A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  Emily too was at her wits’ end. Furious that the captain had permitted such serious abuses to take place in the kitchen, she informed him that from now on she was going to take charge of feeding the refugees. As soon as the ship left dock, she began work. Her endeavours were outlined in the New York Times. “Miss Simmonds obtained a large quantity of rice, which she cooked on shipboard for the Serbians,” the paper reported. “They were so hungry that one man stuck his hand into a boiling pot and grabbed a handful of rice, which he stuffed into his mouth.”53 She made an immediate difference, wrote John. “Bread, beans and wine were served for the mid-day meal, rice and biscuits for the afternoon meal. The people were much more contented, decks were washed and Serbs put on to clean the holds.” But Emily still had her work cut out for her. “The chef could not serve the joint because he had already sold it,” John commented as an afterthought.54

  Although the Serbs had welcomed the news that they were to be taken to Corfu, the fifty thousand men who were already based around Durazzo did not particularly relish the thought of the seventy-five-mile walk south to Valona to catch a transport ship. Neither did Flora. Only a minority, including those declared medically unfit, were to be allowed to embark locally. “Nobody was very anxious for the march if he could go from Durazzo, so one and all declared they had rheumatism or else sore feet,” she reported. Flora was given the choice. “I was perfectly fit,” she wrote happily, “but, as I was told I might do whichever I liked, I thought I might as well embark at Durazzo.” On 3rd February she left the camp for the town and took a room with some of the officers, while they awaited their turn to embark.55

  A majority of the men, including two thirds of Flora’s company, were declared fit enough for the five-day march. The Allies provisioned them as best they could. Each man was given sufficient food and, for once, the road was reasonably good.56 But although they could insure them against death from starvation, they were unable to protect them from the inhabitants. Although all the men of Flora’s company survived, the Albanians repeatedly ambushed the columns, targeting the supply trains in particular.57 In early February the first men of the Serbian army embarked from Valona for the short trip down the rugged Albanian coast to Corfu.

  After nearly three months in captivity, the first of the British women who had been taken prisoner in Serbia were on their way home. Thirty-two women of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and a handful of strays who had been interned in Kevavara in Hungary were released on 4th February and sent home by way of Budapest, Vienna and Switzerland.58 The British Farmers left Vrnjačka Banja on 10th February. They were sent home via much the same route, in “comfortable railway carriages with good food”, with guards chosen for their ability to speak English.59 Eight days later the Berry Unit were also sent home from the town, with two similarly selected guards who evidently took great pride in the fact that they had been picked to accompany them. In Vienna, its members were generously given freedom to visit the city. Many took the opportunity to go shopping. “Some of our party saw in a shop some ‘Gott strafe England’ [God punish England] brooches which they wished to buy as curiosities,” wrote Dr Berry. “The shop people were much embarrassed and refused to sell them, saying, ‘Those are German, not Austrian, you cannot buy them.’”60

  The last of the women to be repatriated were those of the Lady Paget Unit who left Skopje for Bulgaria on 17th February. They were interned “comfortably” for a month in Sofia, where they were cared for by the Bulgarian Red Cross. Ada Barlow travelled with them, through Petrograd to Scandinavia. They eventually reached Newcastle in late March.61

  Emily and John’s refugee ships arrived in Corsica on 13th February, after a trip of nearly three long weeks.62 “We have had an awful time here,” Emily wrote. “Really we have suffered tortures from vermin on this trip.”63 Not only had they been forced to spend nearly two weeks in the prison-like confines of the barren, quarantine island of Frioul off the southern French coast, they had suffered two deaths. One, a woman on the Greek ship, had succumbed to tuberculosis, while the other, a man on their Italian vessel, suffered fatal injuries when he fell from the top deck into the front hold.64 Many of the grateful passengers wrote Emily letters afterwards to thank her for seeing them to safety. A Serbian offered to translate them for her. “The work is very slow,” he told a journalist. “You see, they make me cry.”65

