A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  The harried doctor met Flora’s arrival with a surge of relief. First he issued instructions for her to be laid carefully in the operating tent. Then, while he placed a call to Milić, he ordered her to be given hot drinks. On his return she was lifted gently from her stretcher onto the operating table in the centre of the tent.2 Even if they had had anaesthetic available, they had so many wounded that they would have lacked the time to use it. Telling her to grit her teeth, he stood at her head while another doctor began to probe her wounds for shrapnel. Flora was by now so distraught that her usual nerve and stoicism momentarily left her. “I buried my nose in the broad chest of [the doctor]… and frankly yowled for the first time,” she confessed. The doctor knew exactly how to deal with her. “Shut up and remember you’re a soldier,” he barked as he lit a cigarette and shoved it between her lips. “[His words] had far more effect than any amount of petting would have done,” she remarked later.3

  Flora had been seriously but not dangerously wounded. By the time the doctors had placed her on the ground to make room for the next victim of the fighting, they had removed what they could of the shrapnel from her right side and had bandaged her shattered right arm. They knew that she would require further operations to remove many of the smaller splinters, once she could be evacuated to hospital in Salonika.

  Milić’s intervention on Flora’s behalf was one of his last. The “gallant, jolly, little colonel” who had looked after Flora so well, treated her as his equal and tried so hard to save her life was killed later that month when a stray shell landed on his tent.4

  That evening Flora was taken by stretcher to the divisional ambulance at Dobroveni, near where Jović was buried. She arrived at two a.m. “They wrung me warmly by the hand, and congratulated me on being wounded; for in those days it was considered an honour to be wounded in the defence of your country,” she recalled.5 That day the first of a series of journalists arrived to visit her. “The Englishwoman sergeant had a tent to herself,” wrote Herbert Corey, an American journalist for the Associated Press.

  She was lying on a litter, covered with some rough blankets, when we entered. We saw a wholesome, fresh-faced woman, who might be something less than forty and looks thirty years old. She smiled pleasantly at us. “Badly wounded?” “Rather painful,” said she. There was some desultory conversation. The picture of that… journey down the mountainside, in the darkness and snow-charged rain, suffering from shrapnel wounds, persisted in my mind. I asked about it. “Rather bad,” said she. That was all… She is at once a good soldier and womanly woman. Most woman soldiers – it is only here in the Near East there are woman soldiers – are either freaks or harridans. Miss Sands [sic] is neither. “Why did a woman like that go in for soldiering?” I asked a friend. The friend is an English officer. He considered for a time. Then – “Um,” said he. “Did you ever live in Croydon?”6

  “Will she live?” Flora’s stretcher-bearers were asked time and again as they passed strings of mules carrying other wounded. “It looks like she will,” they replied brightly. She had spent one night at Dobroveni before her stretcher was hung from the axles of a two-wheeled handcart. She had then been handed over to the three men who were charged with wheeling her to the next dressing station, several miles farther south on a low hill above the village of Krušograd.7 It took them much of the day to get her to the Third Danube Field Ambulance, which was virtually adjacent to the mobile Scottish Women’s Hospital’s Transport Column. One of the chauffeurs, Elsie Corbett, went to see her. “I… found her lying on straw in a corner, her wounds already dressed, but with more wounded being carried in and piled more or less on top of her.” After her doctor reassured her that he would take no offence, Flora agreed at the request of the women to transfer to their tented camp. “She seemed to be wounded absolutely all over,” wrote Elsie, who regarded her with the same awe as the other women of her Column, “but said we moved her much better than the Serbs did, which we felt was a tremendous compliment from her.”8

  Flora spent one night with the Scottish Women. The following morning they drove her to Sorović (now Amindeon), a village that lay close to the southern tip of Lake Ostrovo where the Serbian Relief Fund had just finished erecting a tented hospital.9 One of the only hospitals in the region to take civilians, it was run mainly by women. “These girls… dressed in short skirts and trench boots, smoked like the deuce, and some of them were pretty good swearers… and all of them were about as efficient as it was possible to be,” wrote Major Cecil Alport of the Royal Army Medical Corps.10 Hardly had Flora been welcomed as one of their first patients when the demands started to arrive from the Serbian military authorities. “I got to know about [her] because of a wire sent from the Serbian headquarters enquiring whether she was in the [No. 33] Stationary Hospital,” recalled Alport.

