Cleanliness was not Flora’s only concern. Her clothes were also by now infested with lice – or “a certain kind of livestock” as she called them more delicately in print. After her bath she set to work dealing with their proliferation. “I burned a hole in my vest cremating some of them,” she wrote, “but judging by the look of my bathroom, where the soldiers had been sleeping, I am not at all sure that I did not carry more away with me than I got rid of.”46 Flora’s hunt for lice was interrupted by the sudden arrival of Charles Greig. The dutiful young consul was determinedly trying to get the remaining British nationals around Monastir to safety, and he had not yet given up on Flora. His arrival was announced to her by Vliaho. Flora threw on her clothes and went out to see him. “I’ve got the car to take you to Salonika today if you’ve had enough,” he told her. “I’m not going to leave for anything,” she replied.47
Greig could see that there was little point pursuing the matter further. “You’re quite right to stop,” he told her graciously, before driving her to Monastir and back so that she could collect a large case of cigarettes and her well-travelled violin. Before he left, he handed her jam and balaclavas to give to the soldiers of her regiment and they parted “warm friends”.48 A week later, just before Monastir fell to the Bulgarians, Greig hastily married a local girl, Emily Vladica.49 When he left for Salonika, still in wedding dress, he carried with him the letter from Flora to her sister Sophia. “I’m having the time of my life with the 2nd regiment (Serbian) making a last desperate stand against [the] Bulgarians,” she told her.50
The evening after Greig’s visit, Flora joined Milić in a visit to a soldiers’ camp outside Orizari. She brought with her the supplies that Greig had given her, along with some of her cigarettes. She was introduced to the officers and given an enthusiastic welcome by the men, who took real pleasure in the small gifts. “It turned out to be the Fourth Company of the First Battalion [of the Second Regiment, Morava Division of the Army of the New Territories], strange to say, the very company that I afterwards joined, although I didn’t guess that at the time,” wrote Flora. “It was a most picturesque scene with the little tents all crowded together, and dozens of campfires blazing in the snow with soldiers sitting round them; they all seemed very cheery in spite of the bitter cold.”51
The next day, 28th November, was Flora’s last in Orizari. At nine p.m. she joined Milić and his regimental-headquarters staff on horseback as they rode slowly down the dark, icy road into Monastir. Milić had brought her with him to visit the divisional commander, General Miloš Vasić. Among the matters that he needed to discuss was Flora. Her position with the army hung in the balance, as both Milić and Flora knew all too well. By now she realized that there was little point pretending she could be useful as a nurse in such conditions. Desperate not to be sent back to Salonika, she rested all her hopes on being accepted into the ranks of the army as soldier. A few days previously she had removed the Red Cross insignia from her arm. Bracing herself for the rejection that she thought would follow, she told Milić half-jokingly that she would instead join the Second Regiment as a private. Instead of the refusal she so feared, he “laughingly took the little brass figure ‘2’ off his own epaulettes and fastened them on the shoulder straps of his ‘new recruit’, as he called me,” recalled Flora.52
But Milić knew that his unusual soldier needed General Vasić’s final approval. Although the general gave Flora a friendly reception, she remained sick with worry, fully expecting that she would be “ignominiously packed back to Salonique as a female encumbrance”. Awaiting sanction too was a young Greek eager to join the Serbian army. As the two potential recruits stood nervously before him, Vasić turned first to him. “I can have no foreigners in the army,” he told him, cutting short the pleas of the disappointed man.53
Vasić then turned to Flora. “If you remain with the army, you will have to go with them through Albania. The trip will be terrible, like nothing you have ever experienced,” he warned. “The last train goes down to Salonika tonight, and if you want to go you must go at once.” “Will I be a burden?” she asked bluntly. “Quite the reverse,” he replied genially. “It would be better for us if you stopped, as your presence will encourage the soldiers. You represent the whole of England to them.” Flora had already made up her mind. “I’ll stay, in that case,” she answered, to the indignation of the Greek, who had just witnessed the enlistment of a grey-haired thirty-nine-year-old Englishwoman.54
For Flora it was almost too good to be true. She was now, officially, a private in the Serbian army. She had not only realized her long-standing dream, but also achieved unique status. At a stroke, she became the only Western woman to enlist in a regular army during the First World War.
