As the news of Flora’s injuries reached the outside world, excited reports of her exploits in the Serbian army hit the British press. “In a clean and comfortable bed, amid comfortable and quiet surroundings, lies a comely motherly-looking little lady. Though her short-cropped hair is grey, her unfurrowed face is young and fresh, with a peachy bloom in the rounded cheeks that tells of perfect health,” wrote the special correspondent to the Daily Express. “Miss Flora Sands [sic] – that is the little lady’s name – is a Scotswoman,” he continued, managing simultaneously to patronize his subject and mangle his facts, before describing how she was wounded. Other enthusiastic but often inaccurate reports followed, notable mostly for their varying portrayals of Flora’s nationality. Her photo made the picture page of the Daily Mirror twice within the space of a week. “British Nurse ‘Who Was Always First over the Top’ Decorated with the Serbian VC” shouted one headline, to what would have been the despair of Flora, who despised being labelled as anything other than a soldier. Newsflashes followed across the world. “Wounded English Girl Wins Serbian Cross”, reported the New York Times. Articles appeared in the Australian papers, boasting of Flora’s connection to the country through her brother John, a Sydney resident. The Irish too tried to claim Flora as their own. “Kerrywoman Soldier in Serbia”, proclaimed the Irish Independent, relying on Flora’s ancestry to stake a link to the county.36
Such publicity turned Flora, for the first time, into a household name. In an era when only men could vote, she provided an example of what women could achieve. She proved so inspirational that British liaison officers attached to the Serbian army grumbled about the amount of time it was taking to reject applications from other women. “Fired by the example of Flora Sandes, who joined as a private and became a sergeant, we had quite a large number of applications from British women to join the Serbian Army,” recalled one such officer.
The Admiral [the now Vice Admiral Ernest Troubridge, head of the liaison staff between the Serbian army and the British government] often left to me the unpleasant task of turning them down. In general, for obvious reasons, their sex and lack of physical strength rendered them unsuitable for service in the infantry, but a sprinkling found jobs as transport drivers. I remember particularly one Canadian woman who applied. She was annoyed when I asked who would carry her pack on the march, and furiously angry when I suggested she would be better employed looking after the two young children she had left at home. After Flora Sandes was seriously wounded by the explosion of a hand grenade, I am convinced we would have raised a regiment of women had we been so minded. Their martial spirit was wonderful.37
By mid-January Flora was considered well enough to be discharged from hospital on the condition that she sail for a convalescent camp for the Serbs in Bizerte, on the north coast of Tunisia. Milunka too had engineered her own release, to Flora’s evident admiration. “The real joke was when she ran away for the third time,” she recalled.
[She] got the Serb military authorities to give her her papers and return to the front, and then came back to hospital to say goodbye to the colonel, [Brackenridge] and thank him for all his kindness! She was perfectly unconscious of the fact that she had upset him at all, and really wanted to express her gratitude for all the care she had received. But the second matron, not having the temerity to take her up to the colonel’s quarters, told her that he was not very well, and that she would give him the message when he got better.38
“Remember you still have half a blacksmith’s shop inside of you,” the doctor warned Flora as he signed her release papers. “You’re likely to have further trouble on and off.” After nearly two months in hospital, Flora was only too happy to accept the doctor’s terms, in word if not in spirit. She packed the few things she had, bade farewell to her fellow patients and travelled into Salonika to await the departure of the French hospital ship. On arrival she was given the news that the ship would be delayed in sailing. Thinking that this was luck indeed, she put the doctor’s warnings to the back of her mind and seized the opportunity to celebrate her discharge in the restaurants and bars of Salonika. So energetically did she enjoy herself that, by the time her ship sailed two days later, she was hardly able to stand. The French doctor on board the vessel took one look at her and sent her to bed forthwith. “So once more, to my disgust, I became a stretcher case,” recorded Flora.39
In mid-January 1917 Flora’s hospital ship travelled south from Salonika harbour, past the heights of Mount Olympus and the scenic Greek islands before sailing through the Sea of Crete to the Mediterranean. There it passed the islands of Malta and Sicily before arriving at Bizerte at the northernmost tip of Tunisia, then the most important French naval base in the southern Mediterranean. As the ship neared the quayside, its more mobile passengers caught their first glimpse of what at first appeared to be little more than a “desolate backwater” of low forts, warehouses, barracks and hotels that lined the waterfront. Behind the town they could see nothing but bare, barren hills.40 They gazed out over the little Berber villages that lined the shore as the hospital ship turned sharply south to sail down the Bizerte canal to a lake that also bore the name of the town, and which provided a sheltered harbour to passing Allied vessels. All the while Flora lay confined to her hospital bed, following an emergency operation on board. Once the ship anchored she was carried by stretcher to a French-run naval hospital. “There they dug out some more pieces of bomb, and put me to bed for another three weeks, with French sailors to nurse me, by way of a change,” she wrote.41
In the rush to evacuate the survivors of the retreat from the Albanian coast, French and Italian ships took ten thousand to Bizerte before the Serbian government asked for all transports to be routed instead to Corfu, so that their soldiers could remain as close to Serbia as possible.42 The government nonetheless had no objection to the continued evacuation to Bizerte of those whose fighting days were clearly over – the shell-shocked, the blind, the epileptics and those missing limbs – and ships continued to arrive throughout the rest of the war from Salonika bearing such damaged men. Their numbers were further augmented by thousands of recruits of Serb, Croat, Slovenian, Bosnian or Herzegovinian descent, mostly from America, as well as by those like Flora who needed extended convalescence and, in early 1917, members of the ultra-nationalist Black Hand society who had been purged from the ranks of the Serbian army.43
