On the morning of 25th March news broke that Yugoslavia had capitulated. In an atmosphere of “funereal gloom”, the Prime Minister and foreign minister had signed the Pact in front of Ribbentrop in Vienna. Across Belgrade grizzled, scarred veterans of the First World War sat silently in kafanas, heads bowed, weeping silently in shame and disbelief, while “passers-by slunk along with their eyes on the ground”.52 “We were… humiliated before the world,” wrote Lena Yovitchitch, a half-Serbian, half-English acquaintance of Flora’s.53 That evening, Katherine reported, not a single officer came to listen to the radio. “They were ashamed,” she wrote.54
Across Serbia, there were signs of growing fury. Children smashed the windows of their schools, cabinet ministers stepped down, civil servants resigned and Orthodox priests preached to their congregations that they must not allow their government to consign them to foreign domination. Peasants flooded towns and villages to protest the signing of the Pact while university students took to the streets with a refrain of “Down with the traitors!”55 “Everyone was simply sick,” wrote Flora in a letter to her sister Fanny. “The people said they would never be slaves, better death. When a special edition came out at two o’clock with the news of the definite signing everyone was in the streets simply snatching the papers from the boys and poring over them with curses… The kids in the schools all demonstrated and refused to learn their German lesson. One small boy pupil of mine told me all about it with great glee – that they hadn’t done any work at all… He said they’d sung patriotic songs all morning.”56
“Something seemed to be in the air,” commented Katherine. With a sense of unease, she had returned that day from Kamenica to the small flat she owned in Belgrade. The flat, down the hill from the busy intersection known as “London Crossing”, overlooked the Ministries of War and Internal Affairs. That night, Wednesday 26th March, she went to sleep as normal, but was suddenly wakened by noises from the street below. “In the stillness of the night I heard the tramp of soldiers and beneath my window I saw a small gathering of officers and men,” she wrote breathlessly.
At first I did not realize what was afoot until I heard the salute and the signal for action, “Long live King Peter” and the answer, “Long live the King”. The sentries guarding the ministries were then disarmed and a cordon of soldiers were placed across the street thus barring all ways to the ministries. Quietly and with the swiftness of lightning, heavy field guns, machine guns and small armed tanks were brought out from the courtyard behind the Ministry of War and mounted in the streets facing in all directions… As the officers and men who were taking part in this passed beneath my window they seized each other with wild enthusiasm, kissing each other as free men and beside themselves with joy. Quickly I realized that this was an overthrow of the government and that a handful of officers and a few picked troops had taken power into their own hands.57
The events that Katherine had seen and heard from her window were later described as “one of the most magnificent gestures of this age”.58 In a bloodless military coup d’état, the blue-uniformed officers of the Yugoslav Air Force had overthrown the government that had bound them into Nazi vassalage. They had done so in full knowledge that their actions made a German invasion – and their defeat – imminent and inevitable. What mattered to them was that they had redeemed the honour of the nation.
