A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  Throughout the war she continued her weekly trips into town to see Huber. As the weeks passed, something that might have passed for friendship if circumstances had been different arose between them. “H[uber] very amiable and looks much better after his holiday,” she reported brightly after one early meeting.105 He treated her very well, Flora later reported, and would reputedly pour her a glass of schnapps before sitting chatting to her.106 It is also far from inconceivable, in light of the fact she was virtually the only woman of British nationality to retain her freedom in Belgrade during the occupation, that he helped to protect her from rearrest and internment.

  News of German victories followed one after another that first year, settling like a blanket of depression on Flora and the other inhabitants of Belgrade. German media barked the news to them of each Russian city that fell to their armies until, by the end of November, they crowed that they were at the gates of Moscow. A few days later, they were told of the devastating Japanese surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbour and, in the New Year, of Rommel’s march towards the Suez Canal. Every report of a German victory served to make their belief in their ultimate liberation feel ever more remote.

  But by late 1942, although the stream of German propaganda continued unabated, whispers of an Allied victory against Rommel reached the ears of the Serbs, lending credence to their belief that the Allies would, in the end, be victorious. Then, in 1943, they heard rumours of German defeats in Russia and North Africa, the Allied invasion of Sicily, the surrender of Italy and the gathering pace of British and American air raids on Germany.

  Although each new rumour of victory led to “secret rejoicings”, the morale of the Serbs was tempered by increasing hardship.107 Inflation was raging out of control. The shelves and counters of shops were bare, people were ill fed and disease, particularly tuberculosis, began to take hold as it had done during the previous global conflict. By the middle of the war, Flora too was tired, ill nourished and utterly fed up with the daily struggle to make ends meet. Following one particularly trying week, she sat herself down in front of Huber and glowered at him. “I’ve had enough,” she told him. “Things have got to be better in one of your camps. I want you to send me to one.” Huber roared with laughter. “Put your request in writing,” he replied.108 If she did, he almost certainly ensured that it went no further than his desk.

  Cordial as her relations were with Huber, she took great pleasure in the news of the Allied victories. She took particular delight in a story that spread like wildfire through the capital. “One day the Germans paraded some British prisoners of war through the streets of Belgrade, with the idea of impressing the Serbs,” Flora relayed with mischievous pleasure. “It proved a terrible flop, for the prisoners marched whistling, their guards could not prevent the crowds from cheering and pressing cigarettes on them. One prisoner, on passing a donkey, shot out his arm in the Nazi salute and shouted ‘Heil Hitler’, whereupon the rest of the column followed suit.”109

  Easter Sunday 1944 dawned cloudy but dry over Belgrade. All across the city, as church bells tolled, families rose and greeted each other with the traditional greeting “Hristos voskrese” (“Christ is risen”), to which they replied “Vaistinu voskrese” (“Truly He is risen”). This spring, the fragrant April winds had carried particular promise with them. Shrubs and fruit trees were in full bloom and flowers were in profusion everywhere. Equally ubiquitous were tales of recent Allied victories and German defeats, lending people confidence for the first time that this would be their final Easter under occupation.

  As the citizens of the capital sat down at their breakfast tables, their conversations were interrupted by the sudden drone of engines overhead. The hum, this time, was unfamiliar. As they peered upwards into the sky, wave upon wave of American Flying Fortresses and Liberators appeared overhead in breaks in the cloud, almost three years to the day since German bombers began the attack that left seventeen thousand dead. It was all the proof they needed that the Allies were on the verge of winning the war.110

  The first explosion in the centre of the capital turned their joy instantly to disbelief. One bomb after another whistled down onto the residential districts in a series of earth-shaking concussions, driving dense pillars of smoke high above the rooftops. For Flora, it was the most terrifying experience of the war. There were no air-raid shelters for her to run to, since there were no military targets for miles around. Instead, she dashed for the only cover she could find. “I sheltered in a tiny shack and held the head of an old woman on my lap,” she recalled later, “telling her not to be frightened, while the ceiling crashed down on my head.”111

