A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  “Turned out before dawn and started 5 a.m.,” scribbled Flora in her diary on 18th September. “Still dark. Had the longest and hardest day’s march. Roasting hot and the men with their heavy packs were nearly dead and so was I.” As the Bulgarians retreated, they set fire to the tinder-dry bushes and scrub, long grasses and woods to create a smokescreen between them and the Serbs. Under the relentless sun, Flora and her company followed in pursuit over the burnt, black grass, skirting shell craters, their clothes grey with soot and their eyes smarting and watering from the acrid smoke and burning heat. “One place we halted in blinding clouds of smoke and hot ashes to sit on, the woods are burning everywhere,” she jotted as she looked over the devastated landscape around her.9

  Over the next few days, under scorching skies and in blistering heat, Flora’s First Battalion pressed the Bulgarians back over the desolate rock-strewn hills running parallel to the Crna River. Although other companies in her battalion were facing fierce assaults on the occasions when the German commanders managed to rally their demoralized and war-weary Bulgarian charges, Flora’s First Company had escaped lightly. “We all thought we were going straight into battle when we started but after… forced marches we can’t catch up with them,” complained Flora in disappointment.10

  Within days of the breakthrough the Serbs had outstripped their food, supplies and artillery. They had also left the Sandes-Haverfield Canteens and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals far behind in the Macedonian hinterland. Nan MacGlade closed the canteens she had been running for Flora and set out behind the army. So too did Amelia Tileston. Of the four Scottish Women’s Hospitals units in Macedonia, three prepared to leave. Only the Girton and Newnham Unit in Salonika remained behind.

  The Elsie Inglis Unit – named following the death of the founder who had been one of the Serbs’ greatest champions during the war (they are “a very charming people”, she commented once, “very like the Irish, in almost every way, but much better looking”11) – set up base just behind the original frontline at “Dead Horse Camp”, so-called due to the half-buried horses that lay all around. The Scottish Women’s Hospitals Transport Column had taken to the road with the army to ferry the sick and wounded to hospitals and dressing stations, while the American Unit, under the charge of their new, young Scottish director, Dr Isabel Emslie, made plans to leave Ostrovo for southern Serbia.

  Everything about Major Cukavac was precise. The slender, thirty-something commander in charge of Flora’s battalion carried himself erectly and took great care over his appearance, from his neatly trimmed moustache to the wire-rimmed glasses that he wore perched on his nose. In character he was a stickler for regulation with a temper to match. “On duty, officers feared his bitter tongue and overbearing manner,” Flora recollected.12

  Cukavac had inherited the thin, hardy, forty-two-year-old Englishwoman from Pešić. He was less inclined than his predecessor to be indulgent – not that Flora particularly expected or wanted him to be – and he insisted that his unusual sergeant major perform her duties no differently from her male counterparts. He reprimanded her for admitting she was tired after a long march, expected her to assist him on tiresome tasks and expended his impatience on her as he did on everyone else. Nonetheless he still took a paternal interest in her and, like Milić and Pešić, also tried to protect her if he thought a situation was dangerous, much to her annoyance.

  Flora’s initial wariness of him had vanished once she discovered that, off duty, he had a wry sense of humour and was “full of fun”.13 Likewise, he grew to like and admire the woman who dared to treat him as her equal and, on occasion, order him about. Her audacity amused him. “Would you like to turn out and give me your tent for ten minutes?” she demanded of him one evening as she peered through its entrance. “What for?” he queried. “I want to change my clothes,” she replied confidently. “Could I also borrow your basin and soap and have some water for a wash?” “Well, of all the nerve!” he exclaimed. “Did anyone ever hear of a sergeant calmly requesting his Commandant Battalion to turn out and give him his tent?” Turning to his batman, he said simply, “Give her anything she wants.”14

  Since her childhood Flora had always enjoyed pushing herself physically. But days upon days of forced marches were far greater a challenge than a morning’s icy bath, sleeping outside in the snow or even rowing long distances against dangerous currents, all of which she had done in her relative youth. “Turned out at dawn down the wood and an awful stony hill at a good pace,” she scribbled in her diary on the eighth day following the breakthrough. “My feet are cut and blistered and I am dead to the world.”15

