A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  The story behind the arrival of Flora’s White Russians was one of almost unimaginable tragedy. By the autumn of 1920 the men of the anti-Bolshevik White Army had suffered defeat after defeat at the hands of the communist Red Army until they had been driven to the Crimean peninsula at the far reaches of Russian territory. With the Bolsheviks poised to hurl themselves on the cornered Whites, an assortment of Allied and Russian ships rushed to evacuate a mass of terrified refugees and bedraggled, defeated soldiers. Nearly one hundred and fifty thousand were taken first to Constantinople. The majority were then sent to camps in French-occupied Gallipoli, including twenty-five thousand White Russian officers and soldiers, among them Flora’s sergeants.4

  In 1921, after a winter of hunger and disease, the camps across Turkey began to empty as the refugees found homes in the capitals of Europe. Thirty thousand alone – many of them teachers, doctors, engineers and professional soldiers – were accepted by the Serbian government.5 As they embarked on their new lives, they were haunted by the thoughts of what had become of the families they had been forced to leave behind. Those from aristocratic and privileged backgrounds suspected that, at best, they would face a life of penury and hardship and, at worst, they would be subjected to the same sort of savagery that had led to the brutal assassination of the Romanov royal family.

  Flora had her hands full managing her Russians. Although they were a “rackety company”, she also had great sympathy for them. “They were torn with anxiety about their families left behind in Russia, and were, besides, badly equipped and badly fed,” she commented. She also implied they drank heavily. “Money was given in lieu of rations, so that it was no wonder that they sometimes tried to forget their troubles.” Despite her difficult start, Flora was happy to report within weeks they had all become “good friends”. “We all shook down,” she explained.6 And she returned their friendship and loyalty as only she could. Soon she had bales of clothes arriving not just for her vod but for her entire company.7

  Of all of her men, she got on best with Yurie. By the early summer she was spending increasing amounts of time in the company of her polished, educated and handsome young sergeant. She was staggered by what she heard of his experiences. He was the son of a state advisor. His well-off family had sent him to a prestigious military college in St Petersburg where he had graduated with first-class honours. Athletic, hard-working and bright, he had risen rapidly through the ranks. In July 1914 the then twenty-six-year-old lieutenant had marched off to battle against the Austro-German army. The following month, in East Prussia, he was grievously wounded by a grenade in battle. He was later awarded the Order of St Vladimir for courage, which must have been scant recompense for the year he spent making a painfully slow recovery in hospital, so grave were his injuries. In 1916 he was finally able to return to the front as a commander of anti-air forces. Two years later, after the Revolution that swept the Bolsheviks into power, he was one of many ex-Imperial Russian army officers to join the White Army. Throughout 1919 and 1920, as part of the Artillery Division, he survived a continuous series of battles until he was evacuated from the Crimea. On 22nd November 1920 he arrived in Gallipoli, tired, exhausted and traumatized by his experiences. His aristocratic wife Elena and baby daughter Natalie had been unable to escape. He certainly knew that he would never see them again. It is also possible that he never knew what fate met them.8

  Flora had at first, as the “new broom”, thrown herself wholeheartedly into the task of catching a “real smuggler”. She had spent every night for over a week perched halfway down a cliff overlooking a secluded bay with one of her Russians – almost certainly Yurie – who politely refrained from pointing out the utter futility of the exercise. “We… never got the sniff of a smuggler’s lair or hide,” she wrote dejectedly. From that point on she resigned herself to doing the only things that she could. She went through the motions of searching for ever-elusive smugglers, wrote a report to her captain every fortnight, and visited her men weekly at their posts, often rowing out to see them in her rowing boat, which she had promptly christened “Blighty”.9

  At weekends she would dash the seven miles north to the walled town of Dubrovnik in the company of Yurie and her Russians. As evening descended they walked through the maze of narrow streets, piled into restaurants and sat out in cafés in the soft heat, as swifts screamed and raced overhead. “I just slept at the hotel,” she scribbled happily to her friend Vera Holme of her exploits one night, “and not very much of that as I make up there for lonely evenings in Mlin, I got carried off by force to the Ruski Dom [Russian Invalids “Club”, for disabled war veterans] on Sunday evening about 11 p.m., drank until 3 a.m., then slipped away to leave them at it.”10

