The opportunity that she had been waiting for came her way in mid-December. One morning as she sat idling on a hillside the commander of the First Battalion arrived to see Milić before he left to take up new positions against the Bulgarians with his men. It certainly sounded more exciting than spending the day within the confines – and relative safety – of regimental headquarters. “Might I go with him on Diana?” she asked Milić tentatively. “Yes, all right,” he replied indulgently.
That night Flora sent word to Milić that she was going to camp with the men of the First Battalion. They were in turn delighted to see her – she had distributed the jam and balaclavas that Greig had given her to its Fourth Company near Monastir. When they left at three a.m. in torrential rain to take up a position on nearby Mount Chukus, she was asked what she wanted to do. “I’m coming with you,” she told them firmly.20
It took them until four p.m. the following day to reach the flat, rocky heights atop Mount Chukus. The mountain, at 1,790 metres, was one of several peaks in its range. Like its neighbours, it was covered in a patchwork of small trees, bushes, boulders and bare, brown earth. From the top, it overlooked a wooded plateau below, where the Bulgarians were entrenched. Hardly had they reached the top before the first bullets whistled over their heads. It was Flora’s first experience of being under rifle fire.
When the commander rushed the companies of his battalion into the line, Flora made a beeline for the Fourth, which was nearest the Bulgarians. She lay down on her stomach behind one of the boulders that scattered the rough terrain, borrowed a rifle and joined the men aiming in volleys on the woods below to the orders of the platoon sergeant, “Né shanni palli!” (“Take aim, fire!”) “We lay there and fired at them all that day,” wrote Flora, for whom the experience was still much like a holiday adventure. “I took a lot of photographs which I wanted very much to turn out well; but alas! during the journey through Albania the films… got wet and spoilt.”21
The Fourth Company was ably led by Lieutenant Janacko Jović. Jović was young, dark-haired and confident, not averse to administering discipline where required, and fiercely proud of leading the two hundred and twenty men of the “smartest company in the smartest regiment”.22 Despite his relative youth, in four years of fighting he had won “every kind of medal for bravery”, while his experience and competence had also won him the universal respect of his men.23
Jović was impressed enough with Flora’s sangfroid under fire and her ability to handle a rifle to enrol her on his books that night as a member of his company. She was overjoyed finally to have her place in the Serbian frontline. Her first night with her new company was one she would remember all her life. “Lieut. Jovitch had a roaring fire of pine logs built in a little hollow,” she described wistfully.
He and I and the other two officers of the company sat round it and had our supper of bread and beans, and after that we spread our blankets on spruce boughs round the fire and rolled up in them. It was a most glorious moonlight night, with the ground covered with white hoar frost, and it looked perfectly lovely with all the campfires twinkling every few yards over the hillside among the pine trees. I lay on my back looking up at the stars, and, when one of them asked me what I was thinking about, I told him that when I was old and decrepit and done for, and had to stay in a house and not go about any more, I should remember my first night with the Fourth Company on the top of Mount Chukus.24
The other soldiers accepted Flora without question. She earned instant respect from the fact that she, an Englishwoman, was willing to fight for Serbia and share their hardships. To a degree they were also used to women soldiers. A handful of hardy peasant girls fought in the ranks alongside the men, and there was one, Milunka Savić, in their regiment.25 The Serbian army was badly short of personnel and needed anyone who could shoot, ride and adapt to the difficult conditions. During her time on Mount Chukus, Flora had proven beyond doubt that she could do all of that. She had handled a rifle since she was a child, she was among the best riders in the regiment and she was indifferent to the weather. “One soon gets used to the cold when one is always outdoors,” she commented. Once the novelty of her presence wore off, they saw her as a fellow soldier, not a woman. “Brother,” they began to call her, their usual term of address.26
Flora rose with the men of her new company, shook the early-morning frost off her blanket, picked up her borrowed rifle and rejoined them in the line. By the afternoon, she reported cheerily, the firing had become “very hot”, after the Bulgarians had managed to advance up the ridges behind them. Soon their bullets began to spit across the Serbian positions. That night, when they were forced down the other side of the mountain, Flora retreated with them. “We had a few casualties,” she stated bluntly, “but not so very many.”
