A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  No one from the Red Cross appears to have told Emily of the ban. She waited in Paris in September and into October for word from them of when she would sail for Macedonia, in the not unreasonable expectation that her unrivalled experience and her fluency in the language would mean they would send her back. As days became weeks, to pass the time she began work at Dr Lucas’s Children’s Hospital for the Repatriated at Évian-les-Bains. The French hospital, on the Swiss border by Lake Geneva, cared for sick French and Belgian children who had been deported from territory occupied by the Germans, who saw them as a drain on their resources. Although the hospital was overstaffed, the head nurse, at least, appreciated her. “We have such an interesting nurse here; she has been three years in Serbia and Macedonia,” she wrote. “Miss Simmonds is very enthusiastic over the Serbs; she liked the Russians very much, too; she came into intimate contact with the men of six armies; it was a tremendous experience.”28

  By November Emily had heard rumours of the Red Cross’s ruling. “I hear the American Red Cross do not want any more women to go to Serbia,” she commented plaintively to a friend. Instead, after only a brief stint at Évian – something that later gave the American Red Cross further ammunition to use against her29 – she was offered an assignment with their Italian Commission.30 Desperate for work, she accepted. But before she reached Rome in January 1918, Emily knew for certain that they had blocked her return to Macedonia. After she had spent the previous summer appealing on their behalf for funds, she felt little short of a profound sense of betrayal. “Miss S. writes that owing to Dr R. she has not been sent out here,” wrote Amelia upon receiving a letter from her. “It’s a shame that her unique knowledge of Serbian isn’t utilized,” Amelia wrote subsequently. “Truly the ARC is a very badly run affair.”31

  Still, Emily made the best of it. She travelled to Sicily, where she took charge of the distribution of supplies for several thousand refugees before she was transferred to Milan to organize soup kitchens and work rooms. But soon after she started she received a wire from Flora asking her to take charge of one of the canteens. Although the job offer would have provided her with the papers and the funding she needed to return to Macedonia, the young nurse felt obliged to refuse following her acceptance of the position in Italy. But Flora’s offer and her appalling treatment at the hands of the Red Cross must have played on her mind constantly. By March, at the end of her two-month contract, she was on a ship home to New York.32

  After a whirlwind of speaking engagements, press interviews and public appearances that occupied her almost every waking moment, by March Flora’s leave was nearly up. A few days before her departure she travelled into London to get her papers stamped at the Serbian legation for her trip back to Salonika. “You can’t go back just yet,” she was astonished to be told by a waiting official. “You are wanted to go and lecture in the YMCA huts at some of the base camps in France.” “But I can’t,” she replied, as she handed him a document. “My time is up; here is my leave paper.” “We are wiring to GHQ [General Headquarters] in Salonique for an extension of leave for you,” explained the official. “If you really want to go and help Serbia, and we know you do, then go and lecture as we wish you to.”33

  Although Flora nodded reluctantly, her heart sank at the suggestion. How on earth would they take to a woman soldier, she thought with dismay. They would almost certainly jeer at her as she stood before them in uniform. Even in Britain before the war woman speakers had often been considered inappropriately bold and she would not have forgotten the taunts from the public when she had marched through London streets in uniform as part of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry. Nor had she forgotten how the British officers she had encountered in Albania and Corfu had dismissed her initially as little more than a camp follower. It was accordingly with a feeling of dread that she began to prepare for her talks.

  In late March, just as the first flyers were being distributed announcing the imminent appearance on stage of “Sgt Flora Sands [sic] the Serbian Joan of Arch [sic]”, the Germans launched their devastating “Spring Offensive” along the Western Front.34 With revolutionary Russia out of the war, they massed all their resources against the Allies in France in an attempt to secure victory before America could throw the full weight of her army against them. On the first day of the battle they overwhelmed British positions along the Somme. Before nightfall they had advanced over four miles. Over the days that followed the Allied High Command were thrown into near panic as one town or village after another was seized by the enemy. The prospects of Allied victory looked increasingly bleak.

  When Flora stood in front of her first audience, a sea of khaki-clad, battle-worn British soldiers who were “fighting with [their] backs to the wall”, she began haltingly to tell them of her experiences in Serbia. The “first friendly round of applause” she received cheered her tremendously. “[It] told me that we were going to be friends,” she remembered. From that moment there was no looking back. For three weeks she spoke every night and some afternoons in different YMCA huts along the north coast of France. She had correctly assumed that her audience were interested only in being entertained, not educated, and her light-hearted, humorous approach made her appearances a tremendous success. “I used to put in as many funny incidents as I could think of,” she wrote.35 Every room she spoke in was packed to overflowing. Even the officers would attend. “I never enjoyed anything so much in my life as lecturing to the soldiers,” she later concluded. “They were the jolliest and most attentive and enthusiastic audiences it would be possible to imagine.” They were also generous. Although collections were not normally taken at such events, a box was always put up for those wanting to donate something to their Serbian counterparts. By the end of Flora’s lecture tour the Tommies had helped her raise enough money to purchase and ship a couple of Ford cars to the Macedonian Front for the Canteens.36

  “I am sitting now in a sun shelter made of posts roofed with pine boughs… in the principal canteen for the Morava Division,” described Flora in a letter to Evelina Haverfield from Petalino. The village lay a few miles south of the Starovenski Redoubt where her company were based. Five weeks earlier, her lecture tour over, the “Serbian Infantrywoman” had been given an enthusiastic and high-profile send-off from London that was even considered worthy of a mention in the Times.37 In the late spring she had reached Salonika, then hurried west along the congested Monastir Road to visit her new canteens en route to her company.

