of reinforcements passed us and floundered off through the deep snowdrifts across the fields in the direction of the firing.” Suddenly, her pulse racing, she heard the Bulgarians storm the Serbian positions. “The crackle of rifles got nearer and nearer and at last, about midday, [we] could hear the ‘Hurrahs, hurrahs’ of the Bulgarians quite close as they charged.”
The doctor shared none of her composure. “[He] charged past me in a great hurry, and promptly fell over his horse’s head when it stumbled in the snow,” she noted contemptuously in her diary. “The Ambulance was ahead on the move, I wanted to wait until [Milić] went, but the doctor shrieked we must go.” Flora grudgingly set off with him on Diana to rejoin the men of the ambulance. Although they were camped a mere two miles away, it took an hour to reach them, through the snow and penetrating cold.
Flora was at work in the bleak twilight of the late afternoon carefully dressing the wounds of injured men when the sudden crack of Bulgarian guns threw the doctor into a renewed state of panic. “[He] got into an awful state because he had had no order to move and the guns were banging away, the flashes showing on the snow,” she wrote acerbically. This time, when the doctor and the men of the ambulance prepared to retreat, Flora insisted on staying behind. “I’ll wait for Militch and follow later,” she told them emphatically. The day’s events had been too much for the Greek doctor. Soon after, to the scorn of Flora and the men, he abandoned the ambulance for good.39
To be in the thick of the battle was something that Flora had long dreamt of, ever since as a child she had read and reread ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ and spent hours imagining herself as the central character in Kipling’s tales of heroism and adventure. She had high hopes for the climax of the Bulgarian attack. “I had great visions of a gallop with [Milić] with the Bulgarians hotly pursuing us, as he always waits till the last minute,” she explained.40 But her hopes of a dramatic chase were dashed.41 When Milić finally arrived, at nine p.m., they set off together on horseback for the village of Mogila, a couple of hours south on the road towards Monastir. “Instead of the wild cinema gallop,” wrote Flora,
we had one of the slowest, coldest rides you can imagine. There was a piercing blizzard blowing across the snowy waste, blinding our eyes and filling our ears with snow; our hands were numbed, and our feet so cold and wet we could hardly feel the stirrups. We proceeded in dead silence, no one feeling disposed to talk, and slowly threaded our way
through crowds of soldiers tramping along, with bent heads, as silently as phantoms, the sound of their feet muffled by the snow. I pitied the poor fellows from the bottom of my heart – they were so much colder and wearier than I was myself, and I wondered where the “glory” of war came in. It was exactly like a nightmare from which one might presently wake up.42
They were chilled to the very bone when they finally reached a tiny village of roughcast stone houses where they found shelter in a loft. The next evening, with the Bulgarians close on their heels, Flora, Milić and the officers were forced to retreat again, this time towards Orizari, a village on the outskirts of Monastir.
Flora was now the only woman with the regimental ambulance. The Serbian girl had taken the opportunity, as they neared Monastir, to visit the town to pick up some winter clothes. Although she understood that she had intended to return to them, Flora never saw her again.43 As the sole female, Flora’s one complaint about life with the regimental ambulance was the lack of all privacy. “Found lavatory and washing arrangements extremely difficult under the circs,” she commented shortly after joining them. The best that she could do was position her wagon strategically so that it was “not quite so public”.44 She remained otherwise silent about how she coped with sanitary matters at the front. Most likely, the men of her regiment arranged for her to be given the privacy of a tent or shelter where they could, and turned a courteous blind eye where they could not.
The thing she missed most was having a good bath. In the two weeks she had spent with the Second Regiment everyone she had spoken to had assured her that it was impossible to have a bath in wartime. “War with the Serbians having lasted now 500 years. Off and on, I don’t suppose many of the present generation have had one,” she commented wryly to her sister.45 Finally, she got her chance in Orizari. Her orderly Vliaho, who likewise thought it incomprehensible that anyone could possibly feel the need for a bath, procured a filthy “sort of stable” for her, set up her rubber bath, filled it with hot water and stood guard outside.
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 10
