A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes
Page 20
Conditions were as bad as she had feared. The heavy shelling of the previous autumn had left few homes intact while, in another grim memento of the savage fighting, the frozen, blackened bodies of Bulgarian soldiers lay unburied in the vicinity of the town where they had fallen. Its several hundred suffering inhabitants had been forced to huddle in the least damaged rooms in the heart of winter, with little food or fuel to cook or make fires, few blankets and insufficient clothing. Emily found them near starving, verminous and dirty.7 She was horrified in particular at the condition of its children. “They were pitiful things, half starved and not even half-clothed,” she wrote. “Few of them had shoes or even wrappings on their feet, although it was cold and a raw wind blew from the north.”8
Using two empty petrol tins as cooking pots, she lit a fire in a stove improvised from boulders and began cooking what would be her mainstay – beans. Soon a “curious audience” composed of Italian soldiers from a nearby transport unit and village children appeared to watch the proceedings. Emily told the children to return in two hours. Half an hour later they were back “with one-hundred-per-cent increase in their ranks”. Holding a mug in one hand and a plate in another, Emily dashed across to the transport unit to try to borrow more. The Italians understood her gestures, raided their mess and followed her back to help her serve. That evening, she returned to her improvised kitchen to cook the children supper. Within a few days, she had extended the feeding to their mothers.9
A few days later still, the horrors of Valjevo still fresh in her mind, she decided to tackle the matter of sanitation. Handing each of the children a piece of soap, she told them that she would only feed them the following day if they appeared with clean hands and faces. “[The babies] were loaded with lice, carriers of typhus,” she wrote. “Having been through one winter of typhus, I did not want another epidemic on my hands.” For a short while her plans worked well. “Then the children reported that they had no soap,” she recalled. “A little detective work unearthed a scandal: the women had taken my soap and were washing Italian soldiers’ shirts in the river with it for pay.”10
Emily worked in Brod, in the mud, wind, snow and rain, throughout February. The weather was so bad that the rain rotted the mattress of her bed.11 She also faced raids from German Taubes. “Several times bombs lit close to our camp, but without damage.”12 The days were lonely, hard and comfortless but she drove herself on in the knowledge that a number of the children would almost certainly die without her there to feed them. Word of her pioneering, brave work quickly spread among her fellow medical and relief workers throughout Macedonia, as did reports of her modest appearance. Anyone who met her found her “inconspicuous” in a worn khaki suit. “The little New York nurse… does not even wear her medals,” commented one war correspondent of the near-legendary status she had acquired. “When anyone wishes something done or desires to learn something about hospitals it is generally a case of ‘Ask Miss Simmonds’.” He illustrated his article with an anecdote. “One day in Salonika a relief worker dashed into a restaurant and demanded of friends: ‘Where is Miss Simmonds?’ The cheerleader of the American Red Cross looked up from his plate of bean soup and replied: ‘She’s up at Brod, feeding four thousand on seven loaves and a few small fishes.’”13
“This certainly is the most infernal country,” commented Flora in a letter home to a friend, written shortly after her return to her company. “It seems queer that they have always waged war for centuries for the possession of Macedonia. To my mind it is the sort of place you would give away with a pound of tea… However there is nothing like getting used to things.”14 There was much for her to get used to, once the initial excitement at being back at the front began to wear off. By the time she arrived at the start of June the relentless sun had driven the last vestiges of moisture from the earth, leaving it dry, cracked and broken by waterless, parched riverbeds. The rocky, harsh terrain was almost entirely barren of green vegetation for miles around. It was also “damned hot”, grumbled Flora the day of her arrival, with not so much as a “scrap of shade”. And they were beset by “most of the plagues of Egypt”, she complained further.15 But to the west she could lift her eyes to the Chuke mountains, which appeared pale in the shimmering heat of the day. To the south-west lay the Moglena range, dominated by the towering heights of Kajmakcalan.