The news that a small power had defied the armed might of Germany was met in the capitals of the world first with incredulity, then with “emotional exhilaration”. It was “a lightning flash illuminating a dark landscape”, declared the New York Times. “Yugoslavia has found its soul,” rejoiced Winston Churchill. It was met in Berlin with disbelief. “I thought it was a joke,” Hitler is reported to have said.59
Flora’s maid Marica woke her at seven thirty that morning with a rush of words. “No one’s allowed into the town,” she told her anxiously. “Everyone’s being turned back. It’s full of machine guns and tanks.” “Are they German?” asked Flora with excitement as she sat bolt upright in bed. “I don’t know what they are,” responded Marica apprehensively.60
Flora threw on her clothes, drew the curtain, gulped the last of her tea and told Yurie that she was going to explore. “Don’t get into a row with anyone,” he told her worriedly. “I won’t; I’ll be fine,” she reassured him breezily as she sailed out the door. “Never shall I forget the scenes of enthusiasm in the town that morning,” she recalled later. “It was a fine sunny day. Everybody in Belgrade was in the streets; men, women and children marching in processions waving flags, singing patriotic songs, laughing and cheering. Shouts of the old Serbian slogan, ‘Bolje grob nego rob’ (‘Better the grave than slavery’) were caught up by the crowd and became a roar of defiance.”61
Flora rushed home to tell Yurie that young King Petar had been brought to the throne, the government arrested and Prince Pavle sent into exile. “[He] is just as delighted as I am,” she wrote to her sister Fanny that day. “He says this is the fourth revolution he has seen.” That afternoon she walked through the dust and heat of the tumultuous streets to visit Katherine at her flat in the town. As she neared, she was stopped. “Do you have a permit?” demanded an officer as Flora peered past the barricades into the street beyond. “No, but I have the Kara George,” she replied hopefully, as she showed him the medal in her buttonhole. “Are you Flora Sandes?” he replied in “excellent” English. When she nodded, he shook her warmly by the hand. “Go wherever you like,” he smiled as he waved her past.
That evening, after listening intently to Katherine’s account of the coup, she returned to celebrate the news with Yurie. “Although [he’s] not supposed to drink,” she told Fanny, “he is so much better now and we have drunk the health of King Peter several times.” She finished her letter with an attempt to forestall the anxious thoughts she knew would have entered her sister’s head as the clouds of war gathered on the horizon. “Don’t worry about me anyhow,” she told her. “I’m too old to fight now with a game leg, and, as Yurie politely remarks, what would the Germans want to bother with an old woman like me for even if they did succeed in taking the country.”62
That week, in the knowledge that she was too old and “war disabled” to be conscripted, she presented herself at the War Office in Belgrade to volunteer “in case of war”. “They were rather amused,” she later commented drily. “They asked whether the last war had not been enough for me, and then they formally accepted me.”63
Throughout Serbia and Montenegro crowds flocked to the towns and streets waving improvised Union Jacks and the Stars and Stripes, carrying the Yugoslav flag and banners aloft, holding up photographs of King Petar and singing and chanting at the top of their lungs. Better the grave than slavery! Better war than the Pact! Long live King Petar! Long live England! In Belgrade, they smashed the windows of the German “Travel Bureau” – in reality a hotbed of German intelligence – threw the contents in the streets, tore the picture of Hitler from the wall, dumped it on top of the heap and burned the lot. In the window frame they hung instead a huge picture of the seventeen-year-old King. On the Terazije, Belgrade’s central boulevard, crowds looked up at the towering Albanija Building – then the tallest building in the Balkans – as an old Montenegrin appeared on the balcony between a British and American flag and spread out his arms in joy, in unconscious imitation of the crucifixion.64
“Reports from the country revealed the same enthusiasm everywhere,” recorded Flora. “Peasants had not forgotten how they fought shoulder to shoulder with the English and French in the war of 1914–18, how they were cared for by British nurses, how they fraternized with British Tommies in Salonika… A young officer said to me, half in joke but half in earnest, ‘If the English and French together can’t beat the Germans, why we must.’”65
In the streets of Zagreb, the Croatian capital, the news of the coup was met with silence.66
After a few days of elation the mood in Belgrade changed. People hurried through the streets looking wor
ried, while others flocked to the railway station with their children and piles of baggage in the hope of returning to their villages. The German minister left abruptly for Berlin, followed two days later by the remaining staff of his legation. The new government back-pedalled furiously. To consolidate control over the whole of Yugoslavia, they realized, they needed the support of the Croats, and that could only be won if they agreed to abide by the terms of the Pact.67
