A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  Marković looked at the disgruntled forty-three-year-old Englishwoman standing before him and stifled a laugh. “An ultimatum, eh!” he replied jovially while holding out a cigarette to her. “Sit down a minute, Sandes, and cool off and let’s see what we can do.” Flora sat smoking while he leafed through a book of army regulations. “Well, it doesn’t say that a woman can’t be promoted to commissioned rank,” he told her finally. “In fact it doesn’t mention women at all. That’s in your favour. I’ll see what I can do. I will write my own report and opinion of the matter. If no one disagrees, all your reports are good, and Prince Alexander will append his signature, we may possibly have a woman officer in the Serbian army yet.”27

  Flora passed the anxious time waiting for a response by helping in the canteens and on evenings out and about in the restaurants and cafés of Belgrade. She had given up her room in the centre – almost certainly because her funds were running short – in preference for her small, waterproof bivouac tent, which she erected in a small grove of trees near the parade ground of the Grad. The proximity to the canteens meant she only had a short distance to stumble, blurry-eyed, for the six-a.m. start after the latest evening out. And there were nights out aplenty with the men of her regiment and the English community in Belgrade. Those of the latter who knew Flora only by name took a great interest in her, although her reputation as a fearless, battle-hardened, Boadicea-like figure meant that she was not always quite what they expected when they met her in the flesh. “She is an ordinary, middle-aged female” who was dressed in “full rig and no skirts”, wrote one slightly disappointed Red Cross worker after meeting her at a formal reception at Admiral Troubridge’s house.28

  In late June Flora was summoned for a meeting with General Jovanović, the Minister of War. On her arrival at his offices, he wrung her warmly by the hand and congratulated her. She had become the first woman and only foreigner ever to have been commissioned as an officer in the Serbian army. “Don your epaulettes,” he told her, as he handed her the shoulder insignia denoting her new rank of second lieutenant. Not only had she been given favourable reports by all the commanders she had served under, Crown Prince Aleksandar had visited the Grad to interview the officers of her regiment about her character. Even then, a special Act of Parliament had had to be enacted to allow a commission to be given to her, which Aleksandar had signed. On her promotion, she was made a “vodnik” – platoon officer – and put in charge of around sixty men in the Second Company of the Third Battalion, Second Regiment, Morava Division, First Army.

  “I used to think that officers had a soft job,” confided one of Flora’s fellow second lieutenants, “but I wish now I were a non-com again.” Within days of being transferred to the Second Company, she knew exactly what he meant. Every morning bar Sunday the sharp call of the bugle rang out at four a.m., and Flora staggered wearily from her tent, got ready with the help of her batman and, on an empty stomach, joined the rest of her company on the parade ground in the grey dawn. Then, with the other vodniks, she either marched her vod of around sixty men off to participate in mimic battles or south along the cobbled course to Topčider Park, a brisk hour’s walk away. In these verdant surroundings Flora bellowed orders as she wheeled and turned her men in their regulation drills before returning, under the burning summer sun, to the officers’ mess in the Gornji Grad. After a noon lunch, she retreated to her shaded tent for a brief siesta. At two thirty p.m. the bugle sounded again. She emerged blinking into the bright sun and, for three further hours, put her vod through a different set of drills, this time within the confines of the Grad. At six she joined everyone on the parade ground for evening prayers before she set out, every third night, as head of a patrol through the silent streets of Belgrade checking on isolated sentries. It meant a dreary, dark three-hour walk and a midnight finish, before the day began again at dawn.