For the first time Flora was based in a proper trench system, at a position known as the Starovenski Redoubt, where her Morava Division had been sent to relieve a Russian brigade that, as a result of fears about the growing Bolshevik influence following the Russian Revolution, had been deemed no longer reliable and withdrawn.16 Initially, she revelled in the experience. “This is more like the warfare on the Western Front,” she told a friend excitedly.17 The Redoubt was nearly twenty miles due east of Monastir, north of the village of Grunishta, in hilly terrain between the two mountain ranges. It formed part of the frontline facing the Bulgarians, whose trenches in that region blocked the advance of the Serbs to Prilep and the Babuna Pass. The French and the British held the line east of the Serbs. The Italians held it to the west.18
Each evening when the sun descended over the Chuke mountains she left her shelter, walked through a narrow communications trench up a steep and treeless slope and took her place in the frontline trenches over the top of the hillside. Once darkness had fallen she could peer cautiously over the top, past three thick lines of Serbian barbed wire into the eerie quiet of no-man’s-land, on the other side of which lay the lines of Bulgarian wire and trenches, anywhere from fifty to five hundred yards away. In front of her were outposts, each manned silently by three men who spent the hours of darkness peering into the land beyond, ready to sound a warning at the first sign of a Bulgarian attack. Snipers too took their place on both sides of the line, day and night, ready to fire at any hint of movement. During moonlit nights, both the Serbs and the Bulgarians could relax, confident that surprise attack was impossible. But when cloud cover drew a pall of darkness over the terrain, they remained alert and uneasy, ears and eyes straining for any unusual sound or sight. On most nights, little broke the quiet except the rare crack of rifle fire or the ringing of picks hitting the hard earth while men worked to deepen the trenches. Very occasionally the scream of a shell shattered the tranquillity. Flora loved the peaceful summer nights, sitting and chatting quietly with the men of her vod (platoon). “Lovely nights some of them were up in that sweet mountain air, and worth ten years of ordinary life,” she wrote wistfully years later. “A vast panorama stretched before our eyes, veiled in misty moonlight; all the heat and ugliness of the day blotted out… and it didn’t seem so very far from heaven.”19
At sunrise she returned with her company to their dusty encampment, leaving behind a handful of men armed with machine and Lewis guns to watch the lines until the following evening. Shortly afterwards ration-bearers would appear carrying sweet, black tea. Flora would then retreat to her “dugout” – one of a number of rough stone huts – to sleep for five or six hours.20
But novel as she first found life in the trenches, her daily existence soon became “regular and monotonous”, broken only by the occasional spell in the reserve lines near the village of Grunishta. It was often easy to forget during the warm, still nights or the hot, quiet days that they were at war. When the occasional artillery attack burst upon them, it took them all by stunned surprise. “We had few casualties that summer, so that those we did have were perhaps more deeply felt,” wrote Flora. “One man in our vod, Datza, was a great favourite with everybody. He had a genius for getting into trouble, but much was forgiven him on account of his beautiful voice… Even the Bulgars used to keep quiet when, in defiance of all regulations, he would sometimes lift up his voice in the trenches at night… Just as we were finishing our midday meal I heard a single crash, and my batman [her servant, Mitar] ran to tell me that Datza had been killed by a shell a few yards from his own dugout.”21
Other than the odd, unscheduled burst of shelling, by th
e time that she took her place at the front, both sides had settled into a comfortable animosity governed by a gentleman’s agreement that allowed them to escape the worst of the afternoon sun. They went to sleep at the same time, bombed each other in the late morning, then stopped for lunch and a nap during the hottest hours of the day, before giving each other a final shelling at teatime. Flora approved wholeheartedly of this arrangement. It was both sporting and part of the game of war. “Sometimes, but not very often, they varied these times,” she criticized of the occasional ill-mannered Bulgarian breach of the agreement. “We used to feel very indignant if either side did not play the game, and once or twice, when the Bulgars were so unsportsmanlike as to start an unexpected strafe in the middle of dinner, we decided that their rations must have gone astray that day.”22
It was also a rule of the game that they were fair targets if spotted by the enemy. In practice, this meant that in the daytime Flora and her company were confined to the hillside on which their huts were perched, held down by the risk of sniper fire, with nowhere apart from a dry ravine to walk. Even then, she commented, this arrangement was preferable to that of the previous autumn when all they could do was lie “from dawn to dark with one’s nose in the mud”.23 Flora could still play chess during the day, lose money at cards, write in her diary and have a drink with anyone who had any going.
