That afternoon, Colonel Belić knocked on Cukavac’s door to invite Flora to dinner that day with General Mišić, the Serbian Chief-of-Staff. Flora accepted immediately. There was no one more important in the army. He was a veteran of every conflict Serbia had fought in over forty years, a brilliant strategist who was now on the verge of being the author of one of the great victories of the war. That evening she sat down to eat with Belić, a few close members of the inner circle and the lightly built general, the strain of the last years reflected in his lined, worn face. They were in high spirits, flushed with the latest victory, but Mišić suspected that they would not have such an easy time of it in their next battle for the German-held town of Paraćin.36
The Serbian victory in the battle for Niš was another military disaster for the Germans. It severed the railway link from Berlin to Constantinople, which isolated Turkey from its chief ally and cut off its supply of war material. By the end of the month Turkey had joined Bulgaria in suing for peace.37 In the three weeks of fighting leading up to the battle, the Serbs had advanced a remarkable one hundred and seventy miles.38 Flora had kept up with them, so far, every painful step of the way.
Chapter 14
Spanish Influenza
1918
Flora and her company approached the outskirts of Paraćin cautiously. They had been ordered to hold a position near the railway line that ran to the west of the town. Ahead of them lay the shadowy skeleton of a ruined factory. Beyond lay a dark line of hills, outlined against the purple, evening sky, from which German artillery flashed angrily. Each flash was followed moments later by the dull explosion of a shell striking the town. Hundreds of frightened, miserable refugees clogged the main road south to Niš, carrying whatever household goods they had been able to grab in their panicked flight. The men of Flora’s company had flushed with anger at their sight, and murmured threats against the Germans under their breath.
By nightfall they had reached the railway. Keeping their voices low, they crept into position near a low embankment as the German batteries began to sweep their vicinity with their fire. When the first shell slammed into the ground ahead of them with a hot, acrid burst, they pressed themselves into the cold mud behind a low bank. “The Germans know we’re here,” thought Flora to herself. Each whistle and thudding detonation landed a few feet closer, one a bit to the left, the next a bit to the right, throwing up thick clumps of wet earth in front of them. “We thought they’d get our range every minute,” she scribbled. Then a shell landed just short of the bank. Flora pulled her steel helmet down over her ears and held her breath as the next one screamed towards them, certain that it would be a direct hit. Instead it exploded behind them in an empty field. With the immediate danger past, she huddled with the men of her company against the cold of the bank to the sound of the shelling. “There was nothing to do but lie there,” she commented. “I went to sleep in the middle of it.”1
Around midnight Flora was gently awakened. “We’re moving forward to the factory,” the men whispered to her. She stood up, shook her tired, stiff limbs and picked up her rifle. Under the moonlight she followed them over the broken ground, skirting the fresh shell holes as they picked their way towards the shattered building. They looked grimly about them at the dark, crumpled bodies of the men of their Morava Division, victims of the shelling, who lay scattered across the ground around it. Flora spent a miserable, cold night there with her company. When the grey half-light of dawn brought with it orders to hold a new position, she left the death-strewn surrounds gladly behind. In the stillness of the morning she marched a short distance with her company to a position under a bridge along a river running just south of the town. They spent the following day there sheltering from German shellfire while waiting for the cover of night to fall. “About every half-hour they shelled the bridge, or if anyone went over it, and could distinguish between a soldier and a civvy crossing. Very hot… Never seen worse bombardment than we’ve had these last two days,” jotted Flora. When darkness finally fell they crept to a cold, muddy field, rough with the stalks of its last harvest of maize, to spend the night in the dangerous occupation of “advanced outpost”.2