  Flora had found her new role daunting at first. Her fame, which she normally enjoyed, this time only served to add to the already great pressure on her. It meant that every officer who happened to be passing while she was drilling her men would stop and watch. “Woe betide me if I made a slip at morning drill,” she bemoaned, “for directly I showed my face in the mess room for dinner I would be greeted by a perfect hail of good-natured chaff.” Her role was made harder still by the fact that she was not a native Serbian speaker. “Though I could talk it fairly fluently,” she explained, “I had to learn so many words of command, and the exact tone in which to give them.”29

  With the assistance of a sergeant major, she learnt fast. She quickly became a familiar sight on the streets of Belgrade, much to the delight of the English staff of the various missions, including Dr Isabel Emslie of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals. “Flora Sandes… had a platoon of her own,” she wrote proudly. “She could be seen every day goose-stepping with her recruits over the cobbles of Belgrade.”30 The men of her vod also took great pride in their famous and unusual vodnik. Although they addressed her formally as “Mr Lieutenant”, informally she became “nasa Engleskinja” (“our Englishwoman”), the fond nickname by which she was by then widely known throughout the army.

  Flora had looked the men of her vod over worriedly the first time she met them, fearful that they would use every trick in the book to run rings around their new and inexperienced vodnik. Instead, to her relief, she found them a “loyal lot” who were willing to cover for her when, at first, she made the odd mistake.31 The men were a mixed group. She had been put in charge of all the young recruits to her company, the veteran Macedonian-front men and the equally battle-weary Serbs who, by fate of living within Austria-Hungary in 1914, had had to fight for the enemy during the war. Some of the latter suffered language problems at first, she recalled. “They knew the Austrian drill, but not the Serbian, and at first some spoke more German and Hungarian than Serbian.”

  Loyal as they were, her men could be a handful, particularly her “old soldiers”. After years of war, many were “utterly sick” of the army, resentful of army discipline and “incurably lazy”. Still, Flora was far from without sympathy for them. “Small wonder,” she remarked, “for some of these men, after fighting for four years, had not yet seen their homes.”32 Understanding though she was, they would occasionally tax her patience to the very limit. But soon, in her inimitable management style, she had brought even the most difficult men into line by sending them off with messages and assigning them odd jobs in an effort to keep them as busy as possible.

  As the first icy breath of winter swept across the Danube, Flora was ordered to leave her makeshift encampment under the trees of the Gornji Grad. Initially she wondered where on earth she would go. Then, by fortuitous accident, she stumbled across the ruins of a whitewashed stone hut on the ramparts. It was doorless and roofless and not very large, but it had a spectacular view across the river to the flat, seemingly endless plains beyond. “It’s a heap of rubble,” sneered her colleagues. “Wait, you’ll see,” she haughtily told them as she staked a claim, cadged the materials she needed to fix it up and set half a dozen of the men of her vod to work. Within three days they had it windproof and watertight, and Flora proudly moved in. “See, I told you so,” she crowed triumphantly when her fellow officers got their first look at her new winter quarters. “True… the approach was a bit chilly,” she admitted, “but with the walls lined with [bast]-matting, a roaring stove going, and half a dozen of us sitting in there, one did not notice the outside cold.”33

  Every evening when she was not on patrol duty, they would drag her from her warm quarters into town. “Be a man,” she would be told on the occasions she protested that she was too tired. “Oh, all right,” Flora would invariably respond, powerless to resist such a loaded challenge. At the start of the month, after they had been paid, they frequented the restaurants, cinemas, the many cafés and the music hall. By the end of the month, with funds running low, they made do with sitting for hours listening to music in the smoky cafés, drinking local wine and sipping dark, sweet coffe
e. “Luckily for me I had always been pretty good at sitting up late,” she commented later, “for we hardly ever got back before midnight, despite the fact that we had to be up again at 4 a.m.” Tired as she often was, she loved the warm companionship of her fellow officers. “There was great camaraderie,” she wrote later. “The barracks was our home, and all our interests were in common. It was that which always made the army so fascinating for me, and so different from any other kind of work… Our work and our play were all done together, and our whole life and interests revolved around the regiment.”34

  But for all the cosy camaraderie, Flora admitted to an acquaintance that she found life at the Gornji Grad in peacetime “dull and irksome” after the excitement of the war.35 In March, in search of greater adventure, she applied to the army for a year’s leave. She had thought her request through well. If they would grant it to her she offered to embark on a lecture tour of Australia to benefit Serbia’s beleaguered agricultural industry. She would aim both to raise funds from her audiences and generate financial assistance from the Australian government. It would also give Flora, who spent money as fast as she earned it, the chance to travel to Australia for the first time to see her family.