Although most Serbs lent their support jointly to the ruling Radical Party and the royal family, those who gave theirs to the Black Hand were ruthless in their willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their aim of a single south Slav state under Serbian leadership, including threats, intimidation and political assassination.44 By early 1917, with fighting in Macedonia at a temporary standstill, its supporters within army ranks began to agitate and conspire in the face of rumours – likely false – that the Serbian government was considering signing a separate peace with the enemy. Even the head of the American Unit in Ostrovo noted the change in mood. “I’m afraid there is some definite disaffection in the army (Serb) and a large number of their best fighting officers have been imprisoned or deported,” wrote Dr Bennett in a prescient entry in her diary. “This place is a hotbed of adverse currents. I sometimes wonder if they can ever be united. The man who does it will be a genius.”45
The Serbian government acted decisively to contain the threat by ordering what amounted to a purge of Black Hand elements in the army. One in every thirty officers was suspended, one hundred and eighty were sent to Bizerte where they were imprisoned by the French in an ancient Arab fort, and three, including their brutal leader Dragutin Dimitrijević (widely known as “Apis”), were executed on almost certainly fabricated charges, including plotting to assassinate Crown Prince Aleksandar. So great was the infiltration of the Black Hand into the Serbian Third Army that it was broken up at the end of March and its units divided between the First and Second Armies.46
The majority of Serbian soldiers and Yugoslav recruits were sent to live at th
e camp of Nador, which lay three miles outside of the town atop a featureless hill. It was a “dreary” place of around six thousand men with no entertainments or social centres, only row upon row of tents and unlit huts set amid mud and dust. Many of the men were chronically ill or permanently disabled, but their many medical needs – which were almost exclusively in the hands of the French – were ill met by their ally, who was able to devote little care to their rehabilitation.47 Instead, a mere handful of British civilian volunteers, their numbers inadequate to meet the vast need, were struggling against the odds to do what they could for them. “Some were yellow and withered with dysentery, others were paralysed after typhus, some lame through frostbite, and others with all the vital power burnt out of them with the fevers caught in marshy grounds,” wrote one of them despairingly. “There were blind men and lame men, men without hands or without arms… There were men, still greater tragedies to themselves and to their friends, who had become epileptic with head wounds or who, as a result of shell shock, had lost all nervous control… Never have I seen such a society of broken people. There they were, indistinguishable one from another in their tattered blue-grey uniforms, as withered and unwanted and as dismally adrift as leaves on autumn streams.”48
While one volunteer set up training workshops, classrooms and a printing press, another established a blind school to teach Braille. Yet another, Francesca Wilson, set up “The English Home for Disabled Serbs” to give one hundred shell-shocked residents more specialized treatment and care in a series of whitewashed military huts outside of the town. It was an “interesting experiment,” she commented modestly, that combined “Home and treatment and workshop”. “Tremblers strung together pieces of bamboo and beads to make curtains to keep away the flies, paralytics plaited palm mats… epileptics worked in the garden and blind men made straw hats for them,” she wrote proudly of their accomplishments.49
On her release from hospital, Flora had no qualms about pulling strings to find a room in Bizerte in preference to the dusty and depressing camp. The town, almost solely Arab in character, was to her liking. She could wander through its arched passageways, past its mosques, painted shuttered houses and dark shops open to the streets, or stroll along the palm-tree-lined promenade by the sea. An entire industry had developed around the Allied – mainly French and Serbian – presence, and by the time Flora had arrived she could saunter to any of a number of cafés, bars and restaurants through its crowded streets, past donkey carts and camels, Arabs and Berbers in traditional flowing dress, who now shared the town with uniformed soldiers and sailors and military vehicles of every sort.50
She was soon having a “very jolly time”, she reported, surrounded by French and Serbian friends. Should she wish, there were also military reviews, funfairs and amateur concerts on offer, of varying quality.51 She often played cards into the evening at one of the cafés, or at the Cercle Militaire, a club for officers that she was permitted to attend.52 She spent other evenings at the Yugoslav Officers’ Mess at Nador being entertained by Gypsy musicians over dinner. There were moments of greater excitement too, courtesy of her extensive social connections. “Best of all the Admiral gave the Commandant of the airship and the big aeroplanes… permission to take me up in both, the first fine day,” she wrote enthusiastically to her sister Sophia. “I hope to goodness this wind will go down… as they can’t go up until it does. It will be topping. I told you I’d plunged in a submarine didn’t I?”53
Although the rounds of incessant socializing during her three-and-a-half-month stay in the town helped her pass the time, they also made her increasingly aware of her incongruous status. Flora was frequently invited to parties or to dinner by high-ranking Serbian and French officials, but found it difficult to know whether they expected her to behave like a British lady or a Serbian sergeant. “It’s a hard world where half the people say you should not dress as a man, and the other half want to punish you for dressing as a woman,” she wrote.
