Still, it was a day of celebration. Not only had they all survived the retreat to the coast, it was also Flora’s New Year. “Everyone came up and wished me a Happy New Year, our English New Year, that is, as theirs, of course, did not come till thirteen days later,” she reported, “and we all hoped that the New Year might prove happier than the old one had been.” Flora had also been on Jović’s mind that day. He knew that the last food most of the men of his company had eaten during the retreat was that which she had bought for them six days earlier. He also knew that it had almost certainly saved some of their lives. He decided that the best way to reward her for her efforts was to promote her from private to corporal. For Flora, it was to be the start of her rapid ascent through the ranks of the Serbian army.8
After a couple of days on the hill overlooking the Adriatic, Flora began to get restless. On 3rd January, hoping “to see the sights”, she joined three officers on horseback as they made their way to Durazzo, along a path lined with decomposing horses.9 The town of jumbled red roofs and pointed, white minarets looked as eastern as its ten thousand largely Albanian and Turkish inhabitants. Its narrow streets were potholed and littered with great rocks. They were also thronged with miserable hordes of Serbian refugees. Among them jostled soldiers in smart grey-green uniforms who were part of the Italian occupying force.10
Suddenly, among the grey-green, Flora spotted khaki. “I could hardly believe my eyes, it seemed so long since I had seen an Englishman,” she enthused at the sight of a sergeant major of the British Adriatic Mission. “I almost fell on his neck in excitement.”11 The sergeant major was equally astounded at the sight of a grubby Englishwoman in the uniform of a Serbian corporal. No doubt bemused by her story of how she had retreated with the army after having been accepted into its ranks, he took her at once to his headquarters. His fellow officers were equally startled at her appearance. “They looked upon me with more than suspicion at first, thought I was a kind of camp follower I believe,” she scribbled in a letter to a friend.12 Nonetheless, they were at least willing to see that she was well fed on each visit.13 Flora, who knew a good thing when she saw it, went back to visit them often.
On Monday 24th January Flora was handed a telegram. “Meet me at once in Durazzo. Simmonds.” She dropped everything upon receipt of this message from Emily and urged a borrowed horse over the dusty ten-mile track to try to find her. Flora had last written to her in October to tell her she was returning to their old hospital in Valjevo and suggesting they meet first in Salonika. Emily had duly left New York in early December with cases of food, clothing and medicine donated by the American Red Cross.14 But on arrival in the Greek port, not only was Flora nowhere to be found, Valjevo was under enemy occupation. “I had to look round to find something where I could be of real help,” Emily recalled. First, alongside a unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and a few Quakers who had been left similarly stranded, she helped establish a large tented refugee camp in the grounds of a hospital in Salonika.15 Then, when the refugees were about to be evacuated to Corsica and the southern French coast by the French government, she attempted to take her supplies to Albania by boat. “Unfortunately the Italians, [aiming] to keep the Adriatic to themselves and disliking the Serbs whom they consider to stand in their way, interfered a little in our plans,” recorded Emily. “[They] stopped the Greek boat and transhipped our supplies to Brindisi where there were a great many refugees.”16
The refugees who had reached Italy via a handful of returning food ships were barely tolerated, partly due to fear that their poor health would lead to an epidemic. Nonetheless, the Italians did little to alleviate the conditions in which disease could take hold. They were taken to crowded isolation camps surrounded by barbed wire, with little food or water and only a few bare sheds for shelter, paradoxically just the settings likely to lead to an outbreak of typhus or cholera.17 Emily was shocked by their condition and raced into action. Flora heard later about her work and had nothing but admiration. “Among other little odd jobs she discovered a whole colony of them in Brindisi who had been without food for two days,” she praised. “So without any further red tape proceeded to hire carriages, drive round the town and buy up everything in the eatable line which was to be had wherewith to feed them.”18 Before the Italians simply began dumping them over the border into France, she took charge of the rationing of two thousand of them.19
Flora’s first task on receipt of Emily’s telegram was to track her down. Hearing that her friend was about to be presented to Crown Prince Aleksandar, Flora rode to his lodgings, introduced herself and took a seat in his audience chamber to await Emily’s arrival.20 When Emily appeared in the company of Slavko Grouitch, she was taken aback by the sight of Flora in the uniform of a Serbian corporal. She did not approve of her transformation in the least. “Miss Sandes enlisted into the Serbian Army and lives the life of a soldier, which seems to me [a] great waste of a woman – of all the work that only a woman can do,” she remarked later.21 But above all, she was delighted to see her safe, having worried herself sick since hearing that Flora had last been seen heading for Albania with the army.