Part Two
Chapter 6
Retreat
1915
The black, snow-peaked mountains marking the border between Serbian Macedonia and Albania rose menacingly in the distance ahead of the soldiers of Flora’s new Second Regiment. Long columns of hungry, lice-covered, bedraggled men made their way slowly along the rough road, dragging their sore feet westwards towards the heights. Strings of starving pack animals lumbered slowly alongside them, the weight of their heavy loads cutting into their flesh.
Flora had joined the miserable procession at midnight on the night she had been accepted into the army as a private, in the company of Milić and his regimental headquarters. She had stoically endured a series of punishing nocturnal treks on horseback that took them along the gradually ascending, serpentine roads that led through the stunted foliage covering the region. “The roads were really fearful, one solid sheet of ice,” she later recalled. “Occasionally we all used to get down and walk for a bit to warm our feet, which became like blocks of ice, but the going was so hard we were glad to mount again.”1 Ominously, the road was also lined with the bodies of emaciated animals. “Every few yards we passed the horrible-looking corpses of bullocks, donkeys, etc. with the flesh half stripped from them, whether by birds or what I don’t know,” she shuddered.2 The only available shelter from the bitter wind along the isolated route was the occasional white blockhouse, each of which was packed with soldiers and filthy beyond all imagination.3
Flora now took her part in the great “retreat” of the Serbian army across the ice- and snow-covered mountains of Albania and Montenegro, where its men hoped to find sanctuary and safety on the Adriatic coast. There, they believed, their British, French and Italian allies would come to their rescue. At the outset, there were estimated to be two hundred and fifty thousand Serbian soldiers, thirty-five thousand POWs, twenty-seven thousand Serbian boys and tens of thousands of civilian refugees.4 Dozens of men and women of Allied military and medical missions joined them.
The retreat had started well before the Serbs were driven into the mountains. For those who had been driven relentlessly across the country by the force of the enemy onslaught, it had begun not just weeks but hundreds of miles before. By the time it reached the mountains, the army had already undergone appalling privations. It had been fighting without rest for approaching seven weeks. The men were exhausted, hungry and ragged. Some were wounded. Others were afflicted with dysentery and other illnesses. Although the Adriatic was ninety miles away, in practice the distance they had to traverse was easily twice this, as the tracks were not direct but twisted and turned over icy mountain passes up to five thousand feet high.5
The army travelled by four routes. The northernmost was through Montenegro to Scutari (now Shkodër). The next two routes farther south were through Albania; one led to Scutari, the other to the coast near Durazzo (now Durrës). The southernmost track was the one taken by Flora and the Army of the New Territories. They travelled from Monastir, past Resna and Lake Struga to Elbasan, Kavaja and to the Durazzo coast.6
Irrespective of their route, the soldiers faced the combined threats of starvation, exposure, disease and exhaustion. Those travelling through Albania faced a further threat – the bitter hostility of the
inhabitants. Although this animosity stemmed partly from fear of the strain that the starving Serbs would place on the limited resources of the region, it went far deeper than that. In 1912 and 1913, following the collapse of Ottoman rule, the Serbs had marched a heavily armed and well-organized army through Albania in an attempt to seize an Adriatic port. They had shown little mercy to the population during their ultimately unsuccessful invasion. The Albanians now seized the opportunity to show the Serbs none at all.
