A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  Flora returned dejectedly to Orford, all the while turning over thoughts in her mind about how she could join the fray. Pining for army life, she wrote to Vera with a proposal that was more wistful than practicable. “What about you, Curly [Margaret Ker, who had worked for the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and Evelina Haverfield’s orphanage] and I going there as a unit complete with Morris Oxford car? Doesn’t that appeal to you? If we went on the side of the Riffs [the tribespeople] still better. I can add my motorboat which is still in Gruz [near Lapad] to the contingent, so we should be a mobile force by land or sea and could blow up a mole if we could find one (I don’t mean to infer that anything faster than the quadruped could escape). You can take command at sea, Curly of the armoured car, and I will lead the storming parties. Must dry up now and leave you to digest this.”6

  By 1926 Flora had abandoned all hope of invading Morocco. The Rif rebellion had been crushed by a combined Franco-Spanish expedition and fighting was nearly at an end. Instead she decided to decamp to a “villa” that Katherine had purchased in the village of Sremska Kamenica, fifty miles north-west of Belgrade, to write her second autobiography. The villa had “highly original arrangements”, wrote a later visitor, who found that she had to share it with numerous chickens, but its location in the rolling Fruška Gora hills more than compensated for any internal drawbacks.7 Flora could step out of the back door onto its wide veranda and look for miles across orchard- and vineyard-clad slopes down to the winding Danube River in the distance, with forested mountains to the west. And if the Arcadian surroundings became too oppressive she could travel to the busy shops, restaurants and cinemas of nearby Novi Sad, a prosperous former Austro-Hungarian town. She also enjoyed the company of the villa’s many guests and, at weekends, of Katherine.

  Writing her autobiography had, if anything, sharpened her nostalgia for the war. “Sometimes now, when playing family bridge for threepence a hundred in an English drawing room, the memory of those wild jolly nights comes over me, and I am lost in another world,” she wrote.

  So far away it all seems now that I wonder whether it was really myself, or only something I dreamt. Instead of the powdered nose of my partner I seem to be looking at the grizzled head and unshaven chin of the Commandant, and the scented drawing room suddenly fades away into the stone walls of a tiny hut lighted by a couple of candles stuck into bottles, and thick with tobacco smoke, where five or six officers and I sit crowded on bunks or camp stools. For evening dress, mud-stained, bloodstained khaki breeches and tunic, and for vanity bag a revolver. The camp table was covered by the thick brown folds of an army blanket, and before each was a pile of Serbian banknotes and gold, and a tumblerful of red wine. Then came a batman with another relay of little cups of the thick, sweet Turkish coffee, which he brought about every hour. But here comes a trim maid with tea, and I return to the prosaic drawing room with a start, and the realization that I am a “lady” now, not a “soldier and a man”; also that Serbian soil is resting lightly on the graves of many of those happy comrades I have been seeing in my dreams.8

  In May 1927 The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier was published to positive if not particularly widespread or prominent reviews. “Miss Sandes writes easily and agreeably,” commented the Times Literary Supplement. It was “quite good reading without the suggestion of offence”, added the Observer, while the Manchester Guardian observed that it was “an unpretentious book of a brave and amusing woman which carries conviction with every page”.9 Despite her reviews, Flora was bitterly disappointed with her sales figures and wrote lengthy correspondence to her publisher in the suspicion that they could have done more to promote it. However, with a public increasingly tired of hearing about the war and her fame starting to wane, it remained only a moderate success.

  Flora had written obliquely but affectionately about Yurie in the final pages of her autobiography, reticent about mixing a matter-of-fact account of life in the Serbian army with her growing fondness for her former sergeant. But he must have been at the forefront of her thoughts while she wrote her account, for a few months after she finished fifty-one-year-old Flora married Yurie, who was thirty-eight. This decision was not one that she would have taken lightly. She had not consciously chosen to stay single in her youth but the thought of a conventional English husband and conventional married life had held little appeal. Furthermore, her all-encompassing pursuit of adventure had long driven thoughts of settling down to the back of her mind. In her middle age she treasured her independence and her freedom to travel as much as she ever had, and she must have known that by entwining her life with Yurie’s for the first time in her adult life she would have to take another person’s wishes into account. But Yurie gave her the constant company she needed without ever suffocating her and, after five years together, the thought of life without him had become inconceivable. And for Yurie, who was just as adrift as Flora, marriage gave him a family again.