By morning Flora was “shivering violently” from fever. “What’s wrong, Sandes?” asked Cukavac a touch unsympathetically, from his perch atop a horse. She was sitting by herself on a box in the morning sun by the roadside, looking ill and miserable. “I don’t know, but I’m sick,” she replied. “I can’t walk another step.” “All right,” he called over his shoulder as he dashed off after his battalion. “You had better go to the ambulance.” At that moment, Captain Ljuba, the Regimental Adjutant, rode up. “Ambulance, pooh!” he commented. “What can the ambulance do for you? The Colonel’s here [Pešić]; I’ll give you a horse and you can ride with us. We’ll doctor you better than any ambulance.” “I can’t,” replied Flora. “Can’t,” scoffed Ljuba. “Now just pull yourself together. We are going to ride through Paraćin and Ćuprija. The people will be expecting to see you and they will be disappointed if they don’t, so will the Colonel.”3
Flora crawled onto a horse that Ljuba secured for her, forced a grateful half-smile and followed him and the rest of the regimental staff through Paraćin. The town had finally been captured, on 23rd October, after fierce fighting and several counter-attacks by the Germans, who were desperate to delay the advance of the First Army.4 It had been “badly knocked about”, she reported, “and there were not many people left in it”, but as they came through Ćuprija a few miles farther north she could see the inhabitants ahead crowding exuberantly into the sunny streets. Although her head was throbbing under the hot sun, she braved another wan smile as she entered the town at the front of the procession alongside Pešić and Ljuba, who were keen to show off their Englishwoman sergeant major. They received a rapturous welcome. “All the people cheered and clasped our hands,” she wrote, “calling us their saviours.”5 They also placed wreaths and flowers around the necks of their horses. “I… was so smothered… I could hardly see,” scrawled Flora in her diary later. “My gee could hardly hold its head up, flags out everywhere and the whole population in the streets, we came in at one end as our cavalry patrols were driving the last of the Germans out of the other end of the town.” Still, she wrote, “I didn’t feel at all like being ‘demonstrated’ and was glad when we got through.”6
The next morning she felt yet worse. When Ljuba and the regimental staff had rushed off early, she was too ill to join them. “Was too bad to stand, nothing for it now but to wait where I am till the ambulance picks me up damn it,” she wailed in her diary. “Here’s another,” commented Dr Boro, the regimental doctor, to his assistant after she had staggered over to the ambulance in the rain when it had finally stopped nearby. “You’ve got Spanish flu and a high temperature,” he advised her. “You’ll need to ride back to Ćuprija. A temporary hospital is starting there, but I don’t know what it will be like. The doctor is a Greek. If it’s too bad get into some private house.”7
Flora spent two miserable hours on horseback, her face bent against the pouring rain, before she finally rode into the muddy hospital compound. Miloje, the orderly in charge of the horse, had trudged alongside her. With his help she painfully dismounted and walked slowly to the entrance of the low building. Her stomach churned at the stench as she stepped inside. “The hospital was beyond anything I have ever seen,” she wrote later. It had been hurriedly evacuated by the Germans, who had left it in an “indescribably filthy condition”. The Greek doctor had been “pushed in” with a few orderlies with the sole instruction to do what he could. He had not done much, she thought. “Hundreds of soldiers were lying all over the place, and on the cold, stone floors of the corridor in their wet, muddy uniforms. All down with flu, pneumonia or exhaustion, and the atmosphere was appalling.”
Miloje had entered alongside Flora, looked about in disgust, turned on his heels and left, muttering to himself. He returned a few minutes later. “I’ve found you somewhere els
e,” he told her. “There’s a house close by that will take you.” On arrival Flora was ushered indoors by two sisters who lived with their elderly mother. Their husbands had both been interned in Bulgaria as prisoners. They dressed her in a shirt belonging to one of the absent men and put her to bed in their best bedroom. “I… then astonished my hostess[es] by sleeping with very little intermission for three days and nights,” she recalled. Meanwhile Miloje found himself accommodation in the town and turned himself “from a horse boy into a very efficient nurse and batman”. “Evidently,” Flora recorded, he had “small faith that any woman would know how to look after me properly.”