They now needed to push on towards the Adriatic coast as quickly as possible. Not only were the Bulgarians at their backs, if the men did not reach it soon they would starve. The Fourth Company had long since ceased to receive regular rations and had finished their last allowance of bread days before. The only thing left for them to eat were corncobs, which they roasted over their fires. When water began to run short they melted snow to drink. With no fodder for their animals, their horses and ponies had also slowly begun to starve. Flora’s immediate concern lay elsewhere. “We had almost run out of cigarettes and tobacco,” she observed on a worried note. But with every passing day she became increasingly concerned about the men’s condition. Although they soon left the Bulgarians far behind, she could see that they were on the verge of starvation.
After being driven from the heights of Mount Chukus they were ordered to head towards Elbasan, a town of twelve thousand mostly Albanian inhabitants about fifty miles from the Adriatic. They arrived on the outskirts at five p.m. the following day. “It was a filthy little town,” Flora commented dismissively. What she saw of the inhabitants made her livid with rage. “[They] were as hostile as they dared to be, and used to refuse to sell us anything,” she wrote furiously. What made her angrier still was the sight of many of them in Austrian overcoats, which they had taken from the starving prisoners who had staggered through the town, delirious with hunger, in exchange for a small piece of bread. Flora knew that this meant the death of many of them from exposure. She knew that the Albanians realized it too.27
But not all Flora’s contact with the Albanians was hostile. A few days later, on Christmas Eve, after a day of sitting about on one of the low, bracken-covered hills past Elbasan, she ventured into a village in the company of Jović – by now her constant companion on any excursion – where she was welcomed with curiosity rather than hostility. On Christmas morning, buoyed by the reception she had been given, Flora suggested to Jović that she try to buy food for as many of the two hundred and twenty men as possible, using the money she had left. “We’ll send a patrol,” he responded. “And you can also have what money I’ve got.” When the patrol returned, she was thrilled to hear that they had succeeded. “We bought a sort of cornmeal for [200 francs], and had it baked into flat loaves there in the town, and next day when we turned out for a fresh start we gave each man half of one of my cornmeal loaves and a couple of cigarettes, telling them it was England’s Christmas box to them.”28
Although she did not realize it at the time, Flora had been fortunate to be on the southernmost route of retreat. Those who had travelled by the more northerly routes had suffered an “infinitely worse” time than her company, she later acknowledged.29 These included the men and women of the Allied missions who had decided to flee Serbia in preference to being taken prisoner. The women of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals who joined the retreat split into three groups. Two parties of approximately thirty women each set out across Montenegro for the coastal Albanian town of Scutari. They had one fatality, nurse Caroline Toughill, who died agonizingly of head injuries three days after the motor ambulance she was travelling in went over the edge of a precipice.30 Another small group formed the “Second Serbo-English Field A
mbulance” in conjunction with a Serbian director and some orderlies. They attempted to form temporary hospitals along the line of retreat until they lost all of their equipment to the Germans.31 By the time the three parties finally made it to the Albanian coast, nearly all the women were suffering from frostbite.32
The Stobart Unit split into two before retreating. One half, led by Mabel Stobart, became the field hospital for the Šumadija Division of the Second Army, the “First Serbian-English Field Hospital”. She was put in charge of sixty Serbian soldiers and given a temporary rank equal to major by Serbian Army Medical Services. What she saw in the mountains haunted her for the rest of her life. “The track became more and more thickly lined, with the dead bodies of oxen, and of horses, and worse still – of men,” she wrote. “Men by the hundred lay dead: dead from the cold and hunger by the roadside, their eyes staring at the irresponsive sky; and no one could stop to bury them. But, worse still, men lay dying by the roadside, dying from cold and hunger, and no one could stay to tend them. The whole scene was a combination of mental and physical misery, difficult to describe in words.”33 More than eleven weeks after leaving Kragujevac, her column finally arrived at the coast after having had to abandon all their medical equipment, which could not be brought over the mountain passes of Montenegro.34
The remaining members of Mabel Stobart’s Unit, including Flora’s friend Nan MacGlade, left three weeks after the field hospital. One of their most harrowing experiences was to encounter one of their former POW orderlies, Nikola, whom they all knew as a cheerful, obliging, “big, round-faced boy”. “He was no longer the clean, smart mess orderly in white coat and apron, but was a very sorry-looking figure, lean, haggard and miserable,” described the unit’s chauffeur.