It was already too late. Hitler had ordered “the destruction of Yugoslavia militarily and as a national unit” on hearing the news of the coup. He had thrust aside the Pact in fury, declaring that “politically it is especially important that the blow against Yugoslavia is carried out with pitiless harshness and that the military destruction is done with lightning rapidity”.68
On 5th April, as Hitler readied his forces to attack, an interview with Flora reached the English papers, to what must have been the horror of her family. “I am ready and willing to fight again for the people with whom I have lived for half a century,” she declared.69
Chapter 19
Occupation
1941–1946
For ten days the citizens of Belgrade had waited, sick with anxiety, for Hitler to make his next move. “He’ll at least issue an ultimatum first,” they reassured each other.1 Instead, there had been silence from Berlin. It was broken over the skies of Belgrade just after seven a.m. on Sunday 6th April.2 On that clear, spring morning a faint vibration of engines roused the sleepy inhabitants from their beds. They peered out of their windows and stepped out of their front doors to squint east into the rising sun. By the time they spotted a perfect formation of bombers, flanked on either side by fighters, the uneven drone had grown into a deafening roar. All at once the boom and ack-ack-ack of anti-aircraft guns thundered across the city while the sky filled with little black-and-white puffs. Suddenly, while the inhabitants watched motionless, around half of the bombers wheeled sharply towards Zemun aerodrome, while the other aircraft held their course. A few seconds later the earth shook with the thudding concussion of the first explosions to hit the city. As a further formation appeared on the horizon, they turned and ran for cover.3
“Waked at 7 a.m. by bombs and firing. Went in to Yurie who is still sleeping in the sitting room on the couch,” wrote Flora in her diary. “We both got up and went into the little room for breakfast which we ate to the accompaniment of bombs which sounded very close… All the windows in the attic-studio broken and glass showering down, and the whole house shook. Pat [the Alsatian] very scared.” During a pause in the attack their terrified landlady and her two children appeared at their gate in their nightclothes. Flora and Yurie ushered them in. For the rest of the day they sat huddled together in the sitting room while explosions shook the district.4
Fifty miles north-west, in Kamenica, Katherine too had been jolted awake that morning. “We were awakened by planes flying over the hospital,” she wrote. “We thought they were Yugoslav planes exercising. But as we watched them we saw bombs being dropped on the local aerodrome across the Danube and fires started in Novi Sad, our nearest town. Then we realized that war had begun.”5
Wave after wave of dive-bombers screamed over Belgrade, targeting royal and government buildings and destroying the railway station and university. In the city centre they targeted in particular the Terazije, the main boulevard where jubilant crowds had flocked following the coup. They roared and shrieked over the residential districts, dropping bombs, many of them incendiary, on the terrified residents.6 With no mains water, the fire brigade could only watch helplessly while fire raged furiously, burning sections of the city to the ground. “There was no pretence of bombing ‘military objects’,” wrote Flora angrily. “It was a punitive expedition.” During a lull in the attack many survivors prepared to flee the city. “I went to the end of our lane and watched the crowds of refugees tearing along the main road leading up from the town,” she recorded. “They were carrying children or pushing perambulators. They had handcarts piled with such goods as they had been able to seize. All were making for the open country in flight from a holocaust.”7
The survivors had emerged blinking from their cellars into virtually unrecognizable streets. The sun was shining but a strong wind whipped clouds of plaster dust around their faces as they crunched across broken glass, stepped past burning debris, stumbled over rubble and inched their way around craters. Strange smells filled the air, first from an acrid yellow-white smoke redolent of sulphur from the incendiary bombs and then from the fires that were sweeping through parts of the town. There were sounds too: the sporadic wail of sirens, the smash of tiles falling off roofs, the moans of the dying and the screams of those trapped in the debris.8
The Luftwaffe bombed Belgrade for four days in what Hitler termed “Operation Punishment”. By the time the last bomber turned for home, the capital had no phones, no water and no electricity. Seventeen thousand civilians lay dead in the ruined, burning city.9 Katherine’s flat, adjacent to the War Office, was completely destroyed.10 Flora and Yurie, in their suburban house, had been lucky. “Even there bombs fell close,” she wrote. “Nearly all the windows were shattered, and three incendiaries fell in the garden.”11
The savagery and suddenness of the attack threw the government and army into disarray. They provided no effective leadership and they organized no systematic mobilization of troops. Even if they had, it would have made little difference to the outcome of the attack.