  The civil ceremony was held on 14th May in Boulogne-Billancourt in the western suburbs of Paris. The wedding was small and quiet – their limited budget would have stretched no further – but they smiled happily for the camera in their finery, Flora in a smart, pale suit and Yurie in an elegant, dark one, a white corsage pinned to his lapel. They booked themselves into a local hotel, the Hôtel Billancourt, and travelled into central Paris to celebrate. The French capital, they had decided, was as good a place as any to begin their married life. Flora was fluent in the language, it was relatively inexpensive and it was also seen as the most glamorous capital city in the world. It was the home of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Picasso and Matisse, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. It was where Josephine Baker electrified the audiences with her banana dance at the Folies-Bergère and where Coco Chanel revolutionized women’s clothing with her “little black dress”. It had a reputation for wild nightlife and wilder “maisons de rendez-vous” and was seen as modern, trendsetting and liberal. Above all it supported the largest White Russian community in the world – fifty thousand exiles in total – and it was therefore the closest thing that Yurie could get to home.10

  Flora – now Sandes-Yudenitch – and Yurie moved to a street in the heart of the White Russian district in Boulogne-Billancourt. Although the industrial suburb was far removed from the glamour of the centre, it offered a tight-knit community that was full of restaurants and shops advertising their services in Cyrillic lettering. It was also close to the Citröen and Renault factories that hired White Russians in their thousands, for what were little more than ill-paid jobs without prospects.

  Like most Russian exiles, Yurie was only able to find work as a “manouvrier” – unskilled labourer – most likely at one of the factories. Flora, who had declared herself “sans profession” at the time of their marriage, contributed her small army pension to their joint income while working at whatever jobs she could find. She returned to the secretarial work of her youth by spending hours “typing madly” and took on English pupils.11 Somewhat incongruously, she also became temporary matron to a troupe of Tiller Girls, young precision dancers from northern-English working-class backgrounds who were performing at the Folies-Bergère. The girls, known as “the Eight Extraordinary Dancers”, were housed at the “Reverend Cardew’s Home for Theatrical Ladies” in the heart of seamy Place Pigalle. The ageing reverend had turned his hand to maintaining the purity of his charges, after an eccentric career that had included fighting the native Métis population in Canada in the 1880s.12 He gave them a bed in a grey-painted dormitory, fed them bland, overcooked British food and placed middle-aged women like Flora in charge. She escorted them to and from the theatre and, under orders from Cardew to keep them on a tight leash, did her best to maintain discipline. While Flora’s opinion of the reverend is unknown, she had a liking for her charges. “I think she had a certain sympathy with them,” commented her grand-nephew Arthur Baker. “These were girls who were sticking their neck out and she kept them on the straight and narrow.”13

  After two years
of scraping an unsatisfactory living in Paris, Flora and Yurie settled on a new plan. They invested their savings in a second-hand Panhard, a luxury French passenger car, which they hoped would be at the heart of a taxi business that they planned to set up in Belgrade. On a hot, July day they rose early, strapped their luggage on the car and placed a cage carrying Thompson, their canary, in the back. After a drive that took them through the vineyards of eastern France, the hills of Alsace-Lorraine, the forests of Bavaria and the mountains of Austria, they arrived in Belgrade in August 1929.