The Bulgarians and Serbs would also contact each other occasionally, almost always for propaganda purposes. “Stop shooting, brothers, and we’ll tell you some news,” the Bulgarians would shout on occasion over no-man’s-land during the night, before calling out the details of recent German victories. “We reply with some tremendous advance of the Allies, sometimes made up on the spur of the moment,” wrote Flora eagerly in a letter to a friend.24
Although the Serbs and Bulgarians were bitter enemies, both sides appreciated that they were connected by their shared experience at the front. Flora too shared this sentiment. “The friendly little stars twinkled down on us – and the Bulgars,” she wrote once.25 And fraternization of the sort experienced on the Western Front on Christmas Day 1914 had also occurred on at least one occasion between the Serbs and Bulgarians: in December 1916 the two sides had celebrated together and shared food and drink, before the neighbouring French had put an end to the festivities by firing on them. However, by the time Flora took her place in the trenches the authorities had firmly quashed the prospect of any further joint revelry.26
When raids across no-man’s-land took place, the Serbs and Bulgarians were ready to put any sense of fellow feeling firmly aside. Flora too had no qualms about participating. “I’m going to try out the new rifle bombs with Prebicković. Do you want to come?” Dodić asked her during one moonlit evening. “Yes, of course,” she replied without hesitation, although the suggestion had made her heart race with excitement and trepidation. She waited nervously until darkness had enveloped the land, then climbed silently over the side of the trench alongside the two men. It was her first time in no-man’s-land. “We went along cautiously,” she recalled, “keeping in shadow as much as we could, and dropping flat on our faces the moment a Verey light [from a flare gun] went up.” Quietly, they crept through their lines of barbed wire before inching across what had once been a cornfield towards the enemy. Each sound they made seemed to echo across the land. “Every little bush seemed to have legs, and the dried grasses kept whispering as though trying to tell us that things were creeping through them to pounce on us,” wrote Flora. “I devoutly hoped that none of the Bulgars happened to be doing the same thing at the same time, but it seemed more than probable.”
Once they had edged as close as they dared to the Bulgarians, Dodić prepared the rifle. “Get ready!” he whispered. Flora and Prebicković braced themselves for a crack and explosion, then looked at each other in dismay when nothing happened. Dodić shook his head slightly, then gestured to them that he was about to try again. This time he succeeded. “The first was a dud, but the second and third must have fallen right into their trench, for we were rewarded with a tremendous howl, and the next moment a dozen rifles cracked,” described Flora. “We lay as still as mice till the hubbub had subsided, and then crawled back, stopping on the way to examine our own barbed wire and see that no one had been cutting it.”27
Years later, she reflected on how they measured the success of such raids. Although she did not condemn it – it was all part of the game of war, after all – she acknowledged that it appeared savage. “So brutal does one unconsciously become, that when we used to creep out at night on a bombing raid, we always congratulated ourselves on being most successful when the crash of our bomb was followed by a few groans and then silence. Were there a tremendous hullaballoo, we used to say in disgust that in all probability it meant only a few scratches…”28
Twenty-five miles to the south-east, Emily was hard at work in Vodena (now Edessa) running a refugee camp alongside Amelia at the request of the American Red Cross, having finally felt able to leave the devastation of Brod behind after two members of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals took over her work.29 The move in March to the picturesque, ancient town that was famous for its many waterfalls came as a relief, as must have the company of another English-speaker. But she must have been reminded soon after she started working again with Amelia that her friend did not share her egalitarian views. “A baby is a baby, so far as its stomach is concerned, whether it comes from a Long Island estate or a Macedonian mountain,” stated Emily emphatically.30 Amelia, by contrast, littered her letters home with anti-Semitic comments. “I went to Vodena to give my services to a camp of… mixed Macedonian refugees (principally Jews) who had been driven out of Monastir. They were an unclean and most exacting lot,” she complained.31