At best, the Albanians exploited them commercially. There was so little food available that they could charge whatever they wanted. Refugees, POWs and soldiers without gold were forced to barter with their clothing. Many were so desperate for food that they exchanged their coats and boots, in midwinter, for small pieces of bread. The Albanians also massacred the Serbs in their thousands. They targeted those who could not retaliate, in particular the boys, civilian refugees and stragglers. Soldiers were also shot as they passed through narrow mountain passes with no avenue of escape.7
Milić had more than just the Albanians to worry about. He needed little reminding of the proximity of the Bulgarian enemy – the constant boom of enemy artillery that resounded across the hills around them saw to that. Although he grew tired and pale from the strain and lack of sleep, he remained ready with a word of encouragement for his men. At every halt Flora saw him issue orders, rig up field telephones, pore over maps and greet dispatch riders who brought news, never good, from the battlefront.8
The Bulgarians continued to drive Milić and his Second Regiment closer and closer towards Albania. The border was intensely symbolic to the men. “In the bitterly cold grey dawn we stood around in black, churned-up mud, shivering, hungry and miserable,” recorded Flora in her diary on 8th December. “The discouraged soldiers trailed along the road, in the half-light of a winter morning, and altogether we looked the most hopelessly forlorn army imaginable, setting our faces towards the dark, hard-looking range of snow-capped mountains which separate their beloved Serbia from Albania.” Three days later they arrived at the top of the hill that marked the frontier. “We halted for a few minutes, and sort of said goodbye to Serbia, and then rode on in silence into the Albanian valley.”9
Although Flora was near the heart of the action, the war was still little more than a curiosity and novelty to her. She took the occasional solitary stroll at various stops en route, much as a tourist would, to get a better look at her surroundings. “Coming back I was stopped and closely questioned by an officer,” she recalled after one such walk. “He did not know who I was, and was evidently puzzled. He wanted to know where I had been and why, and seemed to think that I might have been paying a visit to the Bulgarians.” Milić was “very much amused” when she later told him what had happened. “Don’t go and get shot in mistake for a spy,” he cheerfully told her.10
Milić had looked after Flora well. His paternal eye and the relatively privileged orbit of regimental headquarters had left her, so far, largely unaware of the extent of the suffering that affected much of the army and, in particular, the thousands of POWs and schoolboys who accompanied them. Although the POWs had been given little choice in the matter – the Serbs were not about to permit them to be absorbed again into enemy ranks – many did not have any heart for the war and retreated voluntarily, little knowing that virtually no food could be made available for them.11 The boys followed ill-conceived and ill-executed orders by their government to leave, along the more northerly routes. They were given little supervision or protection and did not have the strength, endurance or advantages of their older brothers in the army in getting shelter and food. Early on, members of Allied medical and military missions began to see them en route, huddled together, crying from hunger and homesickness.12
The horrifying reality of what the retreat meant to the POWs was brought home to Flora with a sickening jolt. During one of her hillside jaunts she had approached a little hut and peered inside the dark doorway. In front of her lay “9 dead Austrians, a horrible sight, the poor devils lay just as they died, from sickness and starvation, unable to go any farther,” she scribbled in an angry diary entry. She was aghast at what she had seen, her friend Hayek’s face almost certainly flashing before her eyes as she contemplated his fate. “There doesn’t seem to be much ‘glory’ about this war and if there is I’ve never come across it,” she wrote in a rare diary entry critical of the conflict.13
By the time that Flora crossed into Albania with the men of the Second Regiment, the British medical staff who had remained behind in Serbia had been prisoners of the Germans, Austrians and Bulgarians for up to seven weeks. The first to be captured were the Lady Paget Unit in Skopje, who were taken prisoner by the Bulgarians on 22nd October. Next, on 7th November, the remains of the Lazarevac and Kragujevac units of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals were captured by the Germans in Kruševac, a town on the main railway line south from Belgrade. Three days later, their colleagues from the Valjevo unit were taken prisoner by the Austro-Hungarians in the nearby spa town of Vrnjačka Banja. Other missions were also captured in Vrnjačka Banja, including the Berry Unit, the Wounded Allies, British Red Cross and the Farmers.
