Chapter 16
Travels
1919–1920
“How would you like to visit the new kingdom?” suggested Flora’s colonel in April. “You ought to go. You’d get a chance to see the territory we liberated from the Austrians, and I’ll even arrange for you to be given free passes for all the railways and steamers.” Flora agreed with alacrity to take the generous six weeks’ leave. Leaving Emily in capable charge of the canteens, she packed a few things and set off happily by train.1
By the time Flora set out on her long, tortuous journey from Belgrade to Sarajevo, the worst fears of the non-Serb Slavs about how the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes would be governed were being realized. They had hoped for a confederation, an alliance of equals. Instead, when the dust began to settle it became clear that the Serbs held the upper hand in the machinery of state. Belgrade became the capital. The Serbian King, Petar Karađorđević, became the King of the Croats and Slovenes while the Serbian army became the army of the new kingdom. Posts in both government and army were allocated not by competency and merit, but as prizes for loyal military service, and virtually all were given to Serbs. It soon became clear to the Croats and Slovenes that they had exchanged the politically oppressive but essentially competently run Austro-Hungarian civil service for a politically oppressive, incompetent and dishonest Serbian-run one. The Serbs, far from denying that corruption existed, responded to criticism by stating there was little more they could do when ninety per cent of their university students had been killed during the war. As for the possibility of granting some of the posts to able Croats and Slovenes, they countered that they would not award them to men who had served disloyally with the enemy, in the armies of Austria-Hungary.2
“On this trip I looked for no adventures,” summarized Flora later, “but I find that if there is one within a hundred miles it comes straight for me.” The first such one charged her way when she decided to visit Fiume (now Rijeka) on her way to the Dalmatian coast. She had decided to stop off in the port town of fifty thousand inhabitants after travelling, apparently uneventfully, to the largely Muslim town of Sarajevo, followed by the Catholic Croatian capital of Zagreb. She had visited these towns dressed in full Serbian uniform. She now decided to do the same in Fiume. This was not a good idea.
The Italians had marched into Fiume immediately upon the end of the war. In wilful disregard of the fact that the surrounding countryside was almost exclusively Slav and they could only construct an Italian majority in the town by failing to count a Croat suburb, they claimed loudly and disingenuously that it was theirs by right.3 It was as though, wrote Flora after she had been forcibly acquainted with the situation, that a district of London populated by one group of immigrants had raised their own flag and proclaimed that they were subject only to the laws of their mother country.4
When she arrived in Fiume in April 1919, the question of its future status was so contentious that it had led to the temporary withdrawal of the Italian Prime Minister from the Paris Peace Conference and was enough to bring Italians out into the streets of Rome in a wave of nationalist fervour. The Serb position was just as rigid. If the Italians get it, they said, we will fight. The French too were on the ground in the town, attempting to act as buffers between them. For their efforts, several of their soldiers were lynched by mobs of Italian nationalists.5 Flora must have been warned that her plans of exploring the Italian-occupied town dressed, as she intended, in the uniform of a Serbian sergeant major, would court disaster. Most likely, she just ignored them. On arrival, to the surprise of no one but herself, she was arrested. “[I was] shut up for half a day by the Italians,” she later wrote, “until rescued by an English captain.”6 Seemingly no worse for wear, she brushed herself off and sauntered south down the Dalmatian coast in the direction of Montenegro. Five months after Flora’s escape, rogue Italian officers under the leadership of Gabriele D’Annunzio set up the first identifiably Fascist government there, the “Free State of Fiume”.7
When the war ended it was widely assumed both by Serbs and Montenegrins that the two kingdoms would unite. The Serbs wanted it. So too did a majority of Montenegrins, who shared a common language, religion and many cultural traditions with the Serbs. The unification of Serbia with Montenegro would accordingly have been one of the simplest in history, had it not been for spectacularly inept handling by the Serbs.8 The Serbs were like “a fighting army that has just come out of the trenches after a long hand-to-hand fight, and thinks it may yet be ambushed,” wrote one commentator.9 Seeing subterfuge where none existed, they moved quickly to force unification upon Montenegro. First they poured their troops over the border. Next, under the mendacious, thuggish and violent nationalist Andrija Radović, they drew up arrangements for the election of deputies to a “Great National Assembly”, charged with deciding the future status of Montenegro. The “election”, on 19th November 1918, was conducted under the supervision of the Serbian army amid widely reported instances of voting irregularities, arm-twisting and bribery. When the chosen deputies met a week later, they voted unanimously to unite with Serbia. “The election was a ridiculous farce,” said one American observer disparagingly. “Not a vote was cast contrary to the wishes of the organizers.”10 On 1st December, when the establishment of the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was announced, any reference to Montenegro in the title was noticeably absent. It had been subsumed within Greater Serbia.