  With the assistance of Amelia, who had taken a mere two months off to recover from malaria, Flora had managed to open canteens for four of the six divisions of the Serbian army. These she placed under the charge of Amelia and her old friend Nan MacGlade.38 “The outstanding feature is that everything pertaining to them has been made out of nothing,” Flora continued in her letter to Evelina, trying to convey how judiciously the funds from their joint venture had been spent. “The net result is three separate places [in and around Petalino] which are always open for the tired, dusty men who pass along the scorching road all day long, to sit and rest in the shade, be welcomed as honoured guests, and provided at once with a cup of tea and a cigarette.” It was also a beautiful location. “It was up a hillside, with a lovely view, and neatly arranged with sanded floors, and little baby pine trees planted in front, a grass border, and what will soon be a flower garden,” wrote Flora. “The genius of the place is a Serb soldier [Jovan Mitrović] who used to be Miss Simmonds’s batman, and who before the war was a café keeper in Belgrade… He is a treasure. The whole is finished off by an elaborate row of large bottles filled with red, then blue, then white mixture, the Serbian colours giving it rather the appearance of a German beer garden!”39 Amelia was delighted to receive Flora’s approbation. “Sergeant Flora Sandes has just been here on her way to the front,” she wrote to her sister. “She is much pleased with all I have done. Hurrah!”40

  After a fleeting visit to the canteens, Flora hurried a few miles north to the Starovenski Redoubt to rejoin th
e men of her company whom she had not seen for nearly eight months. There she spent a quiet and relatively uneventful summer with them along a front that remained largely static. She spent her days in their dusty collection of huts and her nights in the trenches sitting peacefully under the stars, just as she had the previous year.

  By the summer of 1918 the Serbs and Bulgarians had been at war for nearly three years. Both sides were utterly sick of all that it entailed – inactivity, poor food, uncomfortable shelter, being away from home and family and the very real prospect of catching malaria or enteritis, alongside the small but nonetheless continual risk that they might be killed at any moment by a well-aimed shell. But while the Serbs remained fiercely determined to endure whatever hardships necessary to recover their lost country, the foundations of Bulgarian resolve were beginning to crumble. Not only were they tired of taking orders from their German commanders, they were starting to lose faith that Germany would win the war.41

  The German “Spring Offensive” in the west had slowed, then stalled. When their fortunes worsened still, they began to withdraw further forces from Macedonia in the hope of stemming the pace of their reverses. At a time when German numbers were decreasing, those of the Allies were receiving a twofold boost in the region. Greek neutrality had finally given way under British and French pressure and, in the spring, the soldiers of the Greek army had joined the Macedonian Front in force. The strength of the Serbian army had similarly been augmented by the arrival of roughly eighteen thousand “Yugoslav” volunteers, many of whom were Slav conscripts into the Austro-Hungarian army who had defected to the Russians earlier in the war.42

  Rumours were rife among the men of Flora’s company that the tide in the Balkans had begun to turn in favour of the Allies. By August they knew that they were planning an offensive. As the heat of the summer had increased, so too had the rate of activity all along the front. Labourers toiled under the burning sun to improve the roads and railways and erect telephone and telegraph lines. New training camps and supply depots scarred the landscape and heavy artillery was dragged into place under the cover of darkness.43

  Flora felt the rising tide of excitement as she watched the pace of work swell to a feverish pitch. At last she had a chance to see “the end of this monotonous trench existence” and experience once again the excitement and “sport” of battle. For the men of her company it was also a chance that they hardly dared hope for – to return to their homes and see their families after so many long, hard years. “The men were extraordinarily optimistic,” Flora recalled, “though I do not think the officers were quite so confident; but everything was said and done to encourage the men, who required no encouragement. Not for one moment did they doubt that they were going to march straight back into Serbia; sweep Bulgars, Germans and Austrians before them like chaff, and, after three years of exile, feel once more the soil of Serbia under their feet.”44

  To her horror, just as she was expectantly awaiting her company to be given their orders to advance, the all-too-familiar waves of pain began to shoot once again through her body. Terrified that she would miss the fighting after all these months of idleness, she dragged herself miserably to a Serbian field hospital in the village of Skochivir with her batman Mitar in tow. “It’s only a few short miles away,” she consoled herself, planning to escape to the front at the first sign of the attack.

