With its future assured, Katherine made arrangements to sell her hospital to the government. She planned, with the proceeds, to build the convalescent facility for children with tuberculosis that she had dreamt of since 1922, when she had been forced to close her small home for them in Lapad. Eleven years later, the cornerstone of the building was laid in Kamenica on the crest of a hill overlooking the Danube. Overseeing the work was Vasa Srdić, a half-Serbian, half-Scottish agricultural engineer – known to everyone as “Mac” – whom, as a young army officer, Katherine had first met in Lapad. Although it remained unsaid, it was widely assumed by those who knew them that their relationship was like that of “husband and wife”.27
By the summer of 1934, the hospital had been built according to her specifications. As the final preparations were made to admit her first patients, Katherine walked proudly through the double doors of the one-storey, cream-stucco building into the bright, spacious hall, past a centrepiece mosaic of a red “lion rampant” design, akin to the Royal Standard of Scotland, which had been worked into the shiny parquet floor. She gave the three wings of the hospital a final inspection and stepped out into the spacious terrace, which was large enough to allow the children to be wheeled outside in their beds to sit in the sun.
Katherine spent the summer months preparing for the official opening of the “Anglo-Yugoslav Children’s Sanatorium for Tubercular Disease of the Bones and Joints”, set for 23rd September, all the while caring for her first thirty patients, who had been admitted on 1st August. She secured the patronage of Queen Marie, the wife of King Aleksandar, issued invitations, oversaw the planting of flower beds and, as the date neared, decorated the wards.28 In the days before the opening her guests descended upon Belgrade, including Vera Holme and several other veterans of relief work who had sailed from Britain to attend. On Saturday 22nd September Flora and Katherine travelled into town to meet fifteen of them at Belgrade’s Park Hotel for an emotional and joyous reunion. Many had not seen each other for years. It was a “jolly party” enthused Vera in her diary. “[We had] a smoke and a grand crack.”29
At ten o’clock the following morning, the first of the cars and horse-drawn cabs carrying Katherine’s guests parked outside her hospital, which had been decorated with greenery and the entwined flags of Yugoslavia and the United Kingdom. They were ushered up the pathway through the entrance into the central hall. Over the course of the morning, Flora – dressed in the crisp white tunic and cap of a Serbian captain – joined the other British guests alongside the British minister, representatives of the Orthodox Church, the royal family, the medical profession and local authorities. After a formal ceremony, the guests were taken on a tour of the facilities and to meet the excited young patients who were lying in their beds in the warm sun on the terrace.30 The opening was a triumph, the importance of which was considerably understated by Flora in her diary. “Big crowd,” she commented simply.31 But absent among them was Queen Marie, who was on her way to Marseilles to join her husband for a state visit. Also en route to Marseilles was Vlado Chernozemski, a Bulgarian assassin who was travelling there at the joint behest of IMRO and the Ustaše.
Content as she was with her life with Yurie in Belgrade, Flora’s urge to travel remained as strong as ever. In the 1930s, she returned frequently to both the Dalmatian coast and England, sometimes sharing her adventures with a friend but rarely, according to her patchy diaries, with Yurie. Perhaps he had to work, perhaps he did not trust his increasingly indifferent health or perhaps he simply had no such peripatetic inclinations. Whatever the reason, Flora missed him terribly on such trips. “Felt horrible leaving him standing lonely on the quay,” she wrote as she set out in July 1936 for London. “Wish he was here,” she scribbled plaintively on another occasion when she found herself away on his birthday.32