Although the majority of Montenegrins had supported unification, the manner in which it had been achieved alienated many.11 At the start of January 1919 the “Greens” – so-called because they had printed their list of pro-independence candidates on green paper – took up arms against the pro-Serbian “Whites”. They were promptly squashed by the Serbian army and White militias. It was simply a “minor local uprising” to the war-seasoned Serbs, commented the American observer, “and the leaders of the sad little revolution were thrown in jail.”12 A campaign of terror ensued. The Whites, with the support of the Serbian army, moved to shut down all opposition. They attacked Green villages, looted and burned, stole livestock, took hostages, imprisoned the opposition and, on occasion, executed political prisoners without trial. Armed by the Italians, who wanted to check the territorial ambitions of the Serbs to further their own imperialist aims in the Balkans, the Greens retaliated in kind.13
In the wake of years of war, occupation and civil strife, the population began to starve. The Austro-Hungarian invaders had swept the land clean of livestock and food. Nor could the countryside sustain any significant agriculture to help it recover. It was a “wilderness of stones”, remarked two unhappy wayfarers. “Imagine a vast sea, storm-tossed into huge waves, and then suddenly solidified into a stony mass.”14 Into a country racked by war and threatened with famine arrived two groups – Allied observers sent to investigate the conditions on the ground at the behest of the Paris Peace Conference and a handful of humanitarian workers. There was also a single tourist – Flora.
At the beginning of 1919 a small unit of the American Red Cross reached the rocky shores of Montenegro, charged with providing much needed emergency relief. In the weeks and months that followed they took over the solitary hospital in the country and set up three more in the major towns. They opened soup kitchens and distributed clothing, ran workshops and sent out district nurses into the villages. The director, Canadian Henry Rushton Fairclough, toadied to Montenegro’s Serb governors. Perhaps because he proved himself so uncritical, the Serbs at least allowed his unit to pursue their valuable work, something that they refused to do with other – presumably less accepting – humanitarian organizations, which they unceremoniously ejected from the country.
Unlike Fairclough, the few Allied observers charged with reporting to the Peace Conference were appalled by what they saw. One, Captain James Bruce, the balding, assistant military attaché to the US embassy in Rome, arrived on 1st February. Already in Montenegro was another American, intelligence officer Major Charles Wellington Fur
long. From Cambridge, Massachusetts, forty-four-year-old Furlong was clean-shaven and seemingly bookish, an appearance which belied his reputation as a “dashing near-legend”, gained from his multifaceted career as an “explorer, writer, painter, soldier, ethnologist and lecturer”.15 Before the war he had led expeditions into Saharan Africa and South America. He was also a champion bull-rider.