Twenty-eight-year-old Aleksandar welcomed them shyly but warmly. Olive-skinned, with a thin moustache and a pince-nez perched on his long nose, he had a slightly nervous manner that made him appear more like a student than the commander-in-chief of the Serbian army.22 Flora and Emily were both shocked by how thin and ill he looked. “He had only been there for two days and is just recovering from an operation [for appendicitis],” wrote Emily in a letter to the American Red Cross. “He still looks very sick.”23 He saw them only briefly, but long enough to tell them both graciously how much he appreciated their work and to decorate them with the Order of St Sava, Fourth Class.24 Emily reciprocated his gesture as best she could. “His appetite is very poor,” his doctor had told her before her royal appointment. “All he fancies is chocolate, which we can’t get for him.” She had brought with her a case of “comforts” donated by the Red Cross, including chocolate and other luxuries. Half she presented to him. The other half she gave to Flora for her “field hospital” – or so she told the Red Cross, who would not have been pleased to hear that they had made a generous donation to the Serbian army.25
Emily had arrived in Durazzo only that morning from Brindisi. She had answered an urgent appeal by the Serbian government to find workers willing to help evacuate Serbian refugees aboard the Arménie, a French vessel the American Red Cross had secured for the purpose.26 Not only were the limited resources of the Albanian coastline grossly insufficient to meet the needs of the throngs of hungry, exhausted civilians, a new and imminent danger had emerged in the form of an Austrian invasion of Albania. The Austrian army, fresh following their victory against Serbia, had marched next against Montenegro. The little kingdom had surrendered with barely a whimper on 17th January. Buoyed by their easy victory, the Austrians continued their drive south through Albania. The only thing that lay between them and the refugees was the Serbian army, who were in no condition to try to stop them.
“Nobody else wanted to go,” reported the Red Cross in commenting on Emily’s decision to accompany the refugees. Not only were they suffering from all the effects of prolonged privation including lice and tuberculosis, they would have to be crowded together for days on the ships, with virtually non-existent sanitary arrangements and the very real prospect of an on-board outbreak of typhus or cholera. Equally grave were the threats from enemy submarines, floating mines and aeroplanes. Although Emily was well aware of the risks, they did not deter her from going.27 “Occasionally reports came of Serbian refugees on the coast of Albania, and the trips thither to get them and bring them away Miss Simmonds found even more exciting,” reported the Red Cross. “There was nothing dull about them. The prevalence of submarines in those waters did not exactly drive dull care away, but they did prevent the incidence of ennui.”28 What concerned Emily more was that there would be no doctor on board. “I must tell you I felt a litt
le dismayed when I found that I was looked upon as the medical adviser for the whole ship,” she wrote.29 Only one other volunteer could be found to travel with her, John Earnshaw Bellows, a thirty-two-year-old, somewhat earnest Quaker from Gloucester, although two other volunteers, the archaeologist Robert Carr Bosanquet and Emily’s old acquaintance Slavko Grouitch, agreed to assist them on the first leg of their journey.
Late that evening Emily brought Flora on board the Arménie to help her feed its seventeen hundred men, women and children, many of whom were on the verge of starvation. They slowly navigated their way through its holds and onto its pitch-black decks, handing out bully beef and hard biscuits. The ship was so tightly packed with people that some of the men were unable to lie down. “It was no easy task,” recalled Flora.30 By midnight, they had fed them all. As the dark ship sailed into the black waters of the Adriatic, Flora waved it off from the shoreline before returning to her hotel.