  They had last left a parliamentary democracy; when they returned it was to a royal dictatorship. At the start of 1929, King Aleksandar, who had taken the throne upon his father’s death in 1921, had abruptly suspended the constitution and dissolved the parliament. The “6th January Dictatorship”, as it became known, had followed six months of political turmoil after the assassination, on 20th June 1928, of two Catholic Croatian parliamentary deputies by an Orthodox Montenegrin. Aleksandar had watched the Kingdom disintegrate around him in the fury that followed. Political, regional and religious hatreds, which were never far from the surface, began to escalate out of control. The Croats withdrew their deputies to Zagreb and, with parliament too splintered to run the country effectively, Aleksandar had stepped in forcefully.

  The forty-year-old king was not a natural dictator, either in inclination or ability. Bookish in appearance, shy and somewhat gauche, he was first and foremost a believer in the Yugoslav ideal, that the ties of language and cultural tradition meant that the South Slavs formed a natural national unit. Although he was also a believer in Greater Serbia to the extent that he thought it self-evident that the Serbs should take the lead in the governance of the country, he was not as fanatical as many.14 Still, to keep his country from disintegrating, he was willing to take whatever measures he deemed necessary.

  He focused his efforts on attempting to impose a sense of national identity on his people as “Yugoslavs”. One of his first decrees was to change the name of his divided and tumultuous country. The “Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes” – which emphasized the separate national blocs – became the collective “Kingdom of Yugoslavia”. Far less innocuous were his decrees banning political parties and giving the police new, draconian laws to use against political opponents.15 Although he arguably had good intentions, the impact of his orders was to give virtual carte blanche to the secret and military police who arrested and imprisoned members of political parties and ruthlessly attempted to crush all dissent. “I found [Macedonia] being run as a police state from Belgrade, with the Serb army everywhere as though it were an occupied country,” wrote Francesca Wilson in dismay when she revisited the country in 1929.16 The situation, if anything, was worse in Croatia. State brutality in turn generated recruits for the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) and prompted the formation of a sinister, ultra-nationalist Croatian organization with fascist undertones, the Ustaše (“Insurgents”), which began a campaign of violence and assassination directed against the Serbs.

  “[I have] a permanent incapacity to settle down to anything,” reflected Flora in frustration in 1926, as she placed the finishing touches on her autobiography.17 Although she had found some contentment alongside Yurie, Paris had been unable to offer them a permanent home. They both now placed great hopes on their move to Belgrade.

  In many respects, the Serbian capital fulfilled them. Flora was welcomed back by her many friends and began work as an English teacher at the “Anglo-Yugoslav Club”. Known colloquially as the “English Club”, it served as the busy social hub of the British colony. They also had many friends in common, including the President of the Club, Lilian Vidaković, and her daughter Mirjana (then known as “Cherry”), who recalls that Flora and Yurie spoke a “peculiar Serbian” to each other. Yurie too was ushered back into the fold of its large White Russian community. By 1931 they were well established in “our house”, as Flora proudly labelled it – a large white, modern building with a spacious porch that they rented in the residential neighbourhood of Pašino Brdo. It also sported a garden big enough for their considerable menagerie – Thompson the canary, Vaška the rabbit, Kiko and Winkle the Pekinese puppies, Ginty, a dog of indeterminate breed, and Flora’s pride and joy, a young Alsatian called Pat.

  For reasons unknown their taxi business does not appear to have been a success. By the early 1930s Yurie was instead working at “Auto Commando”, but Flora’s diaries – and her often indifferent attention to spelling – leave it unclear whether he was working at a taxi company of this name or in “Autokomanda”, a district of Belgrade. But what is clear is that, as the impact of the “Crash” of October 1929 devastated the largely agricultural Yugoslav economy, he worked long shifts for his employers, who made few allowances for lateness or illness.18 Still, with the added help of her small army pension, they made a comfortable if not luxurious living that, at the very least, allowed her to escape the domestic drudgery she so hated by hiring a live-in maid, Marica.

  Flora dutifully recorded the minutiae of their daily life in her diary. They enjoyed warm summer days in their garden and cold winter ones indoors in each other’s company. On Yurie’s free evenings they would travel into town to the cinema, or occasionally splash out on dinner. Flora marked dates that were important to her and Yurie in capitals – there was “RUSSIAN EASTER SUNDAY” and “RUSSIAN XMAS”, which they spent in the company of their mutual friends, “YURIE’S BIRTHDAY” on 4th July and “OUR WEDDING DAY” on 14th May.