Bruce had not met Furlong previously, but he surmised that his remit was much the same as his, “to observe, report and stay alive”. “As soon as it was found that I had come to hear both sides of the question obstacles were put in my path,” wrote the normally mild-mannered Furlong angrily. In the weeks that followed they were harried, harassed and hounded by Andrija Radović, who was now the Montenegrin premier, and his men. Finally, after clumsy attempts were made on their lives, Bruce fled the country. Furlong remained behind. Other Allied observers, including the official British representative of the Peace Conference, Count de Salis, were treated similarly.16 Soon their reports reached the ears of the Western press. “The Annihilation of a Nation”, shouted one headline, while articles decrying the “Martyrdom of Montenegro” appeared in leading journals.17
“To read the English papers one would suppose that the whole of Montenegro is writhing under the oppression of a Serbian Army which has invaded it by force,” wrote Flora heatedly in an article, ‘A Word for Serbia’, intended to contradict what she firmly believed was unwarranted anti-Serbian bias in the press. She had written it after travelling the length of Montenegro in the late spring of 1919, visiting villages and towns en route. By then, most of the insurgents who had led the Green rebellion were dead, imprisoned or taking refuge in the mountains. And she could see that far from everyone was unhappy with the new regime. Large sections of the population, particularly the town-dwellers, were broadly satisfied with the new order. Although she acknowledged that there was still much internal unrest in the country, she put it down to peasant bloody-mindedness. “The fact of the matter is that in some of the outlying villages in Montenegro the peasants… are ‘agin the government’ on principle, whatever that government may be,” she argued. “These are not the majority of the population, who, being the same blood as the Serbs, wish to be incorporated with Serbia.”18
“My first meeting with Lieut. Flora Sandes was on a troop-laden Serbian army truck in the lonely mountain fastnesses of Montenegro,” wrote Charles Furlong.19 The intelligence officer had been walking down an empty, unpaved road in the grey, rugged mountains above Kotor when he had heard the rumble of army trucks behind him. He had moved over to the side to allow them to pass. “Would you like a lift?” shouted a female voice as the lead truck slowed alongside him. He looked up to see Flora gazing curiously at him out of the truck window.
Earlier that evening she had jumped at the chance to accompany the army on a mission designed to quell a village uprising. She wrote about it later in her article, in an anecdote chosen to argue away the unrest. “One evening when I was staying in a village in Montenegro, I saw a company of Montenegrin soldiers in the Serbian Army coming down the road,” she recalled. “Where are you going?” she had asked them, in the hope that it was somewhere exciting. “We’re off to punish a rebel village which won’t lay down their arms,” they replied, as Flora’s face brightened. When they invited her to join them, she squeezed in alongside them, hoping “to see the fun”.
The reddening sun was setting over the violet-shaded mountains by the time they reached the outskirts of the isolated village. Flora, Furlong and three officers walked cautiously towards the cluster of silent, stone houses. Then, in the gloom, they spotted the shadowy faces of a line of men hunched behind the shelter of a low stone wall. On top of the wall rested a line of rifles, pointed directly at them. “Sit down where you are!” barked one of the men. Flora and the men dropped to the ground. “We’re unarmed,” the officer in charge shouted across to them. “We’ve come to talk to you.” The men whispered a hurried discussion behind the wall. Then they stood up. First they invited the officer to meet the head man. Next they extended the invitation to Flora, Furlong and the other officers. “The entire male population of the village – about twenty – then left their stone wall, and we all shook hands and expressed our mutual pleasure at meeting,” wrote Flora incredulously.