  Following four long days in crowded, unsanitary Durazzo, Flora and Jović arrived at the harbour ahead of their evacuation to Corfu. There, under the hot, mid-morning sun, they took their place on a barge packed with Serbian soldiers, which a tug towed slowly towards one of three Italian steamers anchored in the harbour. All of a sudden they began to hear a faint hum, then the ominous throb of engines above them. “We had just got alongside the steamer when an aeroplane came exactly overhead,” she recalled. “It passed over us three times, dropping bombs all around as if they were shelling peas. Backwards and forwards it came, columns of water shooting up, now 50 yards to the right, now a little to the left, showing where the bombs hit the water harmlessly.” Flora held her breath. “Every moment it seemed as if the next one must drop in the middle of our barge, but we were pretty well seasoned to anything by now, and… we sat still and stolidly watched sudden death hovering over our heads in the blue sky, but it didn’t seem somehow like playing the game when we couldn’t retaliate at all.”

  The captain of the Italian steamer lacked the composure of his Serbian charges. “Sheer off!” he roared at them. “I’m not having my steamer sunk for you miserable lot. I’ll be damned if you’re coming aboard.” As the aeroplane turned tail and headed home, the little tug pulled the barge back to shore until another steamer could be found to take them south to Valona. In the chaos of the embarkation, Flora and Jović became separated from the rest of their company and their possessions. They arrived in Valona with little more than what they were wearing. The following day, still without luggage, they sailed for Corfu. It was an inauspicious start.66

  Chapter 8

  Corfu

  1916

  The ship carrying Flora steamed south into the night, past the black-shadowed mountains of Albania, towards Corfu. After her long, uncomfortable journey, Flora was full of enthusiasm to see a place that she remembered as “a land flowing with milk and honey” from her brief midsummer stopover there with the members of the Anglo-American Unit in 1914. Instead, when she stepped gingerly onto a cold, muddy, dimly lit quayside at the remote port of Gouvia, she looked around in dismay. In the company of Jović and one other officer she spent a miserable night huddled on a packing case by the sentry’s fire in a borrowed coat, while she waited for a morning that could not come soon enough. “There was one of the most beautiful sunrises I have ever seen,” she wrote later, “but under some circumstances you feel you would most willingly barter the most gorgeous panorama of scenery for a cup of hot tea.”1

  As the warm morning sun slowly chased the bitter chill from the air, the three of them set off on foot to find the camp where sixty-eight men of their company had already been sent. After a weary eight-mile walk they reached their low bivouac tents, brushed the dust from their clothes and joined their comrades as they waited expectantly for food and provisions to be delivered. That night they all went to bed hungry. The following day Flora and Jović were told that, due to a “hitch”, the existence of their camp had not yet been registered with the authorities. Until it was, there would be no food for them. With Jović’s help she scraped together sixty francs, sufficient only to buy each man a third of a loaf of bread. “The Greeks know how to charge starving men,” she fumed later. With not so much as another franc between them, Flora knew that the authorities had to be forced into action lest the men sicken or starve. “Would you let me go into the town? I might be able to organize something,” she asked Jović. “All right, Corporal,” he responded. “Go along and see what you can do.”2

  The next morning she spotted her chance in the form of a British Army Service Corps motor lo
rry slowly rumbling along the road near the camp. Hurriedly telling the men that she would return that evening with food for them all, she dashed through pouring rain to hitch a lift to the town of Corfu, fifteen miles away. She traipsed through the narrow and winding streets only to be dismissed by the British, French and Italian authorities in succession. By the end of the day she was wet through, cold, hungry and miserable. “I was beginning to despair,” she recalled, “when I thought I would have one more try with the French authorities.” Standing bedraggled before an official, she launched into her long tale of woe, pulled out her handkerchief, sniffed loudly for added effect and “made the biggest bluff at crying I could screw up on the spur of the moment”. He rushed to comfort her. “We’ll give you what you want,” he told her hurriedly. “But you mustn’t make a precedent of doing business this way.” She nodded, sniffed again, wiped her eyes, and thanked him. That evening, having secured the promise of the delivery of regular rations, she returned exultantly by carriage to the camp with two sacks of bread, another of bully beef and a barrel of wine. Jović patted her on the back. “You’ve been a pretty good corporal,” he told her.3