The day after her arrival she was roused from her sleep by Monsieur Cichot, a French veterinarian attached to her regiment. He had been passing through Ćuprija with the horse transport when he heard that she was in the town, lying sick in bed. “[He] hunted me up,” wrote Flora drily, “and prescribed for me as he would have done for a horse. At any rate, that was all the doctoring I received, but it seemed to be pretty effective.”8
Fortified by the horse medicine, Flora soon began to feel better. Miloje had kept a close eye on her, and had regaled her during her illness with tales of what was going on at the hospital. “The doctor won’t take patients in and let one man die on the stretcher outside the door where he had lain all day,” he told her. Five days after falling ill she pulled herself out of bed, dressed for the first time and walked shakily down the road to investigate. On the way she met an artilleryman who had been refused admission. “[He] was so sick he could hardly stand,” wrote Flora with disgust. “I took his temperature, and it stood at 104.” Conditions inside the hospital drove her into a fury. So far as she could see, the doctor had done nothing whatsoever to relieve the suffering of the men who were “dying like flies of flu and pneumonia”. Flora rounded on him. “I’m going to report you to the authorities once I get to Belgrade,” she raged. “You can do what you like with the hospital,” he replied. “It’s yours. I’m sick and going to bed.” Although he was the only doctor, he stayed there for two weeks, she recalled bitterly.
Tackling the conditions in the hospital may not have offered the excitement of the battlefield, but it was still just the sort of challenge she relished. First she set the four hospital orderlies to work scrubbing the floors and walls with disinfectant, while the head orderly set up a bath at the end of the corridor. “There are also some townswomen here,” he told her, “but they’ve been of little help.” Flora found them in a room winding bandages and pasting labels on bottles. “A week ago you pelted us with flowers and called us your ‘saviours’,” she fumed. “And you’re now letting these same men die in front of you on the ground. Has it not occurred to you that these men need a bed?” The following day, they returned with blankets, sheets and clothing. By nightfall she had every man, “unless absolutely dying”, bathed and in bed with clean clothes.
With one difficulty solved, Flora tackled the next. The hospital was running short of food and there was little in the town. Although she knew she had only “moral” authority, she wrote out a pass, signed it herself, embossed it with a hospital stamp she had found while rummaging through the doctor’s office and handed it to an orderly with instructions to go round the nearby villages. “Beg, borrow or steal it,” she told him. The next day he arrived back with a wagonload. There was plenty of food in the villages, he reported, and the inhabitants had been happy to give the hospital what they could. Flora now began writing out passes every second day.9
While Flora was hard at work at the hospital, the men of the Serbian army continued their relentless advance northwards, capturing tens of thousands of prisoners as they went, and liberating one town after another. By 25th October the Germans and their Austro-Hungarian allies, all hope of victory lost, had begun their flight out of Serbia across the Danube and Sava rivers. Three days later Austria requested a general armistice. By 31st October the Serbs had reached the wooded heights of Topčider hill overlooking their capital.10 The following day, the ragged army, many of its soldiers now barefoot, entered Belgrade in triumph. In less than seven weeks the Serbian army had marched four hundred miles and routed the Bulgarians and Austro-Hungarians. They now pursued the German army across the rivers into Hungarian territory.
Each day Flora watched two or three men die in her wards while the doctor remained determinedly in bed. Many were French Colonial troops. Twice she sent First Army Headquarters an urgent telegraph asking for a doctor and twice she waited expectantly for a response that never came. In desperation, she marched off to the French Battalion Headquarters in the town and asked to see the commandant. “He received me very politely, though I think he must have wondered who this unusual sergeant was,” she wrote. Armed by the fact that “the French peg out more easily than the Serbs”, she told him that she had a hospital to run but no doctor and that French nationals were dying from lack of care. “All right,” he nodded. “I’ll arrange for a doctor to visit every day.”11
As the commandant had promised, from that day forth “a most awfully nice little [French] doctor” arrived to visit the worst cases in hospital, in the company of a young Serbian medical student. Nonetheless, some patients were already “hopeless” cases by the time the doctor examined them, dying of Spanish influenza or the pneumonia that so often followed in its wake. When it swept across the Balkans in the late summer of 1918, the epidemic met not armies of healthy, strong men but men whose systems had been weakened by chronic malaria and the rigours of the rapid advance. “[It] had just struck us like the plague,” Flora observed.12 The first symptom, after a couple of days of incubation, was a persistent cough, followed by numbing exhaustion and high fever. Often its victims suffered from delirium, diarrhoea and sudden nosebleeds. When pneumonia followed, it was “almost as fatal as being heavily gassed with chlorine or phosgene”, commented one doctor of the Salonika army. “The lungs filled up with fluid and the patient drowned just as surely, though slowly, as a man drowns in the sea.”13 But not all victims of flu were hard hit. Flora was able to treat such mild cases successfully with a combination of gentle bullying and the horse medicine that had worked so well for her.