  There, Flora had her nineteenth piece of shrapnel removed by a surgeon. He put her to bed in a small tent on her own, with Mitar to keep an eye on her. Within days, boredom and the desire for additional company had driven her to disobey his orders to rest. When she spotted a number of British khaki uniforms some distance from her tent, she limped across to introduce herself. The men belonged to 820 Motor Transport Company, one of several such companies at work for the Serbs, delivering ammunition to their guns in the mountains. She was welcomed by one of the British officers, Lloyd Smellie. “Occasionally she would walk as far as the camp of 820 Company,” he recalled, “and I gave permission for her to come to the Officers’ Mess to see English newspapers and be given a cup of tea, and the mess servants looked after her accordingly.” Even then, after her operation, she was “strong and hearty and could carry a rifle,” he remembered.45

  While Flora was recovering from her operation, she received a letter from General Bojović, now commander of the Serbian First Army, expressing his “heartfelt thanks” to the canteens for all that they had done. Not only had they supplied over one hundred and fifty thousand men with tea, lemonade and cigarettes, they had clothed the whole of the Morava Division, along with thousands of other men.46 Flora had not quite proven Colonel Fitzpatrick wrong, but she had come close to it. He had refused to give her a dozen pairs of socks; via her canteens, she had supplied the First Army alone with 11,605 pairs.

  Chapter 13

  Breakthrough

  1918

  By early September preparations were well under way for an attack spearheaded by the Serbs. The plan, devised by General Živojin Mišić, the Serbian Chief-of-Staff, had first been dismissed by the Allied command as near impossible. He proposed striking the Bulgarians along the Moglena mountain range, a forbidding line of windswept naked peaks east of Monastir, which were at points over seven thousand feet in height. Not only did his plan envisage lifting heavy guns into position on the slopes without the Bulgarians noticing, it relied on driving them out of their mountain-top trenches and concrete gun emplacements.1

  The key to Mišić’s plan was speed and momentum. The Serbs would have to drive the Bulgarians back without giving them the chance to regroup and reform. He would have to push his army to the limits of their endurance. They would have to fight their way across pitiless mountains and dry, scorched plains with little rest and few supplies.2 Mišić believed that they could do it. So too did his soldiers. By September 1918 he had convinced the Allied command to let him try.

  As the “great day” loomed, the men of Flora’s company waited anxiously for their chance to advance. “Once back on Serbian ground we don’t care if we’re killed,” the men avowed, as they gazed hard towards the Moglena mountains, on the other side of which lay their beloved country.3 From her small tent in the hospital grounds Flora sensed that something was about to happen. She packed her things resolutely and told the doctor she was leaving. “It’s been five weeks,” she told him. “I’ve been recuperating quite long enough.”

  At eight o’clock on the morning of 14th September, from her position on a wooded hillside next to some Serbian batteries, Flora watched as the artillerymen sprang to their guns and opened fire, on a fine but hazy day. “Prvi top pali, Drugi top pali” (“First gun fire, Second gun fire”), they shouted while they rained shells on Bulgarian positions atop the heights. Nearby the ground vibrated under Flora’s feet and her ears rang with the most “incessant, ear-splitting noise” she had ever experienced, in what was the start of the largest concentration of fire ever seen in the Balkans.4

  To the north-east of Monastir the Italian and French armies readied themselves to advance while, east of the Vardar River, the British prepared for an assault on their sector of the front around Lake Doiran. These were to be diversionary battles only, designed to prevent the Bulgarians from rushing troops to the focus of the attack. The men of the six Serbian divisions, reinforced by two French Colonial ones, waited for their chance to storm the Moglena heights. They were ordered to capture the peaks of Sokol and Vetrenik, which lay on either side of the Dobropolje ridge.5

  In the early hours of 15th September the Serbian Second Army and French Colonial divisions began to advance. Flora and the men of the First Army remained impatiently behind. Above them the blue-grey-clad Serbs and French scrambled upwards over the grass- and scrub-covered lower slopes, the harsh stutter of machine-gun and rifle fire echoing all around. They hauled themselves up over rock faces and squeezed through gaps in the barbed wire towards the increasingly desperate Bulgarians. By the early afternoon they had stormed the crest of the Vetrenik. N
ext they seized the length of the Dobropolje ridge. Only the heavily defended Sokol peak remained. After a bloody and savage battle, by nightfall, it too had fallen to the Serbs.6 Mišić now ordered the Second Army to pursue the Bulgarians through the night without rest.

  On 16th September Flora marched off with the First Army through the huge gap in the Bulgarian lines that had been opened by the heroic efforts of the Second Army. For the men the order to advance was as good as being told they were going home. “It would have been no earthly use giving us blankets,” she wrote. “We should have thrown them away, as we did everything else that would have impeded our progress, excepting rifle, ammunition, haversack and water bottle.”7

  By the following morning a breach of six miles had been made in Bulgarian lines on a front of twenty. The Second Army pushed them back relentlessly towards Gradsko, a road and rail hub that lay at the junction of the Crna and Vardar rivers. If they could reach it, they would sever the enemy’s supply and communications networks and simultaneously divide their army in half.8 The First Army, Flora’s Morava Division among them, took up the chase to the left, across hills, ravines and valleys in the direction of the Crna River. Once across, they were ordered to head towards the town of Veles.