A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  His style of management brought him into inevitable conflict with his charges, who wished to serve their sick and wounded patients while exploiting the relative freedom that came from working in a war zone. On arrival in the Serbian capital, they faced the threat of invasion, shellfire and epidemic disease, which served only to encourage a feeling among them that they should seize the day. And seize the day certain of them did, by conducting affairs, catching venereal disease, being challenged to duels and, in one instance, being arrested for theft.40 When Dr Ryan attempted to impose his authority, they gained their revenge by spreading rumours about him. By the time he returned to the Balkans in 1917, many of those working for Allied units had heard the gossip that he had suffered, not from typhus in 1915, but from gonorrhoea.

  Disinclined to cooperate and oblivious to sensitivities, he also trespassed freely and unapologetically into the fields of others on his return. But while most eventually shrugged off their resentment, Amelia’s hatred of him came to dominate her almost every waking moment. To someone prone to fits of jealousy, whose social standing gave her a firm sense of entitlement, his attempt to take control of her work was unforgivable. In a public campaign against him, she seized on the rumours and spread them further with a malicious relish. She also heard an allegation that was far more serious, that the unmarried doctor was interested in working in the Balkans for the access it gave him to young girls. It was whispered that he had “ruined” between thirty to forty such girls, all under the age of fourteen, and Amelia passed on every salacious detail.41

  When Emily returned home to New York in May 1917, Amelia was full of hope that she would take up the battle on her behalf. “I hope Miss Simmonds will do much to clear up the… situation as the Red Cross people are quite unfit for the work they are supposed to do – it’s a shame that decent men can’t be put in charge,” she complained again to her mother.42 By the summer of 1917 the allegations about Dr Ryan had reached the headquarters of the American Red Cross, although whether it was via Emily is unclear. They were so shocked by what they heard that, at the end of August, they sent out a commission to Salonika to investigate.

  The refugees who had flocked to Vodena were representative of the thousands who, in a region of roughly four hundred square miles, had been left almost entirely dependent on ad-hoc handouts from relief organizations and the Allied armies.43 Many, like those Emily had cared for in Brod and Vodena, were in need of urgent medical treatment. But, by early spring, although there were newly established hospitals aplenty in Salonika and Macedonia, one of the only hospitals willing to admit civilian patients was that run by the Serbian Relief Fund at Sorović, where Flora had been treated after being wounded. Even the main voluntary organization in the region, the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, admitted civilian patients only if space permitted.44 Those run by the Allied armies accepted none at all.

  Gradually, voluntary assistance to the stricken population began to trickle in. Although latter efforts were spearheaded across the region by the Serbian Relief Fund, initially the work was conducted by a number of disparate individuals and organizations who focused their early efforts on Monastir. The Bulgarians, from their positions in the mountains to the north, continued to pour a deadly rain of shells on its ancient houses and narrow, cobbled streets. Their fire, which forced its besieged population of women, children and old men into their cellars, made relief efforts in the town perilous work. Initially the victims of the shelling were taken to the sole hospital in the town, which was run by the French Sisters of St Vincent de Paul, who had steadfastly remained at their posts during the fighting of the autumn of 1916.45 Soon, another tiny hospital was opened by the staff of a Dutch unit.46

  In January 1917 the elegant but imperious Mrs Harley arrived in Monastir to begin the first programme of civilian relief in the town, after the Scottish Women’s Hospitals had refused to renew her contract when they heard she had bullied the Serbian authorities by telling them that she would take her cars home if they did not allow her to work as and where she wanted.47 In need of a project, she had arrived with her daughter and chauffeur against the wishes of the British authorities, with neither the funding nor access to supplies to make her mission a real success. Soon she was joined in Monastir by two representatives of the Serbian Relief Fund who, by late February, had launched a soup kitchen and clothing-distribution centre. “Were she not her brother’s sister [Sir John French, the former British Commander-in-Chief] the Red Cross would have sent her back to England,” wrote one of them bitterly.48