  When the skies finally cleared of American aircraft, Flora – then sixty-eight years old – and the “old woman” were shaken but unhurt. She returned home to find that her windows had been broken, but that otherwise her house was intact. Those on either side of her had been hit.112 “It is bad to be bombed by the enemy, but doubly so to be attacked by one’s friends,” she later wrote angrily. “The casualties numbered 2,000 in a radius of half a mile round my house. Not a single German suffered, for they were safely ensconced in deep dugouts in the town.”113 No adequate explanation was ever given of how the Americans had managed to rain over one hundred bombs on the centre of Belgrade while targeting a German aircraft-component factory over three miles outside of the city. “It was an accident,” they simply shrugged.114

  The bombers continued their sorties time and again over Belgrade that summer and autumn, terrifying the inhabitants, who feared a repetition of the mistake. They left their capital in droves to seek shelter in the villages, as they had done in 1941.115 Others, too poor, tired or ill to flee, stayed in their homes but fled to the outskirts at the first warning of attack. Flora stayed put. “Almost every morning the air-raid siren sounded,” she said later. “I sat on my balcony drinking tea made of lime-tree flowers or – a rare luxury – tea made of the stalks of morello cherries. I watched endless streams of men, women and children passing my gate on their way to the open fields. At sundown they came back weary, footsore and sun-scorched, or wet through in one of those frequent thunderstorms.”116

  “I’ve come to say goodbye,” Flora said to Huber during a visit to his office. He looked up with a start. “And where do you think you’re going?” he demanded, spluttering with indignation. “You’re not going anywhere.” “No,” she smiled, “but you are.”117

  By the end of the summer Flora knew the Germans had lost the war. So too did the rest of the country. When word of the Normandy landings reached the ears of the Serbs after 6th June they were filled with renewed hope that their liberation from the enemy would be soon at hand. Their hope turned to certainty that summer as they watched columns of Wehrmacht retreat north, after Hitler began to withdraw his forces from Serbia in a desperate attempt to shore up his other fronts.

  Events now moved rapidly. Across Yugoslavia, the Partisans inflicted a series of crushing defeats on the Četniks, leaving them the only serious contender to take over post-war authority. Romania declared war on Germany in August while in September Bulgaria followed suit. In France the Allies drove the Germans back towards their borders while the Soviet Red Army won victory after victory against them in the east. The vanguard of a massive Soviet invasion force crossed the Serbian frontier on 22nd September.118 In loose collaboration with the Partisans they battled their way towards Belgrade. The fighting was savage and merciless. “Corpses littered the sides of the road, piled one on another, some in the field-grey of the Wehrmacht, others stripped of their boots and uniforms and left lying half-naked; hundreds and hundreds of them,” wrote Fitzroy MacLean, the head of a British liaison mission to the Partisans, who had travelled with them on their approach to the capital. Some, he noted, bore the signs of execution.119

  “Early one morning in October 1944, we heard that the Russians were coming,” wrote Flora. “At first we did not believe it. Yet actually they were there; with tanks ‘Katushkas’ [rocket launcher
s], armoured cars and all.” She rushed out of her house to cheer them as they passed. “We gave them a terrific reception,” she said later. “All young, tough looking fellows, dusty and dirty after marching and fighting for days, but full of high spirits and splendid soldiers.”120 For ten days street fighting raged across the capital, as the Russians and Partisans fought to clear the city of the last pockets of resistance. “Bullets whiz[zed] along every street as the Russians hunted out isolated groups who were in hiding,” Flora recalled. By 20th October, after three and a half years of brutal occupation, the capital had been cleared of Germans.

