A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  Chapter 15

  Hungary

  1918

  By 11th November the crisis at the hospital was over. With the “show” running smoothly and the wards emptying, Flora became increasingly anxious to rejoin the men of her regiment. The problem was, she had no idea where they were – although she assumed they had reached Belgrade – and no way of travelling north with the railways nothing but twisted wreckage. She spotted her chance one morning when a staff car passed by the hospital. It belonged to Admiral Troubridge, the former head of the British Naval Mission to Belgrade, who had arrived in the capital charged with looking after the traffic on the Danube. She noticed immediately that it had a seat spare. “Could I get a lift with you?” she asked the obliging chauffeur. At ten o’clock that night she reached Belgrade.

  “We all thought you were lost until I got your telegram from Ćuprija,” remarked Colonel Belić cheerily when Flora presented herself at First Army Headquarters the following morning. “I sent you two telegrams asking for a doctor,” she responded crossly. “Yes, I got them,” he replied, “but I hadn’t got one handy, and I knew, if you were there, you would get out of the mess somehow. You know you’ve missed your regiment,” he continued. “They left yesterday for the Banat. But don’t worry. We’ll get you across the river to Pančevo, but you can’t leave for two hours. I’ll lend you a carriage and we’ll then get you across the river by motorboat.”1

  By the time Flora reached Belgrade, her Second Regiment were part of an occupying force that the Serbs had rushed across the Danube. They had been ordered north by the French, who wanted to show to the world that Hungary had fallen to the enemy, but the Serbs had their own reasons for wasting no time in staking a claim to the Banat and the neighbouring Bačka region. Without it their capital was virtually indefensible, separated from the enemy by only the width of a river. Romania also laid claim to stretches of the flat, fertile land. Both countries mounted what was little more than a land grab, each claiming that the nationality of the inhabitants gave them the right to the territory.2

  On 5th November, four days after the liberation of Belgrade, the Serbs sent across their first units. Over the next few days the First Army poured over the border, the Second Regiment with them, with the aim of covering as much of the territory as possible and driving out the remaining detachments of German troops. They were under strict orders to behave impeccably, lest they inflame the simmering ethnic tension. On 9th November they were met by enthusiastic Serbian crowds in the well-to-do city of Novi Sad before they continued their advance north, east and west.3

  Flora could hardly believe her eyes as her boat neared the landing jetty at Pančevo. It looked to her like “half the town” was crowded there. There was a band and she could also see several large bouquets of flowers. “Who are they expecting?” she asked an officer who was travelling with her. “You,” he laughed. “They were disappointed at not seeing you with the regiment, so Colonel Belić played a trick on you by telephoning that you were coming. That’s why he kept you back two hours.” With the officer by her side, Flora stepped off the boat in her well-worn uniform and smoothed down her windswept hair as the band struck up. “Before I had grasped the situation they were tying things they call [peshkirs] – long pieces of thin embroidered white stuff – round my neck and arms and pelting me with flowers,” Flora recalled with a mixture of pleasure and embarrassment. Then, in the company of the mayor, she was taken by carriage to a reception in her honour at the town hall. “There were refreshments and much speechifying,” she recalled. After the speeches were over, she was called on to make one in return. “Then they put a chair for me to stand on, and I was planted on that so that the populace would get a better view!” As she stood over her eager audience, she stammered a few words in Serbian, her fluency suffering under the pressure of the moment. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she said, thinking fast about how she could conclude quickly. “The mayor will say all I should like if I could.” The mayor rose to the challenge of the occasion. “There is nothing the Serbs love so much as making speeches,” she recalled drily, “and he made a long one.”4

  Flora caught up with her regiment just as they were about to travel by train to the town of Bečkerek, now known as Zrenjanin, which they had been ordered to occupy. “I shall never forget our triumphal entry,” she wrote. Her regiment were the first to arrive in the town of twenty-six thousand inhabitants, roughly one third of whom were Serbian speaking, one third Hungarian and the remainder German. The air hummed with excitement as the blue-grey-uniformed Serbs descended in their hundreds from their carriages onto the bright, sunny platform, met by crowds of townspeople, all eager to get a glimpse of the army they saw as liberators.