  As the rigours of February gave way to March, the Bulgarians stepped up their shelling of the town. Not only did they subject it to ever more furious bombardments, they began using poison-gas shells, all the while increasingly varying the times of their attacks in an attempt to create terror among the civilian population. One of the first victims of their new strategy was Mrs Harley. She was killed on 7th March by a piece of shrapnel while sitting at the window of her wooden Turkish house.49 The death of the sixty-one-year-old received widespread press attention across the world. She was given a military funeral on a bitter March day in Zejtinlik Cemetery in Salonika, with thousands in attendance. The acclaim she received in the press was at odds with much of what was said privately. “It was a life thrown away for nothing,” concluded one of the doctors of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.50

  In late July Flora began to suffer from racking stomach pains whilst in reserve. Although she did her best to distract herself by playing cards and writing in her diary, she admitted in its pages that she was feeling miserable. “It’s scorching hot weather and not a speck of shade. I’m feeling pretty rotten, hope I’m not getting enteric,” she jotted. A visit to the doctor yielded no useful advice whatsoever, to her disgust. “I told the doctor that I couldn’t eat, everything made me bad, and all he said was of course I shouldn’t eat but ought to be on a milk diet, however he didn’t suggest how I was going to keep the cow in the trenches so that was useful,” she concluded contemptuously.51

  That evening, with their stint in reserve at an end, Flora dragged herself back to the trenches with her company. She struggled through the next few days, trying to convince herself that she would get better on her own if only she could tough it out. But days later, feeling washed out, weak and oppressed by the heat, she knew she needed hospital treatment. “Enteritis so bad I applied for leave to go down to Salonique for a few days,” she wrote glumly. “If I can get some other food maybe I’ll be all right,” she continued hopefully, “but I’ve stuck it for 10 days now, I can’t do another spell in the trenches.”52

  Two days later, with Mitar in tow, she reached Salonika. Sick as she was, she headed straight to Floca’s, the city’s busiest and most fashionable café. Then, fortified by coffee, ice cream and her first dose of civilization in two long months, she set out to find a hospital willing to take her. Having been first rejected by the Scottish Women’s Hospitals on the grounds that every one of their beds was taken, she trailed across to the newly opened Crown Prince Aleksandar’s Hospital. The doctor who saw her confirmed her self-diagnosis of “acute enteritis” and admitted her as a patient. She was given a room in a wooden bungalow with three of its British nurses: Mrs Hartney – almost certainly the same Mrs Hartney that Flora had worked with in the Anglo-American Unit – Miss Spooner and Isabel MacPhail.

  Isabel’s thirty-year-old sister Katherine had first travelled to Serbia in January 1915 as a junior doctor with the First Serbian Unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. Hardly five feet tall and barely one hundred pounds, she had “a mass of wavy short hair [and] a touch of melancholy in her Scots voice”. Quiet, unassuming and level-headed, she was thought highly of by those who worked alongside her for her professional skill and capacity for hard work.53

  Katherine also knew Dr Edward Ryan better than most, having spent weeks under his care at his American Red Cross hospital in Belgrade after she had caught typhus in the spring of 1915, losing most of her hair. “I shall never forget t
heir kindness,” she commented publicly about her time with them. “[I] owe my recovery in great part to the care & attention of Dr Ryan & his nurses.”54 Impressed with the tall, young, dark-haired doctor, just three years older than she was, she did all she could to keep in touch with him. In May 1916, having spent the first months of the year working in France for the Quakers, she wrote home to her mother after meeting Dr Ryan again briefly in Paris. “It was a great pleasure to see him & hear of all his doings. I hope I shall have the chance of seeing him again sometime,” she said. “Of course I may never hear of him again,” she scribbled plaintively in a separate letter to her sister.55

  Still thinking of their meeting, Katherine travelled from Paris to the mountainous French island of Corsica, where she joined the staff of a small tuberculosis hospital for Serbian boys run by the Serbian Relief Fund in the northern town of Bastia. By September she had resigned and was back at work in France, this time at a Quaker-run convalescent home for French mothers and children in Samoëns in Haute-Savoie. There she had spent her days performing minor operations and doing the rounds of the wards, while contending good-naturedly with the head nurse who made it clear that she thought it was a mistake ever to allow women to become doctors. Even the junior staff could see that the work failed to challenge her. “There is a dear Doctor MacPhail who has been to Serbia & is recuperating after typhoid [sic],” commented one in her diary. “[She] is obviously bored stiff.”56