The conference began in earnest. “You must put down your arms. You can’t defy the whole Serbian army. If you disarm no one will harm you,” the officers argued. The villagers shook their heads. “If we do what you say, your army will steal all our cattle,” the villagers insisted. At long last, after darkness had descended on the village and Flora’s attention had drifted, they reached “some kind of compromise”. The villagers handed over their weapons to the Serbian officers, who stacked them in the back of one of the trucks. When the vehicles drove off into the night, Flora and Furlong remained behind in the company of the villagers, two of whom had offered to show them the way through the mountains to Kotor. During their long walk the next day, they confided to them their reason for handing over their weapons. “Tomorrow we’ll be given newer and better ones by the Italians,” they said.20
In the days that followed Flora charged about Montenegro. She wandered through the narrow, twisting streets of the port town of Kotor. She posed in Serbian uniform for Furlong, an accomplished photographer, and also had her photograph taken in full Montenegrin (male) dress. She attended a ball in Cetinje, the former capital, and was much impressed that the “decorations consisted principally of loaded rifles”. When a lorry arrived in the town riddled with bullets, she jumped in alongside the driver – a Montenegrin in the Serbian army, she noted meaningfully – in pursuit of the insurgents who had fired at it. Later she travelled to the southernmost tip of Montenegro to visit Lake Scutari. There, she “came down in a sea plane, which was left a total wreck… whilst a French destroyer and a company of Serbs patrolled sea and land looking for us.” When her leave was finally up, she set off back to Belgrade through the heart of Serbia. “I got back from that six weeks’ trip,” she concluded, “feeling that whatever else life might be, it was never dull.”21
The Serbia that Flora travelled through on her return from Montenegro was deeply scarred by years of war and occupation. She hitched lifts over muddy, shell-pitted roads, past the skeletal remains of horses, donkeys and oxen, broken trucks and abandoned ammunition.22 Although a monumental amount of reconstruction remained to be done, there were also signs that conditions were slowly beginning to improve. She saw fields that were green with crops and she was able to travel along the large stretches of the railways that had been mended.
As she had moved through the south of the country, Flora would have also passed barbed-wire-enclosed camps in which some seventy-seven thousand dispirited, war-weary Bulgarians had been interned. After years of war and the brutal treatment of their countrymen by the Bulgarian occupation force, the Serbs were in no mood to treat their former enemy humanely. Instead, they left them to freeze and starve in a country that had sufficient food to feed them.23
Throughout the autumn, winter and spring, the sick had been brought in convoys to the Scottish Women’s Hospital Unit based in Vranja. With every passing week the prisoners grew weaker. “It often happened that they literally died on the doorstep, in the waiting room or within an hour of coming to us,” Dr Emslie added angrily. When she attempted to intercede on their behalf, she was opposed at every turn by Serbian officials. “Gospođica [Miss] Doctor,” one told her, “you do not understand how we feel; these Bulgars ought to suffer.” “If you do nothing to improve their conditions, you’ll have an outbreak of typhus on your hands that will threaten more than just them,” she responded angrily.24
The first sporadic cases of typhus had appeared, as if on cue, in December 1918. By February the disease was raging through the Bulgarian camps in epidemic proportions: the wards of every hospital across the south of the country were full of delirious patients and cases were appearing in each major town in Serbia. In a smaller-scale rep
etition of the epidemic of early 1915, the staff of the British units once again began to contract the disease. There was one death, nurse Violet Fraser of the Serbian Relief Fund, who had been attempting to keep Bulgarian prisoners alive by running a soup kitchen for them in the village of Predejane, south-east of Leskovac.25 By May the epidemic was over. In early June, those still alive in the Bulgarian POW camps were set free to stagger home across the border.26
Flora was away on her travels at the end of April when the official list of military promotions was published. It was extensive. Years of war had left the Serbian army bereft of skilled officers while the simmering conflict with Italy and unrest in the new territories meant the country remained on a war footing. In an attempt to fill the many gaps in the ranks, all sergeant majors who had been decorated were automatically promoted to second lieutenants, the first rank of officer class – all except Flora. On her return, her friends broke the news. She did her best to put on a brave face. “That’s all right,” she told them. “I had never expected it to be.” Still, those who knew her well could see how hurt she was by the omission. “It’s not fair,” they replied adamantly. “You should go to see the commandant.”
Bolstered by their support, she booked a meeting with the new battalion commandant, Beli Marković. At the appointed time she duly marched over to his office, stood to attention in front of him, and then let forth a torrent of hurt and grievance. “All my comrades have been promoted while I’ve been passed over,” she told him indignantly as her momentum built. “Either I’m a soldier or not. If I am, then why has a distinction been made? If I’m not, then you might as well demobilize me and let me go home. I’ve been in the army for nearly four years now. I’m fed up with it anyhow,” she told him crossly.
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 27