  They were in a terrible state of mind, fearing she had been killed and not knowing what had become of her… Naturally, when I heard she was a casualty in the hospital next door, I called to see her, expecting to find an Amazon – one of the Spartan sisterhood. Instead, I found a sweet-faced woman, bordering on middle age, with short grey hair and a pleasant voice… She told me that before she was wounded she had been in the trenches for thirty days without being relieved, and when I add that the weather during that time had been extremely cold and wet, it will be readily appreciated how greatly she must have suffered and how extraordinary her courage and powers of endurance must have been.11

  On 21st November, five days after being wounded, Flora was lifted onto a hospital train – in reality, nothing more than a series of modified cattle trucks – for the journey from Sorović to Salonika. Sixteen hours later she arrived at the 41st General Hospital.12 The hospital, at Samlis, was just over seven miles from Salonika along the road to Monastir. One of several based in or around the town, it had been opened only three months previously, in August 1916, as part of a commitment by the British and French to provide seven thousands beds each for the Serbs who had no hospitals of their own.13 The Girton and Newnham Unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals had also set up a tented hospital at Salonika’s harbour, having had their plans to work in Serbia thrown into chaos by the invasion the year before. Other hospitals were run, staffed and equipped by the French, Italians and Canadians, to handle what would amount to two hundred thousand admittances during the course of 1917 alone, the vast majority for malaria, which was tearing strips out of the ranks of the Allied armies.14

  Such hospitals became virtual “townships of canvas”, where cooking, laundry, medical treatment and administration were carried out on a near industrial scale under mostly tented accommodation.15 So too did they become centres of entertainment, in an effort by the hospital authorities to keep their charges occupied. Most famous of all for the quality of its concerts was the British-run hospital for venereal diseases, which was tucked away along a dusty road on the outskirts of Salonika. “Transport some hundreds of thousands of British men between the ages of eighteen and forty odd to a more or less glamorous East, hot sun, cheap and fiery liquors, moonlight, dark-eyed houris of the night and ‘What have you’,” wrote one pragmatic commentator. “The result is the presence of a VD hospital on the outskirts of Salonika… The concerts given at that particular hospital were famous for their excellence… perhaps it was due to the fact that the audience being exclusively of the male sex, and the atmosphere being in some way conducive to the broadest form of humour…”16

  “Good God, another of them!” exclaimed the second matron when she was told of Flora’s arrival.17 She already had one woman soldier, Milunka Savić, on her hands. The last thing she wanted was another. Twenty-eight-year-old Milunka looked more like a chubby, fierce boy than a girl. From a village near Novi Pazar in south-west Serbia, she had been fighting with the Serbian army for years, having first enlisted during the Balkan Wars. She belonged to the same regiment as Flora and had been brought to the hospital after being shot in the thigh. This was the fifth time she had been wounded.18

&n
bsp; Although Milunka already had a fearsome reputation for bravery, she was also renowned among the hospital staff for a series of misdemeanours. “Long before she was able to walk properly she got out of bed,” wrote Flora, who came to relish the tales of her many transgressions.

  [She] hobbled out of hospital on crutches and went down town without leave. When she reappeared next day, having been absent for twenty-four hours, the colonel [Colonel Brackenridge, the hospital director] put her by herself in a small tent, as a punishment. She solved the problem by immediately setting fire to the tent. As soon as her leg was strong enough she repeated the performance, and stayed away for three days. On her return the exasperated colonel put her under arrest in a small tent, with a sentry at the door; but she completely flabbergasted the sentry by walking out under his nose. “What could I do?” said the Tommy, ruefully. “She just laughed at me when I tried to stop her, and I couldn’t shoot a woman in cold blood.”19