The next morning she rose late and sauntered over to the headquarters of the British Adriatic Mission for breakfast. She had just sat down to a plate of bacon and eggs when suddenly she heard a “most terrific crash, followed by others in quick succession”. She pushed her plate aside, stood up and dashed outside to get a better look. Above her in the blue sky were five red-and-white-painted Austrian aeroplanes dropping shiny silver bombs and raining propaganda leaflets on the crowded town. She looked on calmly at the panic all around her. “People were running as hard as they could to get out of the way – at least, the Italians were running, the Serbians always thought it beneath their dignity to do so,” she described. “There was a wide subterranean drain leading from the town to the sea, and down this hundreds of Italians crawled, but I think if I were given the choice of crawling down a Durazzo drain in close proximity to some hundreds of the natives of that town or being killed by a bomb I would choose the latter.” In all, they dropped about twenty-five bombs, killing about fifty people and wounding many more.31 “When it was all over I went back again,” recalled Flora, “and, finding the headquarters of the British Adriatic Mission still standing, sat down to a fresh lot of bacon and eggs for breakfast, such luxuries not being obtainable every day.”32
The town of Durazzo was an attractive target. Not only was it crowded with civilian refugees, it was packed to capacity with Serbian soldiers. The soldiers, one hundred thousand in total, had flocked to the town after having been ordered to march south along the coast to escape being taken prisoner by the Austrian army. Although the Allies had decided to evacuate the civilian refugees to Corsica and the southern French coast following the generous offer by France, the decision on what to do with the men of the Serbian army was far more contentious. Prior to the invasion, the British Adriatic Mission had offered to help feed, reorganize and re-equip the army in situ in Albania, but the Italians, unsurprisingly, were diametrically opposed to this suggestion.33 They further rejected out of hand the mischievous suggestion by the French that the Serbs be taken to Italy.34 The logical place to take them was Corfu, which lay alongside the Adriatic coastline to the south. It was only a short distance away. It was also close to the sphere of operations in Macedonia where, after the men of the Serbian army recovered, it was intended that they would take their place alongside the Allies.35 The one problem with Corfu was that it was Greek. Greece was then walking a tightrope of neutrality, being equally threatened and cajoled by the Allies and the Central Powers, who were both eager to gain a new ally. Impatient with their equivocations, on 12th January the Allies informed the unhappy Greeks as a fait accompli that the remnants of the Serbian army were to be taken there.36
The pressing attention of the Allies now turned to getting them to the island before they were overrun by the Austrian army. First, with great reluctance, the Serbian authorities ordered their sick and starving men to march sixty miles south from Scutari to Durazzo, across dank, stagnant marshland.37 The march took seven days, much of it through pouring rain. British witnesses reported seeing corpses along the track, both human and animal.38 Upon arrival the men were told the unthinkable – the Allies had been unable to amass enough small ships at Durazzo because the Italians would not lend them suitable vessels. They would have to walk a further seventy-five miles south to the town of Valona, which had a harbour deep enough to accommodate large transport ships and which was sufficiently sheltered from naval attack to win the cooperation of the Italians. On 30th January the difficult task fell to Crown Prince Aleksandar to issue the order to march south.39
Before the town was overwhelmed by the Austrian army, a few small ships had braved the journey to the primitive harbour of San Giovanni di Medua to deliver supplies. The harbour was south of the town of Scutari, where the women of the Allied missions had gathered following the retreat. Empty on their return journey, the ships could at least evacuate them and a privileged few, including members of the Serbian government and diplomatic staff who were taken to Italy around Christmas time. Most women reached home by late December with little more than the clothes they stood up in, healthy but tired, to a flurry of press interest.