  It was, by and large, a happy summer, spent in the increasingly warm friendship of her new colleagues, along the rocky, sun-drenched shores of the clear, blue Adriatic. But content as she often was, she suffered severely with her men from poor provisioning. “The shortage of food here is growing worse, I only get a square feed when I go into Dubrovnik,” she complained to Vera. And there were the flies to contend with in the sticky heat of summer. “What did you say kept [them] away?” she asked her. “They won’t let me sleep now, please drop me a line.”11

  She also pined for British company. In Belgrade, the British “colony” had always been on hand. In Mlin, she had no one even to speak English with. When reports reached her in August that a ship had anchored off Dubrovnik carrying the First Lord of the Admiralty, Viscount Arthur Lee, Flora duly dashed over to introduce herself to him. “She came into his cabin; a most military figure with short grey hair, in Serbian uniform with sword, revolver, spurs and the smartest of salutes and clicking of heels,” recorded his wife. “[Arthur] found her very interesting, and she seemed much gratified at being ‘given an audience by a British cabinet minister’. She then saluted again and returned to her post on the mountain frontier.”12

  Flora’s desire for British company would have been sharpened all the more by her knowledge that she had missed Emily by months and Katherine by weeks. By a strange turn of coincidence, both women had also worked in Dubrovnik in the early months following the war. At the end of January 1920 Emily had taken charge of American Red Cross efforts to combat typhus, particularly among former POWs. She organized hospitals and took charge of a disinfecting station where men were stripped, shaved and scrubbed before being handed clean, lice-free clothes from a warehouse she also ran. Over the course of the following months twenty-seven thousand men passed through her capable hands. When her efforts and the onset of warmer weather diminished the threat from the louse-borne disease, she took charge of the distribution of relief in the barren mountains of Dalmatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina. Finally, in October, when the American Red Cross withdrew from the region, she worked in conjunction with its non-Serbian speaking head, Major George Lyon, in ensuring the efficient transfer of their remaining supplies to hospitals and orphanages. He was full of praise for her. “Her duties frequently call[ed] her into conference with the highest officers of the Jugoslav government,” he wrote, “when her tact, ingenuity and persistence enabled her to obtain excellent results.”13 It was her final remit of any note in the Balkans. In December 1920 the modest, unassuming nurse sailed for home.

  In February 1920, just over a year after she had established Serbia’s first children’s hospital, Katherine opened a sanatorium in a borrowed villa in Lapad, a prosperous and leafy suburb of Dubrovnik. The convalescents were the dozens of children, many afflicted by tuberculosis, who crowded the wards of her “Anglo-Serbian Children’s Hospital”.14 Although she had since transferred them from the bug-infested barracks to a large, grey-stone house in central Belgrade, she was all too aware that, light and airy as it was, it was inadequate to provide the only known treatment – rest, healthy food, fresh air and, above all, sun – for a disease that would otherwise progressively twist and contort their young limbs and bodies. For that, she needed an open-air facility that she could use all year r
ound.

  Her first patients were driven down a long avenue of tall cypresses, through a set of wrought-iron gates, into two acres of garden in which the limestone building lay among geranium-lined terraces. Within its spacious grounds roughly forty-five children were cared for by an assortment of British and Slav nurses and workers, including Katherine’s sisters Annie and Isabel. “Every day a sister led a little band of children out through a postern door,” wrote a visitor, “down cobbled paths and steps, among semi-tropical trees and flowers, to the little bay, and there they bathed and basked naked in the sun.”15

  Just as Flora prepared to travel to nearby Mlin to join the Frontier Troops, Katherine was informed that the villa had to be returned to its original owner. In February 1922, after she had helped hundreds of pale, sickly children return to health, she sadly closed the doors for the final time and handed over the keys.16 Short-lived as the success was, it made her all the more determined to secure a permanent facility for such children.