The occupiers uniformly allowed the units to continue their work until arrangements could be made for them to be repatriated, although their treatment of them varied considerably. The Austro-Hungarians in Vrnjačka Banja treated their British prisoners with remarkable courtesy. They made it clear from the outset that they had no intention of interfering with their work and, though they looked “half-starved” themselves, ensured that the units were supplied with daily rations.14 Lady Paget too developed a good working relationship with the Bulgarians who took her staff prisoner in Skopje. They supplied her generously with food and basic medical supplies while allowing her to continue to run her hospital more or less as she chose. One month later over a thousand Germans arrived. They seized the unit’s horses, burned their firewood and exhausted their water supply, while treating their supposed Bulgarian allies with utter contempt. So hostile were the relations between the Germans and Bulgarians that the latter began to collaborate with their British prisoners to get the better of them. When the Germans attempted to take control of the hospital building, the Bulgarians flew their national flag over the hospital to deny it to them.15
The women of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Kruševac were similarly permitted by their “brusque” German captors to continue working at the Serbian military hospital in the town, but their movements were closely controlled and almost all of their equipment was requisitioned, leaving them with almost nothing to treat their twelve hundred patients.16 After only three weeks the women were sent to a POW camp in Kevavara on the edge of the Hungarian plain, where they were joined by their colleagues from Vrnjačka Banja. All thirty-two, as well as a number of strays from other units, were quartered in two small rooms, but they were not otherwise ill treated.17
The American Red Cross Unit under the charge of Dr Edward Ryan remained in Belgrade. As nationals from a then neutral country, they did not expect to be taken prisoner or mistreated by the invaders and they accordingly agreed to accept the patients of two British units, the Farmers and the British Eastern Auxiliary Hospital, when they hurriedly evacuated the besieged capital.18 Before Ryan’s unit left Serbia in early November, its eighteen staff had worked to the point of exhaustion in treating some of the thousands of victims of the fighting.
One of the dozens of British women taken prisoner was Flora and Emily’s former colleague from the Anglo-American Unit, Ada Barlow. She had remained behind in Skopje after the British Red Cross Unit that had so begrudgingly agreed to take on the “fat and plain, elderly and rather pasty” nurse returned home. Lady Paget discovered her there in October, at the time of the invasion. “In the hospital at the Citadel, commonly known as the ‘Grad’, there were more than a hundred severely wounded cases,” she recalled.
The Serbian hospital staff had already left, the only occupant of the huge, rambling building
s being Mrs Barlow, an Englishwoman, who had refused, when the order for evacuation came, to leave her patients. Many of these men had not been undressed since their arrival several days before, and were lying on mattresses on the floor, gaunt, waxen effigies in their bloodstained uniforms; some in a raging fever, others dying of hideous, septic wounds, all entirely dependent for nursing on Mrs Barlow, aided by two or three Serbian women from the town.
Only when the last of her patients were evacuated to the hospital run by Lady Paget did Mrs Barlow agree to leave. She joined the staff of Lady Paget’s Unit where, at last, her remarkable courage and dedication to her patients appears to have been recognized.19
Flora’s association with Milić and his regimental headquarters had given her considerable privileges. She had educated company, an orderly, a bed for the night and a horse to ride. More importantly she was able to share their food instead of having to rely on the worryingly irregular rations given to the ordinary soldiers. But she also realized that being attached to them had one fundamental drawback – it would deny her the opportunity of experiencing the ultimate excitement, that of risking her life on the battlefront – which by now she wanted more than anything else. Although Flora was a private in the Second Regiment, she did not yet belong to a particular company and, while Milić had continued to take her on his inspections of frontline positions at every opportunity, she was no longer content simply to be a visitor to the front, where greater adventure beckoned. She wanted to be based there. If this meant leaving some of the privileges behind, so be it.
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 11