  She piled into a carriage with Cichot, the French veterinarian whose horse medicine had saved her from the ravages of Spanish influenza, and joined a cavalcade of carts and carriages from the station to the town hall. The Serbian people who lined the streets were ecstatic. “All the youth of the town was on horseback,” Flora recorded. “They ranged themselves alongside as outriders, and we galloped along, everyone firing rifles and revolvers into the air.” But when they wound their way through the Hungarian part of town, the crowds who lined the streets watched the exuberant procession with silent, sullen faces.

  Flora and Cichot’s carriage pulled up outside the town hall, a two-storey, white, neo-baroque building that faced a large, grassy square. They stepped out onto the pavement, jostled through its doorway and walked up a set of stairs. There they took their places in a reception room crowded with representatives of both the Serbian army and the town, at the head of which was a Hungarian mayor. He greeted the Serbs graciously, and they responded in kind.

  As one “endless, pretty” speech followed another, Cichot began to fidget. He excused himself and wandered out onto the balcony that led off the room. As he leant over it, he looked down onto the massed crowds of people in the street and square below. Then he gazed idly up over the building. There he spotted a sole flag flying. It was Hungarian. He hurried back into the room to Flora’s side and whispered angrily in her ear what he had seen. “I’m going to take it down if no one else will,” he told her. With Flora egging him on, he marched back to the balcony and yanked down the flag. From below rose a crescendo of angry shouts and protests. Then the crack of a gunshot ripped through the air. In the reception room, looks of confusion and then panic spread across the faces of the dignitaries. Horrified by the dangerously escalating situation, the Serbian commandant consulted anxiously with the major, then issued an order for the Hungarian flag to be flown, but this time alongside a Serbian one. When the red, white and green Hungarian colours once again flapped in the wind, the crowd began to settle. The crisis had been narrowly averted. Flora was unrepentant. Everything about the reception had gone “off smoothly”, she concluded, except this “one little, untoward incident”. The Serbian authorities were less sanguine. For the rest of the month Flora remained in Bečkerek with her regiment under the watchful eye of a bodyguard that Pešić has assigned to her. Cichot too had been given one. “The colonel of the regiment had become anxious about us,” wrote Flora, “as, being the only foreign representatives – especially after the flag episode – he was afraid someone might take it into his head to stick a knife into us.”5

  She was still there when, on 1st December 1918, the announcement was made of the formation of a new country – the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The union had been made in great haste, at the behest in particular of the Croats, who wanted protection from the Italian armies who were pouring south to stake a claim to the largely Slav-populated eastern Adriatic.6 It was a country without established borders, almost all of which were due to go up for discussion at the Paris Peace Conference – and it was one without a constitution to define how power was to be distributed. The Catholic, Western-oriented Croats and Slovenes wanted a federation in which they would be equal partners. The Orthodox, Eastern-oriented Serbs had equally clear aims
, to form a centralized state, a “Greater Serbia”, in which they held the balance of power.

  From Bečkerek, Flora’s company was moved north to a village across the Tisza river from Scegedin (now Szeged). It was “not very comfortable”, she groused. On 6th January she was allowed to leave early for Belgrade, where her company were about to be posted. The penetrating cold of the capital did not improve her spirits. After years of war, it was a grim, dilapidated and miserable place. It was “a one-eyed city, a city of one-legged men… a city of unrelenting cobblestones and broken houses”, wrote one unhappy observer.7 Few shops or hotels were open. Although the worst of the bomb damage had already been repaired, its houses were decaying, its people looked haggard and ill-fed and its streets were full of homeless, orphaned children.