  Towards the end of the summer, Flora was deeply troubled by widespread rumours that the Frontier Troops were to be disbanded and its men demobilized. So too was Yurie, who must have been acutely aware that demobilization would leave him without a home or a job, let alone prospects of furthering the military career to which he had devoted much of his life. When word reached them that volunteers were being sought for companies to guard the Albanian and Bulgarian frontiers against irregular forces, they seized upon them. They spent long hours deeply engrossed in conversation about putting together a unit. Yurie eagerly sounded out the men. “Most of them will volunteer,” he reported back to Flora, “but only on the condition that you’ll agree to take charge, and that I’ll be second-in-command.” “I’ll get some of the Salonika Front men together who were with me during the war,” Flora replied enthusiastically.17 But their fanciful musings of taking joint command of a “hand-picked company of devils, Russians and Serbs mixed” came crashing down about them with an order restricting Russians to the regular Frontier Troops.

  During the final week of October, Flora received the news she had been dreading. “Collect your men at headquarters in Cavtat,” she was ordered. Once there, she was told, they would all be handed their demobilization papers. So sudden was the news that, as she dashed along the coast that week to her outposts and hurriedly threw her belongings together, she had barely time to mull over the implications.

  On 31st October 1922, after presenting herself at headquarters with her men, Flora became a civilian after almost seven years in the army. She hardly knew where to begin. The thought of building a new life for herself and becoming an “ordinary woman” again filled her with dismay. “It was like losing everything at one fell swoop,” she wrote miserably, “and trying to find bearings again in another life and an entirely different world.”18 Demobilization must have turned Yurie cold with fear. Overnight he had become an unemployed refugee with few job prospects in a country with a war-ravaged economy. But by the time they were handed their papers – evidently unceremoniously – Flora and Yurie were inseparable friends, while their long hours of planning a jointly run unit had laid the groundwork for a decision they must have both taken at this time, to remain together after the war. When Flora made her way to Belgrade, it is almost certain that Yurie came with her.

  Flora’s first task in the capital was to buy herself some clothes. She peered dejectedly into windows and traipsed gloomily between shops, still dressed in Serbian uniform. As awkward as she felt, she retained enough of her sense of the absurd to be amused by the reactions that met her attempts. “I shall never forget one shop assistant’s amazement when I went in uniform to try on a hat!” she exclaimed.19 But when she returned home to put on her purchases, she felt almost ill as she looked in the mirror. “I felt neither fish nor flesh when I came out of the army,” she said sorrowfully. “The first time I put on women’s clothes I slunk through the streets.”20

  Just as difficult was remembering to behave as a woman. “For a long time, when walking down the street, I had to clench my hand to keep from saluting mechanically, and from taking off my cap when entering a house or restaurant,” she wrote. “It was impossible, at first, to remember not to click the heels together when introduced to anyone… nor to wait until I was asked instead of saying, ‘Come along, where shall we go tonight?’”21 And, in December, when she arrived by taxi at the British legation for the annual Christmas party, Katherine MacPhail watched in dismay as Flora gingerly lifted the hem of her borrowed evening gown and thrust an army-booted foot out the door. The British minister looked at Katherine’s horror-struck face and stepped in to the rescue. “Come on in, Sandes,” he told her with a smile. “It really doesn’t matter.”22

  Worse still, her discomfiture at her appearance was matched by that of her old comrades, who were shocked to see the former “Mr Lieutenant” in hats and dresses. “Run upstairs and find my old uniform,” her former commander asked his wife when Flora visited him in the south of the country a few months later. “I can’t stand seeing Sandes wearing women’s clothes.”23 “I don’t know where I am with you nor how to talk to you, dressed like that,” he explained to Flora. “My metamorphosis… lost me all my old pals,” she reflected sorrowfully. “Though still friendly they were now quite different. Never again could it be quite the same. As I had long ago had occasion to notice, men are never quite so naturally themselves where there are women present, as when among themselves. Formerly they had been so used to me that I did not count.” She missed their company terribly. “It always seemed to me that men took life much more easily and straightforwardly than women,” she commented.24