If no friend was available she would set out on her own. “When one travels alone one gets more of the ‘human interest’,” she concluded during one such journey from Belgrade to the Dalmatian coast in August 1931. There was plenty such interest on this particular trip, all jotted carefully and in unusual detail in her diary. “One passenger was in a high fever and was flopping about with chattering teeth,” recorded Flora of a bus trip between Dubrovnik and Cavtat, where she had travelled to revisit the place she had first met Yurie. “I diagnosed it as either very bad malaria or else smallpox, and was relieved when he got out before he was sick over me.” The following day, she caught a steamer to Prčanj, Montenegro where she visited the Ruski Dom, a home for war-disabled Russians. “Was ushered into a room where two men were having lunch,” she wrote. “One a good looking man about 38 simply clad in a pair of scanty bathing shorts, and the other an old fellow in his shirt and panties, much to their embarrassment poor things, in fact they couldn’t have looked more alarmed if I’d been a man-eating tiger.” She felt keenly at their discomfiture. “I don’t know which are the more pathetic, the young ones whose lives are done for, or the old chaps ending their days in a home, they must get so bored with each other always, and they are all incurable either from wounds or old age.” There were lighter moments too, which gave free rein to her finely tuned sense of the ridiculous. “The waiter asked if I preferred [a] cheese or sausage sandwich,” wrote Flora of an encounter that had amused her greatly in Budva, “and when I said cheese, replied pleasantly that there was no cheese.”33
The cameras of Fox Movietone News were fixed on King Aleksandar as he arrived at the Old Port of Marseilles just before four in the afternoon on 9th October 1934. He had arrived alone on the light cruiser Dubrovnik, Queen Marie having decided to travel instead by train to the southern French city to meet him. They filmed his open-topped car as it drove him, at walking pace, behind a mounted guard of honour over the cobbled streets and into one of the main thoroughfares. One of the cameramen recorded him waving to the massed crowds. He then jogged ahead to film the visit from a different angle. His camera was rolling as Vlado Chernozemski broke through the crowds and a cordon of French troops, leapt on the running board of the car and fired shots from a Mauser pistol into the King’s heart and liver.34
The news of Aleksandar’s murder stunned the whole of Yugoslavia. For a brief moment, in the outpouring of grief that swept the country, he achieved in death what he had failed to in life, the unification of his people as “Yugoslavs”.35 Equally shaken by the news were the many British women and men who had developed genuine affection for him during the war for the great courtesy he had unfailingly showed them. Many, in the days before television, would have watched in silent horror at the cinema as the newsreel footage of the assassination flickered across the screen before them.
Flora’s diary entry on the day – “King Alexander assassinated at Marseilles” – was typically factual and unembellished, but she was shocked and saddened enough at the news to insist on paying her respects by seeing him lying in state in Belgrade’s National Cathedral on 17th October.36 His funeral cortège was watched the following morning by “immense and utterly silent crowds”. Following a service at the Cathedral, the cadets of the military academy led the procession. Behind them marched soldiers of every regiment of the Yugoslav army, followed by detachments of the French, British, Greek, Turkish, Romanian and Czech armies. Then the elite holders of the Karađorđe Star for Bravery under Fire marched past. In their ranks was Flora in her captain’s uniform. “I walked in the procession with the other Kara George Stars,” she scribbled later. “Had to leave home very early. We met near Kalemegdan, stood for hours, then processed. Very fine procession.”
The gun carriage carrying Aleksandar’s coffin, covered by the Royal Standard of Yugoslavia, followed near the end of the long cortège. Behind it walked Queen Marie draped in mourning black alongside her eleven-year-old son Petar, who had become king upon the death of his father. Paying their respects a few steps back were the official representatives of foreign governments. Among them, in the grey-green and crimson uniform of the Reichswehr, walked a symbol of the growing fasc
ist menace to Europe – General Hermann Göring.37
The death of King Aleksandar marked the beginning of the end of the attempt to turn his heterogeneous subjects into “Yugoslavs”. With the appointment of Prince Pavle (Paul), a cousin of Aleksandar’s, as chief regent until the young king came of age, it also marked a shift away from the worst abuses of naked dictatorship. Under the more liberal hand of Pavle’s rule, the press was allowed to report more freely and political parties permitted to resume their activities.38 But the peace and prosperity that might have otherwise followed in the wake of this liberalization were threatened by the sinister motives of the fascist regimes in Germany and Italy, both of which had a view to exploiting Yugoslavia’s weaknesses.