  In early 1917, in search of more challenging work, Katherine had made the treacherous voyage to Salonika to join her sister. She found work again with the Serbian Relief Fund, first at their hospital in Sorović, and then in the village of Brod among the same malnourished and disease-ridden population that Emily had worked with earlier that winter.57 There, in May, with the help of a small team she opened a small hospital of a dozen beds in a disused stable, vaccinated the four hundred inhabitants and began travelling to outlying villages in an attempt to immunize as many as possible. Soon after Dr Ryan’s arrival in Macedonia, they met up again. He must have been as glad to see her as she was him and, although there is no hint that their relationship ever went beyond friendship, he stepped in to give her all the help he could. Soon, under his orders, the American Red Cross had provided her with a mobile dispensary that her chauffeur could drive from village to village.58

  Flora spent two days sitting quietly in the hospital garden among its wooden and tented barracks, grumbling about the heat and mosquitoes, sipping castor oil and sending Mitar on various missions into town. Finally, on the third day, she began to perk up enough to take a renewed interest in the shops and cafés of Salonika, and in enlarging her already extensive social connections. One of her first introductions was to Katherine, who was in the town on a short visit. “I like her very much,” Katherine wrote home after meeting Flora through her sister Isabel, “and our mutual enthusiasm for the Serbs gives us a lot in common. She is dressed in Serbian sergeant’s uniform which suits her very well. Yesterday we went into town together to lunch and I helped her buy a pair of trousers and leggings. The Serbs all love her and look on her as a sort of mascot.”59

  Flora passed another evening in the company of Amelia Tileston, who had travelled from Vladova to collect supplies for her canteen. Helped by Jovan and Milorad, she had spent the summer handing out free tea, coffee, cigarettes and medicine to Serbian soldiers returning to the front from hospital. Flora listened with great interest to her description of her work and peppered her with questions. “I dined last night with Miss Sandes, the Englishwoman sergeant in the Serbian army,” Amelia wrote to her mother the following day. “She wears of course uniform and I felt as if I were with an amphibious monster or a mermaid or some other anomaly.”60 Had Flora known how she would describe her or how utterly tactless she could be, she would almost certainly have been less eager to work with her. As it was, she left her that evening turning over ideas about how best she could help her with her project.

  Flora had been thinking for some time about schemes to help Serbian soldiers. With the help of her old friend Bessie Stear, with whom she had travelled through America in 1904, she had already succeeded in getting a small-scale project under way. She had written a letter to her in early June in which she commented that, whilst she got letters and parcels, most of the men in her company had heard nothing from home in occupied Serbia for nearly three years. “We are an entire army of lonely soldiers,” she wrote. “I wish people at home… would adopt a few of us… They are so keen on everything English, and prize anything from England so much.”61 Soon, at Bessie’s instigation, parcels began to arrive for the men of her company. They received them with the “greatest excitement and delight”, recalled Flora. “I was promptly inundated with requests from the recipients to address postcards of thanks for them too. Very funny some of these postcards were, and I used to wonder whether people at home ever made head or tail of them.” Such was Bessie’s success that Flora started to send her lists of “lonely soldiers” from the most devastated villages in Serbia. Soon, those “most in need of a little cheering up” received their first parcel of the war.62

  On 15th August Flora was discharged from the hospital to convalesce in Vodena. Three days after she left, fire broke out in the narrow, winding streets of the ancient Turkish quarter on the high hills of Salonika. Pushed by a strong, hot wind that blew a cloud of glowing air ahead of it, it burned its way down the hill, across the Via Egnatia boulevard which divided the old from new sections of the city, to the hotels, restaurants, bars, cinemas and shops that lined the waterfront.