Not only was her position ambiguous, so too was her appearance. “Being thin and sunburnt I could often pass as a man, but my voice now and then betrayed me,” Flora recalled. It was an ambiguity that she embraced. She liked the fact that she cut a curious figure. It opened doors for her and she relished the attention. She also enjoyed the ability it gave her to be at the centre of practical jokes. One warm night she wandered into the centre of the town with a captain friend, who told her that they were going to a different sort of café than usual, and that she was to keep quiet so that her voice would not give her away. “Three girls came and sat down at our table at once, and he ordered champagne,” she described.
Then [the captain] explained that I had only just arrived, and couldn’t speak a word of French, and was, besides, too stupid to talk much at all. “He doesn’t look so stupid, but he’s very shy,” said one of them, planting herself on my knee with her arm round my neck. I kept it up for a while, though the captain was almost helpless with laughter. But when she kissed me I could not help turning my head away, and that, of course, made her suspicious. Then she tumbled to it and they were all much amused…54
Flora watched jealously as acquaintances, declared fit to fight, were sent back to Salonika at a time when rumours were rife that the Allies were planning to attack again. Both sides had spent the winter recovering from the fighting of the autumn and gradually consolidating their new positions, but the winter had also seen the withdrawal of most German units from the front. With the start of the spring thaw came word of a new offensive, in the knowledge that this withdrawal had also bolstered the prospects of their success.55 “I loved being with the regiment,” she wrote plaintively, “and was desperately afraid that the long-talked-off [sic] offensive would really come off some day, and that I should not be in it. Nor could I bear the men to think I was an ‘ambusqué’ [an embusqué, a shirker], as we called those who didn’t go back when they could.”
By May Flora had decided that she was well enough to rejoin her company. She stuck by her conviction, determinedly ignoring any symptoms that hinted otherwise. “The Dr says the nerve in my arm which works my thumb got cut but it’s quite unnecessary and doesn’t worry me in the least,” she commented with more than a hint of bravado. “And my arm is getting quite strong again.”56 Confident that she would not be refused, she applied to the Serbian commandant for permission to leave a town that she now found confining. “You’re not yet fit to go,” he told her. In steadfast disbelief that his refusal could possibly have been on legitimate health grounds, she pestered him over the following days. Finally, he relented. “All right,” he conceded reluctantly. “You can leave shortly.”57
Chapter 11
The Front
1917
It felt good to be back. “It was a glorious moonlight night,” Flora remembered. “The mountains looked wild and lovely, and the air was good up there after the relaxing heat of Bizerte. It seemed almost like coming home again, and I was so glad to meet them all once more.” The men welcomed her simply but warmly. “Our vodnik [their platoon officer, Vukoje] sent his batman with a present of a packet of candles. Perhaps it may not sound a very romantic present, but there, when you could not get the smallest thing, or carry anything more than a knapsack, they were worth their weight in gold.”1
Flora had also returned to the sad news that her company, the Fourth, no longer existed. “There were only about sixteen of my company left to be transferred anywhere, as we had been so cut up at Hill 1212, and in all the various scraps leading up to it,” she reported sadly of the fate of what had once been a proud unit of two hundred and twenty men. The sixteen survivors, including Flora, had been transferred to the First Company, where, at least, they were together again. She took solace that her friend Lieutenant Vukoje “had miraculously come through”, as had Second Lieutenant Dodić, who had risked his life to save hers on Hill 1212.2
By the time Flora reached her regiment at the end of May, Emily had been hard at work in Macedonia for over five months. A
t the end of December she had travelled with Amelia Tileston to work at the First Field Hospital of the Morava Division near Vrbeni [now Itea, in northern Greece], “a mournful village of leaky mud hovels”.3 A little later, leaving Amelia behind, she left for Brod, a village just over eight miles north, after she heard rumours that the civilian population were suffering severely from the effects of exposure and starvation. With her came her two Serbian assistants, Jovan Mitrović and Milorad Gligorović.4 “I was more than a little frightened when I landed in Brod with a Ford car-load of food and two Serbian soldiers, alone in a wilderness of Italian soldiers and Serbian refugees,” she recalled. “None spoke English and no other women were here save those I had come to feed.”5
On her first morning in the village, Emily left her tent on the hills above the town, pulled on her boots and with no further ado made her first proper inspection of her surroundings. “I am not as particular about my morning bath as I was when I left Roosevelt Hospital over three years ago, dressed in my starchy clothes,” she commented wryly. Watched closely by the pinched-faced, ragged inhabitants, she picked her way cautiously through the muddy “shambles” of the village, past the crumbled walls of its one hundred and fifty houses, which lay scattered on the foothills of the Chuke mountains.6
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 19