  The second matron found her new patient in no mood for friendly preambles. Flora had been “dumped” into bed the night before by a self-important sister, who handed her an aspirin, berated her for smoking and ordered her to go to sleep. Racked with pain, she had spent a sleepless night. “Matron, I’ve got a packet of cigarettes under my pillow, and sister says you are going to take them away from me,” she stated irritably. To her surprise, the matron gave her a grin. “Smoke as much as you like,” she replied amiably, “so long as you don’t set the tent on fire.” She was “an Irishwoman like myself”, concluded Flora approvingly later.20

  Monastir had finally been wrestled from the Bulgarians by the Franco-Serbian offensive on 19th November. For the first few days after the fall of the town the Serbs and their allies had continued to skirmish half-heartedly with the Bulgarians who had fled north towards Prilep. But by 11th December all operations had ceased.21 With winter virtually upon them, the soldiers who had survived weeks of fighting against all the odds were at the limit of their endurance. The Allied armies had no reserves of men to exploit the victory, while the ranks of the Serbian army, who had borne the brunt of the fighting, had been decimated. Of, for example, the six thousand men of the Morava Division who had fought at Hill 1212, only eighteen hundred were left standing after the battle.22 Although the recapture of the town was of great political significance for the Serbs, it had little strategic value in and of itself. With the suspension of Allied operations the Bulgarians were able to regroup and return to the mountain heights that overlooked Monastir from the north, positions that were as strong as those they had held before the onset of hostilities. They were also close enough to the town to be able to shell it at will.

  The war had created a refugee crisis throughout Macedonia at the outset of winter, as villagers fled before the fighting and townspeople, many Jewish, abandoned Monastir in their thousands to escape the rain of deadly Bulgarian shellfire. Even during times of peace, many of them had led a hand-to-mouth existence. They now flooded towns and villages with little more than what they were wearing. With insufficient access to decent sanitation, food, clean water or fuel for heating or cooking, the incidence of intestinal problems and diseases such as tuberculosis and rheumatism began to rise ominously among them, as did the threat of typhus.23 Although the Allied armies across the region saved them from outright starvation by providing food as and when they could, for months there was no central organization and no coordinated relief effort to provide them with other basic necessities.24

  Emily was one of the first to begin work among them. After her work had finished in Corfu in the autumn, she had transferred to Salonika. By early October she was inspecting hospitals and refugee camps across the region on behalf of the Serbian Relief Committee of America, in partnership with forty-three-year-old Ruth Farnam from Long Island, who had a marked talent for self-aggrandizement, to the irritation of most of those who spent any time in her company.

  When Emily left Farnam’s company – whether by volition or luck is unclear – to look after thirty-four orphaned children in the coastal resort of New Phaleron near Athens,25 Farnam continued the visits of inspection throughout the region. One of them was to the American Unit of the Scottish Woman’s Hospitals, to the utter dismay of its competent and modest director, Dr Agnes Bennett. “She always referred to all the royalties of the Balkans by their Christian names,” Dr Bennett wrote in disgust. “And when she departed told me if I wanted to see her to be sure and search for her in the social columns of the New York Press and I should know at once where she was to be found!” Worse still for Dr Bennett, on Farnam’s return to the States she informed “all and sundry” that the unit were giving no credit to the Americans for the money that supported them and that they were not flying the American flag. Dr Bennett was forced in response to this allegation to write to the Committee of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals to explain that the Geneva Convention did not permit them to fly it. By then, however, the damage to fund-raising efforts in the States had already been done.26

  Farnam left her unfortunate hosts in the American Unit to accept an invitation graciously extended to her by the Serbs to visit an observation post near the frontline. She was taken around 9th October to see the battle for the village of Brod. She later proclaimed in print that she was the “first woman of any nationality to enter reconquered Serbian territory”, disingenuously ignoring Flora’s presence, of which she would have been all too aware. For the duration of the war she capitalized on her visit to the front by giving fund-raising talks in the States under the guise of “Sergeant” Ruth Farnam, dressed in Serbian uniform, in which she stated that she was the “only American woman soldier of the war”.27 She was no such thing.