  The fire left behind a smouldering heap of ruins that belched smoke for a fortnight. By the time it burned itself out, it had destroyed nearly one square mile of the city. There was little left of the old Turkish quarter, the modern buildings that lined the waterfront had been gutted and it had laid ruin to many historical landmarks including the fifth-century church of St Demetrius. Although loss of life was minimal, the fire destroyed four thousand houses and left around one hundred thousand homeless, whose care was temporarily taken over by the Allied armies.63 Most hospitals were based on the outskirts of the city, and also escaped destruction.

  The Girton and Newnham Unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals at Salonika harbour had had a lucky escape. As the wind had started to blow great fireballs into their tented camp, the women had armed themselves with sacks soaked in seawater to throw on the flames. Others, holding brooms, perched on the ridge poles of the tents and beat out the sparks as they fell on them.64 They fought the flames for four exhausting hours before the wind changed direction and began to blow back on itself, sparing the hospital and the parts of the city that had not yet been destroyed.

  “It blazed for two days, no one knows how it started, all along the waterfront is burnt and for half a mile inland, and all the old Turkish town,” Flora scribbled as she tried to take in the scale of the destruction. “And Floca’s,” she noted unhappily.65

  Flora spent a fortnight at Vodena. Away from the doctor’s supervision, she charged round the region paying visits, all the while medicating herself liberally with castor oil, alcohol and cigarettes. She rested only when the enteritis got the better of her and when, for three miserable days, she suffered from dengue fever. At the start of September she finally felt fit enough to rejoin her company. “They all seemed glad to see me,” she wrote contentedly. “Sat up all night, lovely moonlight night, we are in first-line trenches.”66

  One uneventful hot September day succeeded another until, at the end of the month, less than two months after Flora had left the Crown Prince Aleksandar’s Hospital to convalesce from enteric, she was on her way back. After an operation to remove yet more pieces of shrapnel, her doctor confined her to bed. As usual, her diagnosis of the severity of her condition differed substantially from his, and she soon began to push to be discharged to rejoin her company. “You’re not fit for the front,” he told her. “There’s no point even asking. I’m sending you to the [Serb] convalescent camp
, where you’ll stay put for at least two months.” “If I have to convalesce,” Flora proposed in reply, “I might as well do it back home in England. Will you at least discharge me for that?” He thought it over and, securing a half-meant promise that she would spend her time resting, signed her papers.

  After six weeks in bed Flora was finally released, and arrangements were duly made for Sergeant Major Sandes to return home on a British transport ship. She looked forward expectantly to spending her first Christmas with her family in three years. But when the British authorities caught wind of the fact that their passenger was a woman, they turned her down flat. “The good old British regulations prohibited women on transports,” commented Flora brusquely. Next, she tried to get passage by hospital ship, only to be disappointed yet again. “[They] refused also, on the ground that I was a combatant discharged from hospital.” With a sea voyage effectively blocked, the only other way for her to return home was via train through Europe. First she had to get to Santa Quaranta (now Sarandë), a port in south Albania, which lay on the other side of a range of barren mountains. It was a four-day trip from Salonika over treacherous and precipitous roads followed by a short trip across the Adriatic to Italy, but she had no other option.

  She duly visited Serbian General Headquarters, who sent her to their transport unit to apply for a car. A week later, an increasingly irritable and frustrated Flora was still in Salonika. If she did not leave immediately, she knew her chances of getting home for Christmas were minimal. She left it as long as she could bear, then returned to Headquarters. Brimming with barely suppressed annoyance, she asked to speak to the Chief-of-Staff, who ushered her into his office. “May I speak with you as a friend and not a sergeant?” she asked as she stood before him. “Certainly,” he nodded. “I know very well that if ever I’m killed you’ll put up a beautiful tombstone for me as you have for the other Englishwomen,” she stated crossly. “But that’s not of the least use to me personally at this moment as a mark of your affection. My sick leave – which I need as the result of fighting for you – is slipping away. What I want is a loan of a car now, while I’m still alive.” “Till the child howls the mother does not worry,” he chuckled in response, quoting a Serb proverb. “Please sit down and don’t be angry with me,” he told her with a smile. As she took a seat, he paused to write something. “Here you go; take this to the Chief of Transport,” he said, handing her a request for them to give her a car immediately. Later that day, she was on her way home.67