Immediately I saw what was the matter. He was starving, literally dying for want of food. I fetched the rations given me that morning for two days and gave them to him, and a dry, hard light glittered in his eyes when he saw the bread. He had become not far removed from an animal, and in his downward journey he had picked up the instinct which no one can explain, which tells a starving dog to eat its food in secret. The expression on his face was hardly human as he turned away.35
All members of the Stobart Unit survived their ordeal.36 No record exists of what happened to Nikola.
Individual members of the other British units – the Wounded Allies, Lady Paget Unit, British Red Cross, Farmers and the Berry Unit – also endured the retreat, as did the British, French and Russian Naval Missions and medical, diplomatic and military personnel from other Allied countries. A few made it south to Salonika before the roads and railways were cut by the invaders, including Mabel Grouitch who, as the wife of the Under-secretary of Foreign Affairs for Serbia, could not risk being taken prisoner.
After four days at their hilltop camp outside Elbasan, Flora and the Fourth Company began their final push towards the coast. Each day they rose at four a.m., shook their aching limbs and set off as the morning sun rose behind the mountain ranges that they had now left far behind. “Sick or well, the men had to keep on,” Flora recalled, the memory of those days burnt deep into her mind. “No one could be carried, and you had got to keep on or die by the roadside.”37 They walked or rode daily for fourteen or fifteen hours, the brown Skumbi River swirling lazily to their left, along a path that slowly descended towards the coast. It was lined with the putrefying corpses of hundreds of dead ponies and horses that filled the air with their sickly, sweet stench.
The march to the coast was now a matter of life and death for the gaunt and exhausted men of the company. Jović pushed them on relentlessly, aware that he could only afford to let them rest briefly en route, sometimes for no more than a few minutes at a time. “Before, when I had been working in the hospitals, and I used to ask the men where it hurt them, I had often been rather puzzled at the general reply of the new arrivals, ‘Sve me boli’ (‘Everything hurts me’),” reflected Flora.
It seemed such a vague description and such a curious malady; but in those days I learnt to understand perfectly what they meant by it, when you seem to be nothing but one pain from the crown of your aching head to the soles of your blistered feet, and I thought it was a very good thing that the next time I was working in a military hospital I should be able to enter into my patient’s feelings, and realize that all he felt he wanted was to be let alone to sleep for about a week and only rouse up for his meals.38
By the fifth day of their forced march Flora and the men of the Fourth Company heard naval guns, the first sign that they were nearing the Adriatic. At dusk, after they had been travelling for fifteen hours, they finally neared the town of Kavaja, ten miles south-east of Durazzo. Their destination lay a few miles to the other side of the town. “I never saw anything like the mud in Kavaia,” described Flora. “It came right above the tops of my top boots, and one could hardly drag one’s feet out of it. The road was full of rocks and pits, and every two or three yards there were dead or dying horses which had floundered down to rise no more; and it was pitch dark and very cold.”39
Flora and the men were on the verge of collapse. Ahead, they could see the light of dozens of campfires of another company twinkling on one of the hills, where they too had been ordered to camp. “We kept pushing on and on, and seemed to be never getting any nearer to them,” she remembered. “[I] began to wonder if those really were campfires ahead of us or sort of will-o’-the-wisps getting farther away.” It took the Fourth Company three long hours to get from Kavaja to their hillside camp by the sea. “We all turned in dead to the world that night, but very glad to have at last reached the coast,” Flora recalled. She had completely forgotten that it was New Year’s Eve.40
Chapter 7
Coast
1916
More than one hundred and fifty thousand skeletal, ragged and ashen-faced Serbs eventually reached the Adriatic coast of Albania.1 Behind them lay the bodies of nearly one hundred thousand Serbian soldiers and tens of thousands of civilians.2 By the time the survivors had crossed the mountains and dragged their weary feet through miles of marshland on the approach to the coast, many were near death. “[Outside Durazzo], a figure… staggered up and fell on the threshold of the gate,” recalled a member of the British Naval Mission.