  Although she had finally achieved a happy and relatively settled existence, Flora remained nostalgic for the war. She was made a reserve captain in September 1926, but her promotion only served to remind her how much she missed the contentment that she had found in the ranks of the army. She looked forward to the annual regimental Slava which gave her the chance to squeeze into her old uniform and she eagerly attended other veterans’ events.19 She was there when King Aleksandar unveiled a statue to the war dead at Šabac in northern Yugoslavia in 1934 and she held court at the Russian Cabaret alongside Katherine the following year on the occasion of the annual holiday to celebrate the “Reunion of the Allies”. A year later still, when six hundred British war veterans arrived in Salonika to attend a commemoration ceremony at the old British frontline, Flora travelled over three hundred miles south to join them. “She was charmingly courteous and supremely happy at meeting several old wartime friends,” wrote one British observer.20

  She also kept in touch with the many friends she had made among the members of the units who had worked in Serbia during the war. She sent them Christmas cards, postcards and the occasional letter, and attended the annual dinner in London of the “British Serbian Units” of the British Legion in 1925.21 But by the 1930s she fretted greatly at having lost contact with Emily. At the start of 1938, at an utter loss of how to find her, she addressed and posted a letter to “Emily Simmonds, American Nurse, USA”:

  Dear Simmonds: For the love of Mike if you ever get this letter write to me and say where and how you are. I once did get your address, in 1929, and then lost it again. I often think of you and how we’d never have survived the hospital at Kragujevatz and the gang there if we hadn’t had each other, and ditto Valjevo. Good pals are scarce in this world so now what about it. When I hear from you will write again with all the news. I’m married (10 years) to a Russian colonel and we have settled here – for our sins, but are very happy in spite of it. You wouldn’t know Belgrade or the Serbs now. Best luck for 1938 and all my love and when you get over the shock of hearing from me write pronto. Ever yours, Sandy.

  The letter wound its way eventually to American Red Cross headquarters, but the Red Cross too had lost touch with Emily by then.22

  At least Flora had the company of other British women who had made Serbia their home. She travelled out on occasion to Lake Bohinj, Slovenia to visit her friend Constance Dušmanić who, as Constance Rowan, had met her Serbian husband while smoking an illicit cigarett
e in the laundry of the Salonika-based unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. She saw others at social events at the English Club. Above all, she spent time with Katherine, who by now was simply “Doc” to her.

  “It is early yet, only eight a.m., but already work is in full swing in the outpatients department,” wrote Flora in 1926, in an article published by the Save the Children Fund describing the work at Katherine’s hospital. “The big waiting room is crowded to overflowing, and still every minute brings some new arrival… Many have travelled all night by train from some distant part of the country; more have been, since dawn, jolting over the rough roads in a bullock wagon; more still have come on foot from some outlying villages; but, one and all, they await their turn, unhurried and uncomplaining, with that patience characteristic of the Serb.”23

  By the mid-1920s the hospital had treated nearly sixty thousand children, whose care Katherine had funded largely by voluntary contributions.24 Those who visited it were impressed with what they saw. “Everything seemed to be running with extraordinary efficiency and yet with a kind of miraculous ease,” praised Francesca Wilson. “Everyone obeyed Dr MacPhail but she was always quiet and relaxed and seemed to make no effort. It was natural that the nurses and the children and the anxious peasants who brought them should obey her but what was strange was that the Serb doctors and officials obeyed her too, they who had never before taken orders from a woman.”25 But by 1926, with ever-decreasing donations, she was barely keeping her hospital afloat. Flora, via her article, was one of many who stepped in to help. Others appealed for funds in the British press.26 Their joint campaign raised enough to keep her hospital going until 1931, when her hospital finally received full official recognition and, with it, governmental funding.