In late January an abrupt notice appeared in the papers. “Miss Sandes has been lecturing throughout New South Wales and Queensland, but her director [Rose Venn Brown] has found it necessary to cancel the lectures in this and the western States, as Miss Sandes is due back in Serbia.”53 However, Flora appears to have been in no rush whatsoever to rejoin her regiment. She applied to the army, who were expecting her back in March, for an additional six months’ leave. With it duly granted – and declaring her occupation as “soldier” and her age as a relatively youthful thirty-eight (she was in reality forty-five) – she set sail on a round-the-world trip that encompassed Samoa, Honolulu, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. Finally, in June, she arrived back in England en route for Belgrade, tired and penniless but happy.
All the while relief work had continued apace across Serbia. With the onset of warmer weather the previous spring, Emily had turned her attentions from the soldiers’ canteen in the Gornji Grad to running the “Children’s Fresh Air Camp” at Mount Avala, ten miles south of the capital, with the assistance of a Major Simpson of the Salvation Army.54 Amelia was far from keen at the prospect of working alongside her. “I find that Miss Simmonds is to run a camp for three hundred poor children,” she wrote gloomily to her mother. “Everyone is doing children’s work, and I like soldiers much better.”55
Still, at the beginning of August she joined Emily at the camp. With the help of Miss Tibbets, a “pleasant, middle-aged Englishwoman”, and several German prisoners, they erected a dozen large tents, dining pavilions and a field kitchen on a hillside under some trees amid rolling, leafy countryside.56 On 4th August the first three hundred children arrived from Belgrade. “Oh, but it’s hot,” Amelia scribbled in a letter to her sister later that month. “Our days are very full; they begin at half-past six and end at nine, or so. I go down and superintend the children’s breakfast, nearly four hundred of them; then I dash up, and see that our breakfast is OK… Then I see who is sick, give out clothes, see about dinner and supper, and that the lanterns are lighted, and so forth.” Any children identified by Amelia as sick were handed over to Emily, who was also in charge of its small dispensary. A multitude of children arrived for her to check over. She had cases of toothache, whooping cough, measles and malaria, along with the ubiquitous problem of head lice.57 She sent the sickest down the slope to the nearby hospital camp run by the Girton and Newnham Unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.
The Unit had arrived in May from Salonika. They first established a small hospital in the centre of Belgrade while placing the bulk of their efforts and ambitions on their camp in Avala. With the help of the Serbian Relief Fund they planned to turn it into a flagship “rehabilitation colony” to provide orthopaedic treatment and occupational training for disabled soldiers. By June the women had erected a series of bell tents on a picturesque but muddy stretch of grassland and converted a number of wooden sheds into workshops. Once it was finished the camp could accommodate “half the disabled of Serbia”, wrote Francesca Wilson, a veteran of relief work among the Serbs. But sadly, she added, “not many came”.58
Francesca Wilson had travelled uncomfortably to Belgrade from central Serbia, where she had been working for the Serbian Relief Fund. Not only did her lorry keep breaking down on the rough, muddy roads, she had been travelling with Evelina Haverfield, and Evelina did not like her. “She was slender, dark and intense, and had a biting tongue,” Francesca commented later as she recalled the awkward silences and haughty contempt that Evelina had subjected her to. “I admired her extremely – in any case there was a kind of loneliness and vulnerability about her that would have made it impossible for me to dislike her. But unfortunately she hated me. She had a fine scorn of people who, like me, had had soft jobs in soft places [Corsica and Bizerte] with Serbs in their exile.”59
After her disagreement with Flora over the future focus of their relief efforts, Evelina had returned to Serbia in the spring of 1919 with money to open an orphanage. Francesca had met her as she was travelling, often with great hardship, through the country searching for a suitable site. In the autumn she finally decided to set up one in Bajina Bašta in mountainous, windswept western Serbia. The remote village appealed to her proclivity for discomfort. Not only was it over twenty miles from the nearest railway, it was also impossible to reach by car.60 Its isolation virtually guaranteed from the outset that she would have to run herself ragged to ensure the delivery of sufficient supplies. Nevertheless, by the onset of winter, with the help of a handful of staff and her partner Vera Holme, she had managed to house sixty abandoned children in one of its few two-storey buildings.61