  By the end of the month, with Farnam on her way home, Emily had been asked by the Serbian authorities to undertake relief work among the refugees. She agreed at the request of the American consul in Salonika to accept forty-four-year-old Amelia Peabody Tileston as her assistant, who, like Farnam, came from a wealthy East Coast family. But unlike Farnam, who was interested only in self-promotion, Amelia soon proved herself to be utterly devoted to the Serb cause, tireless in raising funds and willing to push herself beyond the point of exhaustion in her work. She was also petty, vehemently anti-Semitic and utterly without tact.

  Amelia was delighted to be able to work with someone whom she already knew by reputation. “Miss Simmonds has been asked by the Serbian officials to go to the front,” she wrote happily in a letter home. “She is the only woman whom they will allow to go there, because she has done such wonderful work for two years for the Serbians that they worship her, and have unbounded confidence in her capabilities.”28 At the start of November Amelia and Emily began work together on the narrow quays of Salonika harbour. They collected and sorted Red Cross supplies that had lain in warehouses for months, while Emily also made arrangements for trucks to deliver the goods to the war-devastated villages across the region, to the admiration of those who saw her at work. “She violated a number of rules and perhaps broke a number of laws,” wrote Herbert Corey. “But she got the goods and distributed them where they were most needed.”29

  Flora’s time in hospital soon settled into a routine. On clear days she would be carried outside by orderlies to sit in the sun. The surgeon arrived twice a day to dress her injuries, under the watchful eye of Milunka. “One day, [she] had the curiosity to count my wounds,” recalled Flora. “The count completed, she informed me that I had twenty-four, and I felt that it was high praise when she said I could bear pain as well as a Serb. She herself was a perfect stoic.”30

  Word had spread quickly throughout Salonika of the arrival of the new patient. On 22nd November, while waiting for news about the arrival of the trucks, Emily was horrified to hear that Flora had been brought into hospital, severely wounded, a few hours earlier. Telling Amelia that she would return in two days, she dropped everything. She became one of Flora’s first visitors, arriving only hours after she had been carried in. Other wounded soldiers, often swathed in bandages, b
egan to sneak into the women’s tent to keep her company, only to be chased away by British nurses who were scandalized by the breach in decorum. “Let them visit her whenever they want,” commented the normally regulation-bound director, Colonel Brackenridge, when the nurses’ complaints reached his ears.31

  Word had also reached the Bulgarian wards of Flora’s arrival. One of the patients, by an extraordinary turn of chance, was her “pet Bulgar”, who, by now, was convalescing well. When he heard that she too had been injured, he “begged and begged” to be carried to see her, but as a prisoner with few rights he was flatly refused. To Flora’s sorrow and dismay, she was only told much later of his presence, after he had recovered sufficiently to be sent to a POW camp. She received little sympathy from her Serbian friends, who remained deeply antagonistic to their Bulgarian counterparts. His requests were “too much of a good thing”, they told her.32

  A week after her arrival, Captain Milan Jovičić, the dashing and handsome half-Serb, half-Scottish aide-de-camp of Crown Prince Aleksandar, arrived to see her. He was led to her bed outside her marquee. In the presence of Colonel Brackenridge, her doctor, the matrons and “as many others as could be collected round the bed at short notice”, he pinned the gold and silver Karađorđe Star with Swords for non-commissioned officers and men onto her pyjama jacket.33 Flora had been given the highest decoration in the Serbian army for bravery under fire, which carried with it automatic promotion to sergeant major.34 A translation of the order conferring the award, signed by the chief-of-staff of the Serbian army General Petar Bojović no less, was also presented to her. “Volunteer Sergeant in the 2nd Infantry Regiment Miss Flora Sandes, an Englishwoman, has distinguished herself by her courage and by a rare spirit of self-sacrifice in all combats in which her unit has taken part up to the [16th November 1916], the day on which she was wounded when twenty steps from the Bulgars,” stated the order grandly. “[On] the [16th November] at Hill 1212, she served as an example to her company by her bravery.”35