Hitler’s ambitions were fundamentally economic. He hoped to bind the Yugoslav economy closely to Germany’s, thereby guaranteeing him access to the country’s rich agricultural and mineral resources. By the late 1930s he had largely succeeded, having offered agreements to supply the industrial goods that Yugoslavia could ill afford in exchange for the raw materials he needed for Germany’s armaments industry.39 The aim of Mussolini’s Italy was instead political, to gain influence over the Adriatic coast by exploiting ethnic tension between Serbs and Croats. It duly nurtured, financed, armed and trained Croatian separatist extremists, among them the murderous Ustaše.
“The governments of Japan, Germany and Italy consider it a prerequisite of a lasting peace that every nation of the world shall receive the space to which it is entitled,” stated the disingenuous preamble to the Tripartite Pact. “It is furthermore the desire of the three governments to extend cooperation to nations… for the purpose of realizing their ultimate object, world peace…” In reality, the Pact, which was presented by the Nazis to the governments of central Europe and the Balkans for signature in the autumn of 1940, was designed to prostrate them into the political, economic and military submission that Hitler required before he could mass his troops for an invasion of the Soviet Union. Behind its rhetorical flourishes lay the threat that, should they refuse to sign, they would instead be overrun by the mechanized forces of the German army.
The first to acquiesce to the Pact was Germany’s neighbour Hungary, on 20th November, followed that week by Romania and Slovakia. Hitler then turned his attention to the governments of Yugoslavia and Bulgaria, who had looked on grimly as he had “protected” the new signatories by pouring German troops into their territory. On 27th November he invited the Yugoslav foreign minister to Germany. There he used a mixture of threats and inducements to encourage him to sign. He reminded him that most of his country’s trade was with Germany, all the while offering the kind of terms that none of the earlier signatories had been presented with. He would guarantee the sanctity of Yugoslavia’s frontiers, and would present the country with the port of Salonika. He would neither ask for military assistance nor allow the passage of German troops through Yugoslav territory. The foreign minister would need solely to agree to suppress any anti-Axis activity and permit his territory to be used for the passage of German war material. Although the Yugoslavs saw these amendments to the terms as a “diplomatic triumph”, they looked in profound distaste at the Nazi regime and stalled for time in the forlorn hope that the changing fortunes of war would somehow turn in their favour.40
The echoes of the opening shots of the Second World War carried a profound sense of unease throughout Europe, even in countries distant from the approach of German jackboots. As the first months of the war had unfolded, the Serbs had watched with growing alarm as Poland, Denmark, Luxembourg, Holland, Belgium and Norway had fallen to the might of the German army. Then, in June 1940, they had heard in disbelief the news that France, their “heroic Ally of the last war”, had surrendered.41 That autumn Greece, their closest ally in the region, was invaded by Italy.
Life on the surface remained normal. The restaurants and cafés of Belgrade were crowded, there was plenty of food in the shops, the trams, buses and trains ran as usual and people went about their business as they had always done. But all that they could talk about was what would happen to their homeland. “We’ll be left alone like Switzerland and Sweden,” some stated optimistically. “Or invaded like Poland,” others responded grimly.42
By mid-February 1941, Hitler had had enough of Bulgarian and Yugoslav equivocations. He summoned the recalcitrant Yugoslav foreign minister and prime minister to Salzburg on 14th February and, in a four-hour conversation, urged them to sign the Pact. Yet again, they shuffled their feet evasively and stalled for time. At the same time, Hitler’s foreign minister, Ribbentrop, peremptorily informed King Boris of Bulgaria that if he refused to sign Germany would simply invade. On 1st March 1941, after Hitler had backed up the threat by massing thirteen German divisions on Bulgaria’s northern frontier, the King capitulated. On the same day Hitler poured his army into Bulgaria to take up positions along the frontier with Yugoslavia. Next, on 19th March, he gave Prince Pavle five days to sign or face invasion.43
The situation facing the Prince and his government was impossible. Yugoslavia now stood alone in south-eastern Europe and the Balkans. Its thousand-mile frontier was bordered by seven countries, all of which, with the exception of beleaguered Greece, were Axis signatories. The country was economically dependent upon Germany. It was also split, with the Croats strongly in favour of signing the Pact and the Serbs just as intransigently opposed. The army was equipped with obsolete weaponry, most of its ageing tanks were “quite useless” and it was led by brave but out-of-touch veterans of the First World War who trusted ox wagons more than motorized vehicles.44