  On Thursday 3rd June she hopped off the ship in Adelaide, its first port of call, having assuaged the hardships of a long, tedious voyage by travelling first class. She then travelled by express train to Melbourne, en route to Sydney. Australian governmental, military and press circles were abuzz with the news of her arrival. “It is doubtful whether any woman in any sphere of life… is as wonderful as this soldier – a woman – a wonder – a woman who dared – and yet [is] so modest about her own achievements” trumpeted the Daily Examiner of Grafton, New South Wales.36 She is the “Woman’s champion”, added the paper, while others feted the arrival of “a modern Amazon”, “a real heroine” and the “new woman”.37

  Those unfamiliar with her exploits were instead able to recognize her as the sister of the renowned novelist, poet and journalist John Sandes, who had emigrated to Australia when Flora was just eleven years old. Watched by journalists and throngs of curious onlookers, John proudly grasped her hands in welcome as she stepped down onto the station platform in Melbourne.38 Her fifty-seven-year-old brother had returned to Australia only a few days previously, having been selected to accompany the Prince of Wales (the future King Edward VIII) on a seven-month-long colonial tour. He had been given this most prestigious, enviable and coveted post due to his unwavering support for the Empire and the King, and because he could therefore be trusted to send back suitably uncritical descriptions of the Prince’s progress. By the time he met Flora he had already reported on the “tumultuous” welcomes and the “affectionate” farewells given to the Prince from Barbados, Hawaii, Fiji and New Zealand.

  Flora stepped off the train in Sydney’s busy Central Station two days later under chilly skies, as usual kitted out in full Serbian uniform, her medals pinned across her chest. On hand to extend an official welcome were the District Commandant of New South Wales and the Chief Staff Officer of the Australian Forces.39 Pressing forward excitedly behind them were cheering crowds of Serbian-Australian well-wishers, who mobbed her from all sides in an attempt to shake the hand of the woman who embodied the pride they felt in the Serbian contribution to the Allied victory – “our brave warrior”, they called her. A representative of the community stepped forward to present her with a large bouquet while another gave a brief speech in Serbian in her honour. “The name of Flora Sandes is engraved on every Serbian heart,” he pronounced. She stumbled through a few impromptu words in gratitude to the shouts of “Zivila!” (“Long live [Flora]!”) before she was whisked away to the Hotel Australia for a reception in her honour. There she posed for pictures draped in a Union Jack and a Serbian flag, signed autographs and graciously accepted an illustrated address that described her grandly as the “reincarnation of Joan of Arc”.40 Later that day, she had hardly caught her breath before she was introduced to the Prime Minister and was having tea with the Governor General and his wife.41

  Over the days that followed Flora was flooded with invitations to various functions. Although all of New South Wales was then preoccupied with the royal visit, several members of parliament found time to welcome her and she was given the chance to explain the purpose of her visit to the Minister for Defence during an audience he granted her.42 There were garden parties, dinners and formal receptions, along with an appearance at the horse races.43 There was also an invitation to the most prestigious event of all, a ball attended by the Prince of Wales at Government House. While others looked on enviously, Flora’s brother John introduced her to the Prince. “She… appeared in uniform, booted and spurred, her breast covered with decorations,” recorded Louis Mountbatten, the Prince’s nineteen-year-old cousin. “HRH chatted with her for some while, but couldn’t bring himself to dance with her.”44

  “Perhaps you wonder why I have come all the way out here to Australia to tell you about Serbia which is so small and far away, and sometimes in danger of being forgotten,” began Flora nervously from the stage of Sydney’s King’s Hall to her first audience on 3rd July. “Well it is just because Serbia is so far away that it is sometimes forgotten that the Serbian government asked me to come out and tell you something about the Serbian people, and the Serbian army to which I have the honour to belong, because I have lived with them for the last six years they think I know them better, and possibly understand them better than most people who have been over there.”45