Autumn was in the air when Emily and Amelia packed up the Children’s Fresh Air Camp on 6th October, in wooded countryside that was, by now, richly coloured with tints of red and orange. In the two months the camp had operated it had been a great success. Several hundred children had returned home with sun-browned faces, eager to tell their parents of their adventures and to show off the new clothes that Amelia had distributed to them. Although Amelia had continued to avow in her letters home that it was not work that she liked, she had thrown herself into it unreservedly, with relatively good grace. Her missives were soon littered with clumsy appeals, this time for children’s clothing. As she neared the end of her stay, she worked proudly among her chattering, excitable young charges, and was pleased to see them all looking “much better for their stay here”.62
The staff of the Girton and Newnham Unit remained behind in their adjacent camp, enjoying clear, brisk days outdoors. But within days, their rural idyll was shattered as the weather deteriorated. “It was foolish of the Serbs, who knew the climate, to have chosen this site,” criticized Dr Isabel Emslie following a visit. Disaster struck in the middle of the month. The winds rose, thunder rumbled and heavy rain began to whip their tents. As the storm raged overhead, a nearby ravine filled with water before spilling tons of mud onto their camp below, sweeping away wooden walls and tents. Amid the chaos, lightning struck and killed one of their patients, “a poor fellow with trench feet who was just looking forward to going home”.63
The storm was the final straw in what had been a slow process of disillusionment. The women had not been able to provide the orthopaedic treatment they had hoped to disabled soldiers and they had struggled with their Edinburgh-based organizing committee, which had steadfastly refused to sanction any of the alternative schemes they suggested.64 Above all, they were utterly fed up with dealing with Serbian officialdom. “It gradually dawned on us that the Serbs didn’t want us any more,” commented one of their doctors bitterly.65 With their camp in ruins, the women left Avala for good. They salvaged what they could of their equipment and joined the rest of their unit at their small hospital in the centre of Belgrade.
Theirs was now the sole unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in Serbia. In late September, Dr Emslie, the head of the Vranja Unit – who felt strongly that they were wanted by the Serbs – was left stunned when the “old committee ladies” ordered her to disband. After donating their equipment to a small civil hospital in the town, they closed their doors for the last time on 16th October.66
By the end of November Emily and Amelia were putting the finishing touches on their new project, the “American Free Canteen”, in a large room on the ground floor of an ornate but dilapidated former hotel directly across from Belgrade’s central station. The location, at least, was ideal for handing out tea and cigarettes to the shabby, tired soldiers, just discharged from the army, who were passing daily through Belgrade by train and boat. With the help of a number of POWs, Emily and Amelia had replaced the windows and doors, scrubbed and whitewashed it from top to bottom, and put in rough wooden benches and tables. By the time they had finished, the “very clean and cheerful” room was the only warm place where the near-penniless soldiers could sit without paying. Soon, the canteen was receiving between seven and eight hundred men per day.67
Within days of opening their doors, Emily
and Amelia were scrambling to secure the permissions they needed to turn an adjacent room into a centre for soldiers who arrived in the dead of night with nowhere to go. “The [railway] station is unheated,” explained Amelia in a letter to a donor. “And at four in the morning, the men are knocking at the door, begging to be let in out of the cold.” Over the weeks that followed they begged and borrowed socks, gloves and shirts from other relief missions to hand out to the ill-dressed men and, when the city authorities began to use the rooms of the hotel to house destitute families and soldiers waiting to be fitted with artificial limbs, they helped care for those who fell ill.68
By December, with their POWs hard at work alongside them, they were able to steal a few moments to stand back and gaze over their warm, busy rooms with pride. Soon Emily felt able to leave Amelia to oversee the operations. “There was not enough work for both of us,” she explained. “[The canteen] was entirely Amelia’s. I only helped her get it started and in running order.”69 When she was approached by Helen Scott Hay, the European Director of Nursing Services for the American Red Cross, to take charge of the repatriation of POWs in Dubrovnik on the Adriatic coast, she accepted. Although she must have baulked initially at the thought of working for the organization that had treated her so harshly, she knew that the work would be challenging and interesting, and that it would allow her to make a difference to the lives of the ragged and ill men who were streaming home via the port town after years in captivity.70 Recruiting Emily was nothing short of a coup for Miss Hay, who would have struggled to find anyone else with her combination of language and organizational skills. She had one further qualification that made her nearly unique – the Red Cross had decided to put her in charge of their efforts to combat typhus among the returning former prisoners, and Emily was immune.