  Flora’s feet were in an awful state. “I wonder you can walk at all,” remarked a Lewis gunner in her company after watching her rub thick machine-gun oil into them during a brief halt. Each morning, she winced as she pulled her boots over her bloodstained socks, before buttoning up a shirt of white flannel – a practical colour in wartime as lice stood out against it. Most days, with the men of her company, she marched off before dawn with little or nothing to eat. They survived only on what they could scavenge en route.16

  Far worse than bleeding feet, lice and lack of regular food was a shortage of water so serious that, on 21st September, three men of the Second Company died agonizingly of thirst whilst pinned down under enemy fire. “Went the whole day over these infernal hills in the blazing sun, not many kilometres but hills like the side of a house, scorching hot and no water anywhere. The men are dropping with their heavy packs and I am just hanging on by the skin of my teeth,” she scratched in a typical diary entry.17 As they dragged their feet painfully over the broken, stony ground, the stragglers were savagely berated by Major Cukavac. “You’re over-hard on the men. They’re doing their level best,” protested Flora one night. “That might be so, but if a man is really all-in he won’t care what I say to him,” he explained patiently. “Whilst, if it is only his willpower, and not his legs, that has given out, and if he can still stand, he will get up and go on, if I cuss hard enough.” He paused as Flora considered his reply, then asked, “How did you get here? Do you suppose one of those men who fell out was really as tired as you were? You don’t walk on your legs at all. You walk on your willpower.”18

  It was true, thought Flora, as she briefly lifted her sunburnt face to look around her on the forced marches. She would see “delicate lads plugging along” while their seemingly stronger comrades dropped behind. She bore her commandant’s words in mind as she forced herself up and over the rock-strewn hills, down steep goat tracks, over hot ash and through the choking clouds of smoke. To stiffen her determination on the punishing marches, she played the words of Kipling over and over in her head:

  If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

  To serve your turn long after they are gone,

  And so hold on when there is nothing in you

  Except the Will which says to them: “Hold on!”

  The Serbs could sense victory. “The men are splendid, dead tired, almost barefoot [and] nothing to eat till nightfall… they are in the height of spirits,” jotted Flora, who, despite her exhaustion, shared the sense of exhilaration.19 By 21st September the Bulgarians were in full, panicked retreat across the entire front, from the hills north of Monastir in the west to Lake Doiran in the east. As they fled, they left behind them the wreckage of stations, railway lines and bridges, destroyed in a desperate attempt to slow the advance of their pursuers.20

  On 23rd September French cavalry liberated the sizeable town of Prilep, the first town of any size to fall to the Allies in the region since the capture of Monastir in 1916. Two days later, when the Second Army seized Gradsko, the Bulgarians knew they had lost the war. Thousands laid down their arms.21 At noon on 30th September, the day after losing the town of Skopje to the French, they surrendered unconditionally. Mišić had proved all of his detractors wrong. Not only had the men of his army broken through Bulgarian positions along a mountain range that had been considered inviolable, they h
ad brought the enemy to their knees only sixteen days after launching their opening salvo, without regular rations, supplies or water.22 For Germany, already on the edge of defeat on the Western Front, the collapse of its Bulgarian ally was a devastating blow. Nevertheless, the German and Austrian armies were still in occupation of much of Serbia. The Serbs continued their relentless progress north, knowing that some of the toughest fighting lay ahead of them.