It needed a second glance to recognize in that poor heap of rags, sodden and begrimed with filth, a Serbian soldier… When we lifted him from the stones we saw a face that made the blood run cold at the heart… At first one thought that this was the countenance of an old man, or rather of the mummy of one long dead; and then there came the dreadful conviction that it was the countenance of a youth – a boy of seventeen or eighteen – but so wasted by hunger and suffering that nothing was left there but dry skin drawn like parchment over projecting bones… The lad was all but dead of exhaustion and hunger. He said a word, hleba (bread). We gave him a loaf, and he held it in his hand and did not eat. His naked feet were bruised and covered with blood, and he was too feeble to walk farther by himself.3
The Serbs had staggered across the mountains of Albania and Montenegro propelled by the belief that British, French and Italian forces would provide them, on arrival, with food and safety. At first they found neither. The Allies had at least agreed on a plan of rescue for the Serbs; where they failed was in carrying it out. The French sent the Mission Militaire Française en Albanie, whose aim was to reorganize the remnants of the Serbian army into units capable of rejoining the fight against Germany and its allies.4 The British sent another, the British Adriatic Mission, whose aim was to prevent them from dying first from starvation.5 The Italians, in turn, accepted the responsibility of shipping food and supplies across the relatively short distance from their coastline.
Both Britain and France had sent large quantities of food for the Serbs to Brindisi in southern Italy, a port directly across the Adriatic from Albania where, as agreed, it awaited shipment. But as one day followed another, no ships sailed. “The trip is too dangerous,” protested the Italian naval auth
orities, who had already lost one flotilla to the destroyers of the Austrian navy, as they contemplated the enemy submarines, floating mines and aeroplanes that lay in wait.6 However, the reasons for their foot-dragging went beyond these risks. Both the Italians and the Serbs had competing territorial ambitions in Albania. Although the Serbs posed no threat whatsoever to their aspirations following the retreat, the Italians deeply resented their presence. In what amounted to a systematic policy of obstruction, not only did they refuse to ship food to them, they attempted to thwart the efforts of relief workers and failed to ensure the proper feeding of the refugees who made it to Italy. Only after repeated interventions by the British and French was enough pressure brought to bear on them to induce them to begin sporadic shipments. By then, it was too late for many thousands of Serbs.
Flora had a talent for turning situations to her own advantage but on many occasions pure luck favoured her. It did so again now. Had she arrived on the coast sixty miles farther north at Scutari as had the majority of military and civilian refugees, she would have faced infinitely worse conditions. By the time she reached the coast near Durazzo with the Fourth Company at the tail end of the retreat, food shipments were becoming more regular and there were enough supplies in the vicinity to keep them from starving to death.7
On New Year’s Day, Flora and the men of the Fourth Company crawled out of their tents into the warm morning sunshine, rubbed their aching limbs and hobbled as best they could to the top of the hill to get their first look at their surroundings. All around them the tented camps of hundreds of other companies were dotted across the low, rolling hills and along the rough roadsides. To the west, on the far side of a river and stretch of swampland, lay the Adriatic. Although the town of Durazzo was ten miles away, they could see it clearly at the end of a long sweep of yellow sand, nestled against the slopes of a hill. They could also see the distant wrecks of several food ships that had been sunk by the Austrian navy in its harbour, which lent it a desolate and foreboding appearance.
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 12