On 26th January 1920 Emily caught the train to Dubrovnik. Although she knew that Amelia planned to keep the canteen open only until the onset of warmer weather at the end of March, she worried that she would push herself too hard. “Promise me you’ll return home for a rest in April,” Emily begged before leaving. “Don’t worry. You know me. I’ll be fine,” Amelia responded reassuringly. But in a letter to one of her many beleaguered but generous donors, Amelia admitted for the first time that she was feeling tired. “I shall be awfully glad to go home,” she wrote, “as I don’t think my powers of working are inexhaustible.”71
At quarter to four every morning Amelia dragged herself from her bed to the icy canteen kitchen downstairs. She lit the stove, made tea and, with the help of her soldiers, lugged the great can across the slippery, snow-covered road to the railway station. On the dim platform, she handed round steaming cups to the cold, exhausted soldiers who were waiting for the early-morning train. “I am very busy,” she scribbled home to a friend.
I also give cigarettes to the other soldiers on it, and, when I have them, socks, sweaters and shirts to the men who… are going home in old clothes, without coats or blankets… I also give cocoa or rice pudding to forty children in the house, look after the sick people, and am to run the kitchen for the invalided soldiers who spend a few days in Belgrade, seeing about artificial limbs… I have about seven hundred a day in the canteen, besides sleeping accommodations for about a hundred and fifty.72
Amelia had disregarded all of Emily’s admonitions to rest. She struggled on through the bitterly cold, sunless winter seemingly unable to turn down any request made of her, despite her growing fatigue. On Wednesday 11th February she fell ill. Assuming that it was simply another attack of malaria that would soon pass, she retreated to her bed in her room above the canteen, shivering with cold and fever. Six days later, suffering from pneumonia, she was brought in critical condition to the nearby hospital run by the Scottish Women. There she was nursed night and day, but the attacks of malaria she had suffered since 1917 had weakened her heart. On 22nd February she died from heart failure brought on by pneumonia. She was one of their last patients. The following month, their Edinburgh-based organizing committee ordered them to disband. With that order, five years of remarkable work for the Serbs fizzled to a depressing and anticlimactic end.73
A wire reached Emily in Dubrovnik telling her of her friend’s death. No doubt shocked to the very core at the news, she hurried back to spend early March packing away her possessions, closing the canteen and sorting out her financial affairs. She also spent long hours writing to Amelia’s mother and sister, trying to comfort them as best she could. “You have cause to be proud of Amelia,” she said. “Looking back, it seems to me that she somehow must have known, and was trying to get it all into the shortest space of time.”74 At her own request Amelia was buried in Belgrade.
A month later, on 21st March, Evelina Haverfield died following a battle with pneumonia in the village of Bajina Bašta. “My word did she love the Serbs and worked so hard for them to the very end,” wrote Dr Isabel Emslie. “She would go through anything in the way of hardship and did till the time of her death.”75
Few Allied women in Serbia had died so heroically. Although their irrational prejudices and, in some cases, unpleasant temperaments had sometimes made life a misery for those around them, their work had allowed them to transcend their own difficult and divisive characters while lending them a purpose that their leisured and privileged backgrounds had never hitherto been able to give them.