  Her largely female audience looked up at her admiringly as she stood erectly before them dressed in khaki uniform, leggings and shiny, spurred top boots, an officer’s swagger cane by her side, her short grey hair newly trimmed for the occasion. Her talk was a great success. It was colourful, unpretentious, self-effacing and full of humorous anecdotes. She started by outlining, briefly, the key points of Serbian history, before describing how she had nursed the grievously wounded in Kragujevac and survived the horrors of typhus in Valjevo. She explained how, during the retreat across Albania, she had joined the army and told them how she was rescued by her colleagues after she was wounded. She spoke about her recovery, of her time in the trenches, of the suffering, endurance and bravery of the ordinary Serbian soldiers and their great victory in 1918. After the interval she showed them lantern slides, some graphic, of photographs from the Serbian front. She ended her talk with an appeal for funds. “The men have lost their all in helping the Allies to win the war,” she told them. “In peace they are a splendid, resourceful race, and with a little help they will soon be on their feet again.”46 As Flora thanked her listeners, she was given a standing ovation while the State Governor rose to his feet. “I have not heard of anything finer, or brighter, or more natural, or more modest, or more skilful than the work of Lieutenant Flora Sandes,” he announced to the cheers of the audience, who pressed forward to shake her hand.47

  The pending arrival of “Lt Flora Sandes” was advertised in newspapers all along the coast of New South Wales during the chilly month of July, as Flora slowly made her way north, on what was nothing short of a gruelling schedule. She gave both matinee and evening performances in larger towns, while virtually every hamlet en route, as long as it could provide a stage and a bed, also received a visit. Many of her appearances were accompanied by a flurry of activity. She was given civic receptions and tours of local hospitals and amenities. Red Cross ladies held afternoon teas and dinners in her honour, mayors welcomed her to the stage of their town halls and large audiences listened intently to her now-practised lectures.48 But as her tour extended into the cold, wet month of August, the numbers at her lectures began, on occasion, to wane and the papers were sometimes only able to report “fair” or “moderate” attendances.49

  Nevertheless, the press continued to comment widely on her visit. “She is a very manlike and martial lady, wearing military coat and cap over uniform top boots, and spurs, and carries a military cane,” commented one paper. “
The lieutenant is neither Amazonian nor petite,” observed another. Still others speculated on what the ambiguous appearance of the chain-smoking, trousered second lieutenant meant for the future of womanhood. But most reports simply commented favourably on her lectures and her “amazing endurance and fortitude”.50

  She cared less about what the press said about her than her cause, in the knowledge that she needed to capitalize on her unusual appearance. But to her dismay, before she had stood behind her first lecture podium, she had received her first indication that she might struggle to attract much help for Serbia’s agricultural industry. “We are not sure of Serbia,” wrote one reporter from Sydney, “and our hands are very full of our own needs.” The comment upset her deeply. “This hurts!” she scribbled miserably alongside it.51

  Although Flora had isolated successes – she managed in one night alone to collect a staggering £300 (the equivalent today of over £9,350) from an audience in Sydney – by mid-August her hopes had been dashed that she would achieve her ambitions. Most of those who came to hear her speak paid a small admission fee, listened intently to her account of her adventures, clapped enthusiastically and left without making further significant donations. Flora was worried that her lectures might not even cover her costs. Forced to lower her aims, she told the press dejectedly that she was “not appealing for money but… to finance [the] tour from Belgrade and return, the Serbian government not being in the position to do so.”52 Nevertheless, she kept faith that her audiences with the Prime Minister, Governor General and Minister for Defence would result in offers to sell agricultural machinery and supplies to Serbia on beneficial terms. But these hopes too met with bitter disappointment when, as week followed week, she began to realize that their polite interest was unlikely to translate into practical help. Still, she continued her tour of the Australian coast into September and October, and was able to retreat into the warm embrace of her sister Meg’s large family at their farm near the town of Inverell.