  Flora’s bravery and capacity for endurance during the Serbian advance had not gone unnoticed by the military authorities. In particular, she was applauded for her actions on the Ovshe Plain, an expanse of dry, yellow, featureless land north-east of the town of Veles. Although she had done little more than the rest of the men in giving chase after they had been attacked by Bulgarian machine-gun and shellfire, the authorities were keen to heap praise on her. “Volunteer Sergeant Major in this Company, Miss Flora Sandes, has accomplished the following exploits,” announced Commander Stojanović of the Second Regiment in his dispatches. She was presented with a painstakingly translated version. “She has stopped the enemies [sic] counter-attack as head of the squadron on the left bank of the Cerna when the enemy counter-attacked the 2nd Company of this Battalion… opening rapid fire against them,” he wrote. “On [21st September]… in spite of the greatest difficulties arising from the inequality of the ground and from the want of water, she has supported all day upon the same position all the fatigues of the combat in which she has equalled the soldiers of her company, surpassing them indeed to a certain extent.” In his desire to honour the woman who had fought for them for three long years, he ended with a flourish. “On [28th September], she fought very courageously at [Ovshe Plain], outstripping all the company, despite the open ground, and leading by her example as usual the soldiers to accept with joy even the roughest combat.”23

  The news of the Bulgarian armistice came as a bitter disappointment to the men of Flora’s company. Proud as they were of their remarkable achievement, most of them wanted to keep fighting, even if it delayed their return home. Flora felt the same. “There we were, stopped by our allies in the full flush of victory we had been through so much to gain, on the borders with Bulgaria, and yet not allowed to go any further,” she wrote with a flash of anger. Instead, the French sent their African Colonial troops into Bulgaria as an occupying force. “These, in addition to frightening the women and children, did far worse things in the way of wanton cruelty… than ever the Serbs would have done,” commented Flora, who was not otherwise in the habit of using race pejoratively. “If one can believe all one hears,” she added, clearly not entirely convinced by the reports.24

  But the British and French had their rationale. They too had heard the widespread rumours that the regions of Serbia under Bulgarian control had been subjected to harsh requisitioning, summary deportations and public executions by their occupiers. In March 1917 the first reports had emerged that some eight thousand Serbian irregular forces, largely composed of men who had escaped to the mountains and remained in Serbia after the retreat, had risen against their oppressors in the region around Niš and Prokuplje, a village to the south-west. They had heard too that that the revolt had been put down savagely and that there had been mass executions and deportations of families to camps in Bulgaria.25 The Allies feared that if the Serbs were allowed to enter Bulgaria they would carry out retribution in kind.

  Flora thought it incomprehensible that the Serbs could carry out such atrocities. “The idea that [the Serbs] would have revenged themselves by killing women and children… is not to be thought of,” she declared. “Though I have sat and listened to the men making blood-curdling threats to the address of the next Bulgar they caught alive, what they actually did do when they found a wounded Bulgar was to give him a cigarette and a drink from their own much cherished water bottle. This I have seen over and over again.”26

  Both the Serbs and Bulgarians firmly believed in each other’s capacity for savagery – as did the Allied authorities – and there is indirect evidence that at least some atrocities were committed by both sides.27 However, they do not appear to have been particularly widespread – with the exception of Bulgarian crimes against the Serbian civilian population in 1917, which were comprehensively documented. And there was little evidence of the Serbian mindset that the British diplomat Aubrey Herbert so famously described: “Accuse the Serb of having put to death 500 Albanians… and the fiery Serb will reply proudly that such is not the case; his gallant countrymen have done better than that: from a thousand to twelve hundred Albanians have been massacred.”28 When the sinister Black Hand infiltrated the Serbian Third Army, the authorities moved decisively to crush it, while Allied personnel attached to the Serbian army saw or heard little evidence of war crimes having been committed by the Serbs. In contrast, the Balkan Wars had been marred by widespread atrocities on all sides, including the Serbs. It of course remains possible that the Serbs moderated their behaviour in the presence of Allied nationals, but on the whole there is far more evidence to indicate that the Serbian army remained for the most part both disciplined and professional.