  Flora had done well by them. Most companies had had no such luck. The French authorities had taken charge of the immense task of feeding the one hundred and fifty thousand Serbs on Corfu, many of whom were sick and emaciated. One problem after another beset their efforts. For the first six weeks the rain, wind and hail that lashed the island turned the roads into quagmires, creating immense transportation headaches. Such logistical difficulties were exacerbated by problems which would have verged on comical had their consequences not been so catastrophic. The French had shipped across large quantities of Australian frozen meat, which they distributed across the island to the Serbian camps. The Serbs, who had never seen frozen meat before, simply threw it straight into boiling water. Until it was explained to them that it had to be defrosted first, the results had the consistency and edibility of a “pneumatic tyre”.4 Yet another culinary miscalculation was made by a philanthropic American who inexplicably sent the Serbs large quantities of tinned pumpkin. “All the tricks and chicanery of the kitchen” would not induce them to eat it.5

  Others fell ill or died after being fed food that was too solid or rich for their systems. “The incessant wet, combined with the effects of bully beef, on men whose stomachs were absolutely destroyed by months of semi-starvation was largely responsible for the terrible amount of sickness and very high mortality among the troops during the first month of our stay here,” noted Flora. “This was especially the case among the boys and young recruits, who, less hardy than the trained soldiers, were completely broken down by their late hardships and died by thousands.”6

  Neither were adequate medical arrangements in place to deal with the thousands who needed treatment. The numbers at first overwhelmed the few Serbian and French doctors on the island, who had little assistance except for a handful of “freelancers”, mainly Austrian POW doctors and local nuns. Starvation continued to take its toll, while typhus, typhoid, cholera and dysentery reappeared among the ranks. The sickest were taken to two small islands off the coast of Corfu. One, Lazareto, was used to quarantine those with infectious diseases.7 The other, the barren island of Vido, was used for the thousands of men who were expected to die. The “barely living skeletons moving about in tattered uniforms… [were] too weak from hunger to speak, to hear, to think beyond the effort of putting one foot before another,” recorded the American archaeologist Harriet Boyd Hawes, the sole relief worker to aid the French and Serbian medical staff on the island in the early weeks. “They could not be treated like human beings. Only violent tones and gestures could reach their stricken senses. So though our hearts were breaking for them, we must scold to get them into line, to insist on fairness in feeding. In the first days they ate to their destruction anything they could lay [their] hands on and cried like babies when denied.”8

  Throughout February and March, around one hundred men died daily on the island. Their bodies were stacked “like a woodpile” behind a screen at the small harbour. At intervals during the day and night, they were taken offshore by boat, weighed down and thrown into the sea.9 Altogether, around five and a half thousand men died on Vido, which is now a site of pilgrimage for many Serbs.10

  After a few long, cold days at the wet and uncomfortable camp, Flora had had more than enough of lounging about in the incessant rain with nothing to do. “I simply can’t sit and twiddle my thumbs as they do,” she once wrote impatiently of her Serbian companions.11 The monotony was broken only briefly when she was transferred with her company to a permanent site near the coastal village of Ipsos, where the rest of the Morava Division were based. But although the new camp was set in a picturesque part of the island among hills, glades and trees, she soon grumbled that they were now “very far from anywhere”.12 Restless, bored and in search of the constant stimulation she required, she began to use the lorries which delivered the company’s bread as a sort of bus service to get around the island.

  In mid-February Flora met Robert Carr Bosanquet, an Eton-educated archaeologist who was one of four overworked representatives of the Serbian Relief Fund then on the island.13 “She is an adventurous English nurse, who has attached herself to a Serbian cavalry regiment, holds the rank of corporal, roughs it with the toughest of them, sleeps on the ground, under a little bivouac tent, without even a groundsheet, and dresses like a man,” he described in a letter home to his wife. But what interested him most were her linguistic skills. “[She is] about 40, white hair, tanned, round-faced and cheery. We want her to help us as [a] Serbian interpreter,” he added. Flora too had taken great interest in his work along the quayside, unloading and sorting supplies. When he asked her if she would consider helping them, she leapt at his offer. Above all, she was keen to find something that would both keep her occupied and give her an excuse to escape her remote camp for the relative excitement of the town.