Chapter 17
Frontier Troops
1922
Throughout the war Flora’s British nationality had never been a problem. She had been allowed to enlist and serve in the army for its duration, and had been promoted time and again. Even when she had been forced to fight to be commissioned as an officer her sex and not her nationality had been at issue. But on her return to Serbia in September 1921, after a summer spent vacationing with her family in England, she found that for the first time her foreign status put her at a disadvantage. Conflict with Italy was no longer likely, and all “reserve” officers – those who had joined the army for the duration of the war, like Flora – had been demobilized. Only “regular” officers – those for whom the army was a career – could serve as vodniks, and to be a regular officer it was necessary to be a Serbian citizen.
Still, she had a choice. Those who did not wish to leave the army could join the Granična Trupa – the Frontier Troops – instead. And Flora did not wish to be demobilized. “I never loved anything so much in my life,” she said once of her time in the army.1 She duly applied to join and, in February of the following year, was sent to the village of Cavtat on the Adriatic coast, near Dubrovnik, to become vodnik of the Second Vod, Thirteenth Company, of the Frontier Troops in Dalmatia. There she was charged primarily with helping to tackle the roaring trade in “excellent” tobacco that was smuggled over the mountains from nearby Herzegovina and across the water from Italy.
Flora had heard that her vod would be composed largely of White Russians, opponents of the Bolsheviks who had been forced to flee their homeland in 1920. She had also been told that high-ranking ex-officers of the defeated Imperial Russian army would be expected to serve under her as her sergeants. Flora’s imagination ran wild as to what they would be like. “I had not previously met any Russians,” she wrote, “so pictured to myself getting some fat, old colonel as sergeant; probably with a bushy beard… and was, if anything, rather pleased at the idea of getting some of my own back by making him take a bit of exercise.”
Instead, when she stepped off the steamer that had carried her to the picturesque little bay at Cavtat, she was met by “a tall, clean-shaven young man, who stood at attention, and reported to me very correctly, but with a wicked and sarcastic twinkle in his eye.” The thirty-three-year-old Russian artillery colonel introduced himself to Flora as Yurie Yudenitch. “Heaven help me if I am going to be held responsible for that sergeant’s good behaviour for the next year or so,” thought Flora to herself, all the while wondering “if there were many more like him”.
And there were worse places that she could have been sent. A
s she was driven to her base of Mlin (now Mlini), to her left she looked out over the intense, azure blue of the Adriatic. To her right rose the rugged, scrub-covered peaks of the Dalmatian Alps, while fruit trees, palms and cypresses reached their branches upwards to the cloudless skies. Mlin too, she thought, with its rocky beaches and terracotta-roofed, tall stone houses, was “a lovely little village”.2
Despite her intriguing reception and the beauty of her surroundings, she found the first weeks difficult. Not only had she been separated from her many friends in Belgrade, she had also been put in charge of men who, she strongly suspected, resented her presence. For once, she was intimidated. “Some of the men,” she wrote, “were holding aloof and watching critically, or so it seemed to me.” She was intimidated most by Yurie. “[He] had more at the end of his little finger concerning military matters than I could ever have learnt in a lifetime,” commented Flora, who felt keenly that the former colonel must have found the obligation humiliating to have to “salute a lieutenant and take orders from him, or worst still, her.”
Not only did she feel friendless and lonely at first, she soon realized that she had been given a near impossible task. From Mlin, where she was quartered with her batman Ivan, four or five men and a Russian sergeant, Flora was expected to patrol an irregular shoreline from Cavtat to Zemun, a headland beyond Dubrovnik. In all she had been given between thirty and forty men, distributed between five bases, to defeat an army of smugglers, many of whom were peasant women who simply tied sheaves of tobacco under their layered petticoats. “It was like a blind kitten being put into a haystack full of rats, and being expected to distinguish itself,” explained Flora.3
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 29