  The medical need both in Belgrade and across Serbia was enormous: of the four hundred and fifty doctors in Serbia at the start of the war, only one hundred returned to practice at its end.8 The country was full of war-shattered, limbless soldiers and emaciated former prisoners, while the civilian population, who had had little access to medical treatment during the war, suffered widely from a range of untreated diseases. The greatest medical problem by far was tuberculosis, a disease that attacked not only the lungs but the bones and joints, causing severe deformities. By the end of the war, an estimated fifty thousand children were dying annually of the disease across the kingdom.9

  Emily was one of several “old campaigners” who returned to the capital at the end of the war hoping to help. On 11th November 1918, the headline of the New York Times shouted out the news that she had been waiting so long to hear, “Armistice Signed, End of the War!” Days later, she sailed across the Atlantic under the auspices of the Commission Internationale de Ravitaillement.10 No sooner had she reached Belgrade than she went in search of Flora. She found her living in a room in the city, having turned up her nose in disdain at the “filthily dirty” barracks where her regiment had been temporarily quartered.

  With the help of Nan MacGlade and Evelina Haverfield, who had also returned to the capital, they threw themselves into a flurry of activity. In the space of about a week they had opened a canteen for former POWs in an empty building in the town. Soon they were handing out tea, cigarettes, underclothing and soup to an average of nine hundred men per day, many of whom were in a “pitiable condition”. “We had good fires always going in two stoves,” wrote Flora. “We also managed to get benches and tressle-tables [sic], and any soldier could come in and have a mug of hot tea, sit there and play games as long as he liked.” In early January the four women began planning a second canteen in Belgrade, this time for the men of Flora’s Second Regiment who had since been given permanent accommodation in the ancient stone fortress of Gornji Grad, in the capital’s central Kalemegdan Park.11

  Charitable organizations flocked to the country at the end of the war. Although some were led by veteran workers, many were run and staffed by people who were new to Serbia, had no knowledge of the modus operandi and did not speak the language. With little initial coordination between them, they competed with each other for accommodation and governmental support for their particular project.12 Even the experienced Serbian-speaking workers found things difficult. Those with no experience found things next to impossible. They received little help from government officials, many of whom were dishonest or shared the air of apathy that hung over the city. The Serbs had a tendency to say yes even when they did not mean it, grumbled one onlooker, partly out of politeness and partly out of laziness.13 Many relief workers soon left in frustration.

  Great as the need was, even some of the most experienced organizations appeared to lose their raison d’être. Among the worst affected were the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. While the valuable work of the Vranja Unit continued apace, the other three units still in the region began to show early signs of splintering. Their problems, which stemmed largely from dismal management and vicious infighting between their organizing committees in Britain, were compounded by the dispiriting experience of dealing with Serbian officialdom. By January many members of the Elsie Inglis Unit were on their way home and, in March, most members of the Scottish Women’s Hospital Transport Column followed suit. The Girton and Newnham Unit remained behind, but planned to transfer from Salonika to Belgrade.

  Other organizations that had been active among the Serbs during the war continued their service, with varying degrees of success and longevity. The Serbian Relief Fund set up hospitals, clinics and dispensaries across central Serbia and a workshop for the disabled at Mount Avala, south of Belgrade.14 The American Women’s Hospitals – in effect an American version of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals – had arrived in Macedonia shortly before the end of the war, where they established hospitals, clinics and dispensaries.15 The American Red Cross poured in both personnel and resources to conduct medical and general relief work across the country.16 The American Quakers focused their efforts around Niš and Leskovac in central Serbia and Peć in Kosovo. They placed more emphasis than the other units on reconstruction and, uniquely, built two shared villages in the Kosovan “scrubland” for six hundred homeless Montenegrins and Albanians. They had “some disappointments” in trying to make the nationalities cooperate, commented one Quaker observer.17

  Still, there were several notable longer-term successes, particularly among the projects run and staffed by the old campaigners. Two such veterans cared for orphans at the Anglo-Serbian Children’s Home at Niš. Another, Margaret McFie, set up a blind school. Yet another, Annie Dickinson, the School of Carpentry for Orphan Boys.18 But of all the successes, the greatest by far was Katherine MacPhail’s. She had left Macedonia in the summer of 1918 when her father fell ill with Spanish influenza and had hurried back with the vague idea of opening a children’s hospital. With no time to make plans, raise funds or bring supplies, she dashed off with “$100 in her pocket and a bottle of aspirin, which had been given her by a well-wisher as she left for Serbia”.19