  The population of Belgrade gave the Partisans as euphoric a welcome as they had given the Russians. They flew red flags from their windows and flocked to the streets to cheer a parade marking Tito’s triumphant entry into the capital. “It was impossible not to be moved by the sight of the ragged, battle-stained throng of Partisans of all sizes and ages who marched past us,” wrote MacLean. “Veterans of Salonika and the Balkan Wars marched next to boys of sixteen and seventeen; here and there a girl strode along with rifle and pack beside the men.”121

  With the support of much of the public the Partisans under Tito moved rapidly to establish their authority across the length and breadth of Yugoslavia. Their political, military and administrative structures became the new government, they took control over the written press and radio and instituted conscription to give their authority the backing of their armed forces. They also established a court for “trying crimes against the national honour” and set their secret police – the “OZNA” – to root out those they viewed as counter-revolutionaries, collaborators and traitors.122

  Even before the last of the Germans had been driven from the city agents of the OZNA were rounding up their opponents, in the first ominous sign that liberation from the Germans would not be all that many Serbs had hoped for. Soon it became clear that the same ruthlessness that had allowed the Partisans to continue their attacks after the 1941 massacres was being applied to the persecution of their opponents. Just as the Germans had done, they imposed a curfew from six p.m. until daylight while, during the day, the streets rang with the shouts of “Death to the traitors!” and “Long live the Soviet Union!” as parades of Communist supporters marched through the streets carrying framed portraits of Stalin.123 They requisitioned homes, appropriated their contents and took what food and fuel they wanted, leaving little for anyone else. “Most people considered themselves lucky if they secured potatoes and other vegetables,” recalled Lena Yovitchitch.124 Then, on 27th November, the papers announced the execution of over a hundred people accused of being war criminals. “There was little in common among them, except perhaps that none was a war criminal,” wrote one dismayed onlooker.125 It was rapidly becoming clear to all but the most ardent Communists that they had exchanged one set of oppressors for another.

  While the Partisans were manoeuvring to establish their unequivocal control over the machinery of state, Flora was interviewed by Reuters. Her words, less than a month after they had marched into Belgrade, were already subject to censorship. “I must express my admiration for the Russians who took Belgrade without using artillery on the town, and without wrecking a single house,” she was quoted as saying.126 Although there is no evidence that the Russians actually targeted civilians, this statement was blatantly untrue.127 She was also visited on occasion by the Partisans, who would have viewed her with suspicion from the start, both as an English national and a “bourgeois”. But now she had no one like Huber to look out for her or to whom she could air her grievances.128

  Life over the following months became increasingly difficult for Flora and the remaining British nationals, as the suspicion of the new Communist authorities hardened towards their country of birth. Not only were they hostile on ideological grounds, in the post-war scramble to claim territory and define borders, the British had sided with the Italians in their claim over the largely Italian-populated city of Trieste that lay near the old border between the two countries. The airwaves rang with verbal attacks against Britain while the newspapers were peppered with equally antagonistic commentary. The hostility not only left the British vulnerable to maltreatment at the hands of the authorities but also put at risk those who were friendly towards them. “Denunciation was to be a great factor in the lives of all of us for a long time,” commented Isabel Božić, an Englishwoman married to a Serb. “It followed that a newly converted Partisan might be able to win the confidence of Russian and other communists by denouncing someone who had spoken in favour of the British.”129 With great sadness Flora began to turn over the hitherto unimaginable thought that she would have to leave the country that had been her home for much of the last thirty years and for which she had served in two world wars.

  At a time when most British nationals were struggling to come to terms with the fact that they were no longer welcome in their adopted country, Katherine began to make plans to return to Yugoslavia. She had spent the remainder of the war, after being released by her benevolent Italian captors, in Lanarkshire, Scotland, where she had run baby clinics while serving as chairman of the West of Scotland Committee of the Yugoslav Relief Society, an organization that included many other “old campaigners”, including Vera Holme.130

  In the spring of 1944 the Save the Children Fund had approached her to ask if she would head a relief unit that they were putting together to work in Yugoslavia. Under the auspices of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), an organization whose remit was to provide immediate aid and assistance to all such liberated countries, Katherine set out with her unit in early June to await transportation first to Italy and then to Yugoslavia. With her travelled Alice Murphy, her old hospital secretary.