Happiest when she was busy, Amelia was also dissatisfied by the numbers. Only two hundred refugees, at first, were in need of their assistance. “There is very little to do,” she wrote with disappointment during the week of their arrival. “Miss Simmonds has so much experience in dealing with large numbers of refugees that she does it very easily,” she praised in a letter home, all the while perhaps feeling somewhat superfluous in Emily’s presence.32 But within days the promised numbers – the majority Jews, but among them Christians, Muslims and Gypsies – began to materialize. With the help of Jovan and Milorad, Amelia set to work alongside Emily feeding, sheltering and clothing the new arrivals. They arranged for supplies to be sent from Salonika and accommodated them as best they could in a monastery, in houses in the town and under tents. Soon Amelia was able to write home to her mother that she was at least “very busy” caring for eight hundred refugees, although as usual she added a barbed note. “As 400 of them are Jews the work is not as pleasant as it would be otherwise & my dislike of Jews grows daily greater.”33
As it had in Brod, the condition of the refugees worried Emily. Many were sick and suffering from malnutrition after having been forced to flee their homes months before, and she was deeply concerned that epidemic disease would find hold among them. “Women, children and old men die for lack of care,” she wrote later in a letter published in America pleading for more women to volunteer for civilian relief work in Macedonia.34 Although she could provide them with a degree of medical assistance, she knew that many urgently needed to see a doctor. Leaving them in the care of Amelia, Jovan and Milorad, she made the slow and uncomfortable trip to Salonika to try to find one willing to help. She was turned down flat. “All our doctors are needed for the army,” the authorities told her. “None can be spared for civilian work.” She returned briefly to Vodena, then left again for Salonika determined to try once more. Again she was refused. Only on her third trip did her persistence pay off, when she secured the “temporary” services of a Canadian, Dr Burnham.35
In April Dr Edward Ryan also reached Vodena, to organize and coordinate sanitary and relief work in Macedonia for the American Red Cross. His position as chief distributor of supplies made him the de-facto head of the refugee camp in the town. Emi
ly had met him before when, in December 1914, she had toured his Red Cross hospital in Belgrade. She had sent glowing reports of his work back to the American papers but now, as he moved to consolidate control over their mission, she struggled to work with the difficult, controlling young doctor, while Amelia seethed with anger. “That loathsome Dr Ryan has come out to be in charge of all relief work, so I shall leave,” she scribbled furiously to her mother. “It’s a shame to send a man like that, who is only out to get what he can for himself.”36
Both women left their work at the end of April. After over eighteen months away from home, Emily decided to return to New York on a fund-raising trip. She left Amelia both supplies and money to allow her to establish a free “canteen” for Serbian soldiers in the town, which she moved shortly to the nearby village of Vladova.37 Emily gladly left Vodena – and the conflict with Dr Ryan – behind. She was busy, there was a war on, and she had better things to do with her time. Amelia, on the other hand, thought of little else.
Throughout the war, although there was often much cooperation between the volunteers working for the Serbs, there was also some competition. Its origin was nothing more than territoriality – different units and individuals had “their” projects to protect from the trespasses of others. In its mildest form, members of one unit would grouse regularly about those of others in the pages of their diaries and to each other. But occasionally what was little more than natural competition would turn into open hostility.38
Dr Ryan had a knack for bringing out this hostility in people. As the head of the American Red Cross Unit in Belgrade, he had alienated many of his staff. Highly competent, conscientious and hard-working, he was also supremely confident in his own abilities, quick-tempered, intolerant of dissent, heavy-handed and authoritarian. So harsh was his treatment of his employees that the American Consul in Salonika felt obliged to intervene when the doctor started subjecting them to military discipline. “He asked the British Marshal to imprison one of them, and feed him on bread and water,” wrote the horrified Consul. “I referred the matter to the State Department, as a result of which… the [man] was released.”39