  The thirty-one-year-old doctor faced the same daunting series of difficulties in establishing a working charitable enterprise as the other relief workers and one additional one – she had no organization to back her. Nonetheless, she had certain things going for her. She spoke fluent Serbian, she knew people willing to help and she was not fussy. When a well-connected friend offered her the use of an old barracks, Katherine looked round it with dismay but accepted nonetheless. The building had been used as stables by the Austrians and had no water or electricity. Most of its windows were broken, it was full of bugs and it was filthy.

  First she went to see Admiral Ernest Troubridge, whom she had first met in Belgrade in 1915. Troubridge did not approve on paper of many of the British women then working in Serbia. “Any woman who has some money and wants to adventure herself had been allowed to arrive in Serbia with what is called a ‘unit’, which apparently is under no one’s control and in very many cases the people are quite undesirable,” he complained in a reference that would have encompassed the likes of Flora.20 In practice however he was kind and helpful to them. When Katherine approached him with her plans for her hospital, true to character, he lent her all the help he could, first sending his marines to her barracks armed, this time, with paint and brushes. “They had only dreadnought-grey,” commented Katherine drily.21

  Next she scrounged a few army beds and supplies from friends in other charitable organizations. Within a week she had one of the few going concerns in Belgrade. Thirty-two starving children – many of them critically ill – were lying in her grey-painted wards. “Seeing that Dr MacPhail meant business everyone who had anything to provide did so,” noted one observer. “As Dr MacPhail weighs about 100 pounds and stands about five feet tall, it may furnish some indication of how her energy made popular the sympathy which was accorded to her by various relief organizations.”22 The Serbian government donated wooden beds, the British Red Cross agreed to pay the salaries of two nurses, the American Red Cross gave medicine, dressings and a ster
ilizer, a British general donated bedding, the Serbian Relief Fund agreed to feed the children, the Scottish Women’s Hospitals gave money and volunteers offered their services.

  With Troubridge’s continued support, Katherine’s hospital went from strength to strength. By the end of January her thirty-two children lay comfortably in clean, heated wards, she was beginning to carry out operations with the help of Dr Ibbotson, the marine surgeon, and she had started an out-patients department.23

  With Sandes-Haverfield Canteens up and running in two locations in Belgrade, Flora and Evelina began to broaden the focus of their fund-raising efforts to take account of conditions in Serbia at the end of the war. Their work continued apace on their Canteen Fund, but now they registered a new charitable society. Through the “Hon. Evelina Haverfield and Sergeant Major Flora Sandes Fund for Disabled Serbian Soldiers” they planned to set up a hostel where men maimed by the war could live and be taught new trades.24

  While Flora remained behind to run the canteens with Emily and Nan, Evelina returned home to London in early 1919. In February, she oversaw the first of a series of fund-raising events. There was a Fancy Dress and Dance at the Piccadilly Hotel, a meeting at the Royal Automobile Club and talks by prominent speakers. There were even plans to have a “Flag Day” during which little paper flags printed with the name of the Fund and the colours of the Serbian flag would be sold in the streets.25 But by spring, Flora and Evelina’s plans had begun to unravel. After years of war and separation from their families, most disabled men preferred instead to return home. Then, in May 1919, a tersely worded note appeared, tucked away in the columns of the Times. “Sergeant Major Flora Sandes is severing her connection with Mrs Haverfield’s Fund, as she wishes to work for Serbian soldiers only,” it announced. “Mrs Haverfield is doing a certain amount of relief work among the wives and families of disabled men, which she feels it is impossible to drop.”26 In the weeks that followed, Evelina broadened her focus on civilian relief by setting up yet another charity, “The Honourable Evelina Haverfield’s Fund for Serbian Children”, hoping to raise funds to open an orphanage.