  “Where’s Jovan Simović?” called an old woman waiting patiently in the rain alongside the muddy road leading north to Niš. She was one of many eagerly scanning the faces of the passing soldiers. Like the others she carried a little basket of white bread, eggs and plums to welcome the son she had not seen for four years. “He’s somewhere behind, with another regiment,” replied one of the soldiers. “Is he really behind?” Flora asked him when they were out of hearing distance. “How could I tell her he died of hunger in Albania?” he answered quietly.29

  The men of Flora’s Second Regiment likewise searched the faces of the old women, hoping to see a familiar one. Most had been recruited from the area around Niš and, after three weeks of forced marches, they were nearly home. They were sick with worry about what they would find on their return. Those lining the road told them about the brutal treatment they had suffered at the hands of the Bulgarians while the sight of ruined cottages and fields empty of livestock told the same story. “They have lost everything,” Flora jotted in her diary, “stock driven off and everything in the houses, even their clothes, ‘requisitioned’ by the Bulgars and Germans… They say the Germans pay for everything, whatever is asked so I gather some of them have not done so badly, but the Bulgars just take everything.” But the Serbs also suffered at the greedy hands of corrupt, unprincipled local officials, she added. “As far as I can gather some villages seem to have suffered more from their own ‘smret’ i.e. head man than anyone, he being in with the Bulgars and requisitioning his neighbours’ stock while keeping his own.”30

  On the occasion that the men of Flora’s regiment recognized someone from their village, they were all too often told that their parents had died or been killed, or that their cottage had been burnt to the ground and their family interned in camps in Bulgaria. “It seemed, as one man said bitterly,” wrote Flora, “as though all the mothers who were left had lost their sons, and all the boys who did come home their mothers.” Those who received no news of family pleaded to be allowed to visit their homes. It was rarely granted. “Please, it’s only an hour away,” they begged Major Cukavac. “I’m sorry,” he replied with genuine regret, “I can’t let you go. It’s orders.” Often they “wept outright with disappointment”, recorded Flora. Occasionally there was a reunion. “Then there would be hugging and rejoicing,” she recollected, “and the whole lot would fall into step with us as we marched on, followed by the wistful eyes of those still patiently waiting.”31

  Flora had marched in the rain with her company to the green, mountainous outskirts of Niš without firing a shot. She had enjoyed neither the inactivity nor the weather. The twisting roads, up and over steep, slippery hills, were in appalling condition. “I feel my enthusiasm for Serbia oozing away in the mud at every step,” she grizzled in her diary after a week of virtually continuous rain.32 It was at least a “triumphal march”, she wrote. As they tramp
ed through each newly liberated village, cheering, joyous inhabitants lined every muddy street. They whipped out forbidden hand-sewn patriotic flags from their hiding places and hung them from windows or waved them vigorously to welcome the tired, sodden but victorious army. Rye bread, wine and fruit were pressed on the soldiers from every side. “I’m sorry we have nothing better to give,” the inhabitants would apologize, “but the Bulgarians took everything.” Flora too was widely fêted. “I looked just like the rest, of course, ragged, thin and sunburnt,” she reported, but the men marching in front had generally told the inhabitants about the Englishwoman who had fought bravely alongside them and who had shared their hardships. By the time she arrived, crowds craned their necks to get a look at her. “Before we got through a village I had made everyone’s acquaintance,” she wrote.33

  On a dreary, wet 10th October, Flora’s company arrived on a hillside overlooking Niš. She had been looking forward to getting back into the thick of the action in the battle for the town, which she had heard that the enemy had been ordered to hold at all costs. Instead, as she looked down over its red roofs, the bulbous dome of its cathedral and the needle-like white spires of its many minarets, the Serbs were already patrolling its potholed, muddy, cobbled streets.34 “There was street fighting in Nish and great doings and I was out of it to my great disgust. As Mancha [a Lewis gunner in her company] said we had been talking of getting to Nish for the last three years and all we saw of it was a muddy field and pouring rain.”35

  Flora was itching to visit the town. Not that she particularly liked it – she had described it as an “awful hole” after passing through in 1914 – but the prospect of spending a few days on the hilly outskirts resting with her battalion appealed far less. After she successfully begged a horse from her old friend Colonel Pešić, now the regimental commandant, she charged down the hill into the centre. First she dropped in on Emilo Belić, the Chief-of-Staff of the First Army, before spending the afternoon with Cukavac and his family.