  The need for emergency relief was enormous. Three and a half years of war, occupation and civil strife had ravaged the country from end to end. Transportation links had been destroyed, agriculture and industry lay in ruins and the population was threatened by both starvation and disease, particularly tuberculosis, in conditions virtually identical to those that had beset the nascent kingdom at the end of the First World War.131 All the while the negotiations for the unit’s entry to Yugoslavia went on and on and on. “The talks… were… unforgivably slow,” commented a contemporary Serbian observer. “Foreigners from Western countries were unwelcome, and, contrary to the situation after the First World War, the attitude towards them was one of considerable hostility and fear… However, in the end Yugoslavia had to accept help from UNRRA… the simple reason was that the country was devastated and the people hungry.”132

  In March 1945, after a nine-month wait, Tito grudgingly gave his consent for the first representatives of UNRRA to leave for Yugoslavia from Italy.133 Soon after arrival Katherine and Alice received permission from the Ministry of Health to travel from their base in Budva, Montenegro, to Belgrade to discuss the future of the Anglo-Yugoslav Children’s Sanatorium. It was a “harrowing and distressing” trip, reported Katherine. The streets were thick with snow and slush and every café and public building was overflowing with the wounded, in a scene that reminded her of “Kragujevatz in 1915”. Before she visited the site of her hospital in Kamenica, she went to visit Flora and her former chief surgeon, Dr Svetislav Stojanović. “They looked older and worn out,” she recalled.134

  The hospital that Katherine had had built largely at her own expense in 1934 was now “an empty shell”. It had been used, then abandoned, by the Partisans during the war. In disbelief she walked grimly from room to room. “We found the hospital standing but entirely bare, the windows broken and the doors off,” wrote Katherine.135 But the sight of her mosaic of the red lion rampant lying intact in the central hall gave her a small but significant glimmer of hope.136 When she returned to Montenegro with Alice, she was all the more determined to see her hospital restored to its former glory.

  Chapter 20

  “Folly’s End”

  1945–1956

  Near the end of Fe
bruary 1945, Flora turned the key in her lock one last time, picked up her bags and left for the airport to catch a British military flight to Bari. As she looked out over the familiar streets, she must have wondered if she would ever pass through them again. She carried with her the precious exit visa that granted her the right to leave, and which were granted so rarely. “I regretted having to leave behind so many good friends among the Serbs, who would have got out too, had it been possible,” she wrote mournfully.1

  Aged sixty-nine, Flora had lost none of her wanderlust. Although she had not been home to England for years, she chose instead to catch a ship from Naples to Jerusalem to visit her nephew Gerrard Baker, a police forensic scientist. In June, she sailed again, this time for Africa, to stay with Dick Sandes and his wife Joan at their home in Bulawayo, Rhodesia. Flora had last seen her nephew in London in early 1920, just before he had left to join the British South Africa Police, Rhodesia’s police force. The boy whom, aged five, she had taken on a road trip across America in 1905 after his mother had died was now a detective inspector. His nine-year-old daughter Allison and her younger brother Richard bubbled with excitement at the news that their father’s “favourite aunt and hero” was coming to stay, while their maternal grandmother, who lived with them, was sent to live with her son to make room for their esteemed guest.

  On Saturday 21st July, Dick, Joan, Richard and Allison drove to the railway station to meet Flora, who had travelled the long distance to Bulawayo across grasslands and bushveld from the port of Durban. Their car had not been driven for years as petrol was so scarce, but in honour of her arrival it had been taken off its bricks so that she could be collected in style. Flora arrived in the leafy town during its cool, dry winter to a flurry of press interest. “Seven-Medalled Irishwoman Comes to Bulawayo”, trumpeted the local paper.2 There were parties and dinners, interviews and public appearances. “For the first time two ‘colonial’ children were exposed to the press and dignitaries who were clambering to meet this famous woman,” remembered Allison.