  The Fund set her to work overseeing gangs of Serbian soldiers at the crowded harbour who were tasked with unloading shiploads of supplies and transferring them to one of two storehouses for sorting. Early each morning she walked over the polished stone streets to the quayside, climbed down the stairs to the waterfront and picked her way through the mountains of crates piled high against the stone walls that divided the shore from the streets of the town above. There she joined a crush of men and horses working furiously to unload and shift supplies, overlooked by curious locals watching the action from the railings above. “The quay was a most interesting place,” recollected Flora, “though I should have enjoyed the work more if it had not poured steadily all day and every day.”14

  Apart from the weather, the job suited Flora to the ground. The atmosphere was hectic and chaotic, never dull, with English, French and Serbians jostling for transport and labour. She was a good manager with a distinctive and highly effective technique, which combined scheduled breaks with the willingness to use gentle psychological manipulation if her men required further incentive. She was also one of the few conversant in the three languages spoken at the quay. The officers and men of her company had gone to great lengths over the past months to help her learn Serbian. She could now speak the language fairly well, although there were still moments when it failed her. “One day I told my orderly to go and fetch my thick coat, which he would find on a chair in my room, and bring it to me,” she recalled. “He duly arrived back about an hour afterwards with the coat and the chair, which he had carried all through the town, and was much discomfited at the howls of laughter with which we all greeted him. I asked him what the landlady had said to his removing her furniture like that, and he confessed that she had made a few remarks, but, as she spoke nothing but Italian and he nothing but Serbian, they passed lightly over his head.”15

  But her Serbian was still good enough to be of use at the quay and, once others learnt of her linguistic abilities, she was in great demand as an interpreter. “It was quite a usual thing
to find an Englishman, who could not speak French, trying to explain to a French official that he wanted a fatigue party of Serbian soldiers to unload a certain lighter, and neither of them being able to explain to the said fatigue party, when they had got them, what it was they wanted them to do,” she wrote, pleased to be of use.16

  Flora was confident before starting work that she would work well alongside her new Serbian colleagues. What worried her was how she would be treated by the British. The officers of the British Adriatic Mission in Durazzo had treated her with suspicion at first, and she was concerned, rightly, that the ordinary British Tommies would do likewise. “I can’t say I was struck by the friendliness of my fellow countrymen in Corfu,” she wrote in a frank letter to a friend from home.17 With time, her aptitude for hard physical work in the wind and rain, her linguistic competence and obvious managerial ability won most of them over entirely. In print she glossed over her initial problems with them. “I was rather afraid of the British Tommies at first,” she wrote. “But, on the contrary there was nothing they would not do to help me, and the French soldiers were just the same.”18

  Within days of starting work for the Serbian Relief Fund, Flora began to see familiar faces in Corfu town. A few of the women that she had known from Serbia had begun to arrive both singly and as members of reorganized relief units. Although the relief effort had got under way slowly, by April it had started to gather momentum. Provisions began to arrive in volume from Britain, America and France, but the number of volunteers remained relatively small. Only two British organizations were represented – the Wounded Allies and the Serbian Relief Fund – on an island with tens of thousands of sick or wounded Serbs.19 The former sent out a unit of only five members at the end of March to set up a hospital in a private villa at Benitses, thirteen miles south of Corfu town.20 Over the following weeks and months they sent additional staff from Britain and generous supplies of hospital stores, food and clothing. By midsummer they were running a hospital for over one hundred and fifty “poor broken-down men”.21 “Many are quite incurable,” wrote one of their doctors, despairing of the task she faced. “[They] must slowly die of inanition because they can never digest the simplest food. An overdose of morphia would be the kindest treatment for them.”22