As Hitler stepped up the pressure on Yugoslavia to sign the Pact, the Serbs’ desperate hopes of staying neutral gave way to a realization that he would force on them an unpalatable choice – sign the Pact and be forced into a shameful compromise with their hated enemy or refuse and face invasion. Neither were they under any illusion that their antiquated and ill-prepared armed forces stood any chance against columns of German panzers. They joked blackly about an imagined telephone call between Hitler and Prince Pavle. “Pavle, I need some more tanks,” Hitler said. “Can you let me have some of yours?” “Yes, of course,” replied Pavle. “At once, Adolf. How many do you want? One, two or three?”45
From the terrace of her hilltop hospital Katherine looked with a worried eye across the Danube to the flat Bačka plain that stretched seemingly endlessly northwards towards German-occupied Hungary. She had watched anxiously through the autumn and winter of 1940 as the Yugoslav army dug trenches and built gun emplacements in the surrounding countryside, twenty of which were in the immediate vicinity. “If we’re attacked, the children won’t stand a chance,” she thought to herself. In vain she had visited the Ministry of Health to ask that they make plans for their evacuation. By February 1941 she was fraught with worry. At the end of the month, sensing that every passing day was bringing the country closer to war, she knew she would have to take the matter into her own hands. With a heavy heart she put her approximately one hundred and fifteen young patients in plaster and sent them home. “Take them to villages in the mountains,” she told their parents. “They should be safe there.” Next she sent her staff home on indefinite leave. She remained behind with Alice Murphy, her half-Russian, half-English hospital secretary, confident that the two of them could make their escape in time.46
By March the ranks of the English Club had noticeably thinned. For weeks Flora had listened as others at the Club deliberated endlessly about what they should do. Many in the end had obeyed the Minister, Ronald Campbell, when he quietly requested their evacuation.47 A number, among them several women who had met their Serbian husbands whilst working for British units in the First World War, decided to remain.48 For Flora, there was no debate. “I’m staying too,” she avowed to anyone who asked, her spirit of defiance undiminished. But as much as anything, the thought of what the upheaval would do to Yurie’s health made a move back to England inconceivable. Throughout the 1930s he had suffered from
attacks of malaria that left him bedridden, sometimes for days on end. By 1940, aged only fifty-two, he was also suffering from blood pressure so high that, at times, he struggled for breath at the least exertion.
The precarious state of his health had been brought home to Flora during a disastrous holiday. In August 1940 they had set aside all thoughts of war to travel back together to their beloved Dalmatian coast. First they spent a few happy days in and around Dubrovnik. They visited Cavtat, where they had first met eighteen years before and sat reminiscing in Lapad, where they overlooked the former site of Café Finish. Then, after they had travelled up the coast by steamer to Makarska to take a room in a quiet pension, he became ill. “Yurie got a chill late in afternoon, and was bad in the night, couldn’t breathe, or sleep,” scribbled Flora in her diary a week into their trip. Three days later she called a doctor. His breath must have caught in his throat when he took the reading from his arm. “Yurie’s B.P. 280, and he must not be in the sun or drink anything alcoholic. Seaside not good place for him,” she commented anxiously after the consultation. Two days later she cut their holiday short. “We think Yurie had better come home,” she wrote sadly, as she vowed to herself to live quietly with him in the hope that his health would stabilize.49
The tension in the air was almost palpable by the middle of March 1941. Although the government had publicly divulged not a word of Hitler’s ultimatum, the Serbs sensed the growing crisis. In Kamenica, Katherine and Alice were joined nightly by the officers of the nearby batteries who came to listen in with them to the news from London.50 In Belgrade, more grey-green uniforms of the Yugoslav army appeared in the streets following a slow call-up of reserves while the authorities began to take half-hearted measures to prepare the capital for the eventuality of a German bombing raid. A few public shelters were hastily dug in parks and squares while householders were ordered to clear their attics of lumber and keep quantities of sand and water at hand. “What’s the point of all this? There are no military targets here,” they grumbled to each other but, under threat of fines, they complied with the edict.51
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 32