In the deceptive calm following the coup, Katherine had returned to her hospital at Kamenica. The children had long since been sent home, and she had spent the days in the quiet wards with her hospital secretary Alice Murphy slowly packing up the supplies and equipment while they decided what they were going to do. The first roar of bombers overhead sent them into a desperate flurry of activity. They immediately sent some of their equipment to the village to use as a first-aid station and packed the rest hurriedly in the cellar. That afternoon they threw a few things into the back of Katherine’s car and left the village for Dubrovnik, hoping that the rumours were true that the Yugoslav army was planning to defend the Dalmatian coast.12
The first columns of German panzers rumbled across the Bulgarian border towards Niš on the day that Luftwaffe began raining destruction on Belgrade. They made no attempt to disguise their objective of paralysing communications by cutting Serbia in two.13 “[We passed] an interminable column of ox-drawn wagons,” wrote an American journalist. “This miserable, crawling thing bore supplies and munitions for the defense of Nish – that vital road and railhead of eastern Serbia on which so much depended – at approximately half a mile an hour.”14 By the evening of 8th April the Germans had captured the town and turned towards Belgrade. Across Serbia and Montenegro reservists struggled desperately to find their units. In Croatia many local soldiers in the ranks of the Yugoslav army refused to fight while, in Slovenia, the “Volksdeutsche” – Yugoslavs of German extraction – flocked treacherously to the aid of the Germans.15
“The Germans will arrest you for a spy once they discover you’re British and a captain in the army. If they find you in civilian clothes, you’ll be the first to be hanged. They’ll probably string you up in your own front garden in front of your husband,” speculated Nikola, Flora’s former captain from the Frontier Troops. She received his opinion cheerfully enough. There was after all a solution – to put her uniform back on and join the army. Perhaps because he knew how badly Flora wanted to be off, his words were echoed by Yurie. She needed little urging. Not only was there the possibility of adventure, her pride was also at stake. “You can’t stay out of the fighting – can’t let other people do it for you – not if you hold the Kara George Star,” she explained later.16
At six o’clock on the morning of 10th April, four days after the start of the attack, Flora – then aged sixty-five – rose and pulled on her uniform. This time though her feelings were mixed. “I cannot say that I felt as enthusiastic as I did on joining up in the war of 1914–
18, when I was considerably younger [and] not married,” she said later. “My husband was ill, and though as a ‘White’ Russian he would be safe, Germany not then having declared war on Russia, it was a wrench saying ‘goodbye to all that’.” She picked up a blanket, raincoat and her kitbag (into which she had stuffed five hundred cigarettes), said goodbye to Yurie and set off in a blizzard to report to the nearest headquarters. With Marica by her side to help her carry her things, she walked for six miles through the snow and bitter cold, before she stepped wearily into a chaotic scene at headquarters. “I’ve already got three hundred officers here all clamouring for orders,” the beleaguered adjutant told her. Still, he wrote her out an order to present herself to army headquarters in Užice in western Serbia, gave her a pass for the train and a driver to take her to the station. “Maritza, in floods of tears, was convinced that she would never see me again,” said Flora. “I embraced her, and assured her that of course I should come back. Then I set out into the blue.”17
At dawn on 10th April, just as Flora was preparing to march off with the army, the Germans began their final advance on Belgrade. The following day, the Italians began to drive down the Dalmatian coast and the Hungarians marched south towards Novi Sad. In Zagreb, Croats wearing homemade swastika armbands welcomed the Germans enthusiastically as liberators.18 With German support they declared the establishment of the “Independent State of Croatia” across both Croatia and much of Bosnia-Herzegovina, under the leadership of the head of the Ustaše, the fanatically anti-Serbian and anti-Semitic Ante Pavelić.
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 33