  Peace came as little short of a calamity to many of the women who had worked in the Balkans. In war they had ably performed work that had until then been restricted to men. In so doing they had suffered – and enjoyed – hardship, danger and excitement. Difficult as their work had often been, it had given them a strong sense of purpose and had tasked their initiative to the limit of their abilities. It had also given them the sort of freedom that had been denied to them at home. Those who had wanted had cut their hair short, worn men’s clothing, smoked endless cigarettes and raced about the countryside to the despair of the heads of their units who struggled to keep their exuberance in check. Just as the war had lent them these hitherto unheard-of opportunities, peace took them just as suddenly away, as much for them as it had for Flora.

  They too found it difficult to adjust when they arrived home to find that their friends and families did not understand what they had experienced or accomplished in the Balkans. They had worked in spheres where their sex had been overlooked only to be forced on their return into traditional or domestic roles. Women doctors and surgeons who had proved themselves every bit as capable as their male counterparts found it near impossible to find work outside the fields of obstetrics and gynaecology, paediatrics or public health. One by one the London hospitals that had opened their doors to offer clinical training to women closed them again when they were no longer needed. And there were minor personal tragedies too, exemplified by that of Rose West from Scotland. The young, attractive head of Motor Transport for the American Unit, as able a mechanic as she was a driver, was forbidden by her family to own a car when she arrived home.25

  “It’s coming on me with a sort of cold horror,” scribbled Australian Olive Kelso King in a letter to her father as she contemplated her return home. “What shall I do then? Live in London, with all one’s interests in shops & theatres? Or in Sydney, going to teas & luncheons, playing tennis at the golf club, getting new dresses for the races, & always being gossiped about & disapproved of?”26 For many, there was no real answer.

  Part Three

  Chapter 18

  Interbellum

  1922–1941

  “I am not getting on at all happily in a perfectly respectable life and shall do something desperate soon,” scribbled Flora miserably to Vera in August 1925 from Orford, Suffolk. She had submitted unwillingly to
pleas by her family to stay put that summer, but life in the tranquil village did not suit her at all. “I am staying at present with a married sister here,” she told her. “There’s nothing in this world I should like better than to pay you a visit,” she added gloomily, “but I have promised to stay here.”1

  Neither was life as a civilian suiting her. She had spent the first three years after demobilization drifting restlessly between England and the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, often accompanied by Yurie. Her family at least uniformly approved of him, none more so than Betty, daughter of Flora’s sister Fanny. When the self-described “fat, spotty, thirteen-year-old” first met him, he immediately came to attention, clicked his heels and bowed. For making her feel important, she loved him from that moment forth.2

  Flora had enjoyed an idyllic few months with him in 1924 working at “Café Finish”, a picturesque waterfront café in Lapad, Dubrovnik. There they had acquired a joint pet, “Ginger” the dog, and a joint motorboat for “motorboat picnics”. But after they closed it that winter, she had returned to England with little idea what to do. She approached the Save the Children Fund for work as a lecturer and fund-raiser, apparently unsuccessfully, and began writing freelance articles but struggled to get them published.3

  Restless and bored of village life in Orford and with Yurie evidently back in Belgrade, Flora was thumbing unenthusiastically through the daily papers when her eyes came to a sudden stop at headlines announcing “Sharp Fighting in Morocco”. She avidly devoured reports of “Rifi Raids” – attacks by largely Berber tribespeople in a bid for self-determination against their Spanish and French colonial overlords – but kept her interest to herself.4 In July, without telling anyone, she slipped from her sister’s house across the Channel to Paris to ask the French military medical authorities to send her to the front as a nurse, confident that they could not refuse someone so uniquely qualified. To her dismay, they brushed her off. “We’re only sending French nurses,” they told her flatly.5