Across liberated Serbia medical and relief workers were facing equally appalling conditions as they set up base in the larger towns. By mid-October Amelia Tileston had reached Skopje. There she found two hundred Italian soldiers, former prisoners of the Bulgarians, “in a pitiable state”. In the chaos that followed in the wake of the advance, no one had fed or taken care of them. “She bought bread for them,” wrote Emily of her work, “which saved the lives of many of them.”14 Also in Skopje were the Elsie Inglis Unit of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals who had had moved from their malodorous former base, “Dead Horse Camp”, to set up a hospital in a former school. They admitted “mostly overworked and underfed men” suffering from the frequently fatal combination of influenza and malaria.15
The American Unit, under the charge of their new, young Scottish director, Dr Isabel Emslie, left Ostrovo to take over a hospital in Vranja, a town of fifteen thousand inhabitants in mountainous southern Serbia. “The operating theatre was ghastly,” Isabel shuddered. “A trestle table, covered with the refinement of a brown American cloth, stood in the centre of the room, the wooden floor of which was swimming with blood. A few saws and knives were lying about, and pails full of bits of legs and arms lay round the table and were black with greedy flies. The surgeons [of the Second Drina Dressing Station], with their sleeves rolled up and waterproof aprons black and red with old and new blood, worked steadily and without anaesthetics.”16 The men handed over the hospital to the women against the backdrop of the influenza outbreak. One by one the staff fell ill of flu, disease and overwork. As a blanket of depression and lethargy settled over the devastated country, they struggled daily with orderlies who were disinclined to work and officialdom that had to be nagged and prodded to supply their patients with even minimal rations. “Samo Serbia spava slava” (“Serbia only sleeps and f
easts”), they joked blackly to each other, in parody of the motto “Samo Serbia sebi spacella” (“Serbia alone delivered herself”).17
Further north still, by 17th October the Scottish Women’s Hospitals Transport Column had arrived in Niš, only five days after the Germans had been driven from it. They had spent the month since the breakthrough combing the country for wounded, pushing their cars over the mud-churned roads strewn with debris and across bridgeless streams. Nan MacGlade had also reached Niš, bringing with her all the supplies she could carry for a new Sandes-Haverfield Canteen. What she lacked she bought from the British. It was enough, at least, to allow her to hand out cigarettes, tea, biscuits and “potted meat” – a uniquely British delicacy – to the weary soldiers marching north and give cocoa and milk daily to four hundred men in a nearby hospital. “Poor things!” she wrote in a letter to Flora. “This is the only real nourishment they get.”18 She was joined in the town by members of the Serbian Relief Fund. They were given a building for their use, a former high school that had been used as a hospital by the enemy. The sanitary inspector, Dorothy Newhall, was given the unenviable job of cleaning it up. “The centre of the building looked like a sewage pit,” she shivered. “After digging for some time in it we came on human heads and limbs and every kind of filth. Beneath this we discovered a beautiful marble hall and staircase.”19
When news of the Armistice flashed across the world on 11th November signalling the end of the war, Flora and her Serbian patients met it quietly. “There were no festivities,” she recalled.20 Although Serbia had been liberated, it had also been ravaged. Over half its male population had died during the war, all industry and transportation links had been destroyed, agriculture was in ruins and the country was facing epidemics, not only of influenza, but also of tuberculosis.21 With so much disease and destruction, few felt much like celebrating. “War, we know, peace, we did know, but Armistice, who can tell?” commented a dispirited woman orderly at work with the Allied troops.22
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 25