The nineteen thousand Austrian POWs who had survived the retreat against all the odds to reach the Albanian coast received no such special treatment. These were all that were left of the seventy-five thousand men who had been taken prisoner in 1914.40 Many of the starving men had been put to work improving the roads. Near Durazzo Emily had found six hundred of them imprisoned outside the town in a ruined, roofless house, cared for by a solitary Red Cross worker, sanitary engineer Estus Magoon. Many were suffering from cholera and typhus and only one doctor – Dr Zucchi, an Italian – would go near them.41 “I gave a lot of blankets, rice and milk to Mr Magoon for the Austrian sick,” she wrote to the Red Cross.42 From Durazzo, the prisoners were herded onto ships destined for Sardinia to prevent them from being freed by their compatriots advancing from the north.43 Hundreds were reported to have died of cholera before the survivors reached the Italian island.44
Nearly six of the twenty-seven thousand Serbian boys who had left their homes in Serbia died in the mountains during the retreat.45 By the time the survivors reached the coast many were barely clinging to life. “In Scutari one night, I saw about 900 boys,” described a survivor among their ranks. “They were alone and all sleeping in the mud. There was no food for them, but some soldiers gave them what they had. I do not think many of them could have lived much longer. Some of them ate the bark of the trees, snails and anything they could find in ditches.”46 Before they could be evacuated, a further two thousand had died.47
The scale of the emergency had taken not just the Allied military authorities but relief organizations by surprise. Only representatives of two such organizations – the American Red Cross and the Quakers (who were working under the auspices of the Serbian Relief Fund, a British “umbrella” organization which provided the funding for several units) – reached the Adriatic coast in time to be of assistance to the Serbs.48 The Quakers were the first to arrive, in late November 1915, in the company of the British Adriatic Mission. Two civilian relief workers, Theodore Rigg from Wellington, New Zealand, and Glasgow-born Robert Tatlock, worked largely in and around Scutari in the north of the country before they were driven south to Durazzo by the advance of the Austrian army.
The American Red Cross scrambled to find representatives from among their contacts in the region, including Emily, who brought with her the first Red Cross supplies to reach the Serbs in Durazzo. The Red Cross also enlisted three volunteers from the ranks of the sanitary commission they had sent to Serbia the previous spring to fight typhus, including Estus Magoon. By the end of January the Quakers and the American Red Cross had joined forces in Durazzo to feed the remaining refugees. They finally left Albania with the last of them in early February, having provided food and shelter for thousands of men, women and children, many of whom would otherwise have perished.49
Late in the afternoon of 25th January the Arménie arrived safely at its first port of call, the town of Galli
poli on the Italian coast. That day the refugees were ushered onto two new ships, one Italian, one Greek, ahead of their long voyage to Corsica. Emily and John Bellows noticed with consternation that the ships’ authorities had set aside grossly insufficient food for them, but they put their faith in buying further supplies at their next stop, the beautiful but barren port of Messina at the northern tip of Sicily.50
As they prepared to sail, Emily paid a final visit to the holds at noon. What she found made her blood run cold. Three men were suffering from vomiting, diarrhoea and severe cramping, all classic signs of cholera, a highly contagious water-borne disease which could easily kill in two or three days without proper treatment. Although Emily had been inoculated against cholera and Bellows would have been as well, it threatened the lives of anyone else who had been in close contact with them. “This was very serious,” she wrote. “The majority of the people were underfed and in a very exhausted condition, and lavatory facilities were wretched.” She rushed to tell the captain. Before the ship sailed, he had them carried off the ship to the local hospital.51
“We arrived at Messina and the ship was placed in quarantine,” recorded Bellows in his diary the next day. “No one was allowed ashore. The people cried out for bread. Miss Simmonds and I went ashore, but were not allowed into the town… they had telegraphed from Gallipoli warning Messina against us. Cases [of cholera] had developed and we were told that one had died.” The Italian authorities now did their utmost to see the infected vessels off their shores as quickly as possible. To the horror of Emily and John, they were refused leave to buy food. Worse still, they then discovered that the ships’ cooks were selling their remaining supplies of rice and beans with the apparent sanction of the Italian captain. All the while, the captain was under orders to ensure the ships sailed the following day, with or without supplies. Only after the persistent English Quaker reached the offices of the British Consul in an attempt to postpone the voyage did the authorities agree to provide bread to the ships. That day, the resupplied ships sailed for Corsica.52
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 13