A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes

by Louise Miller

  Two mornings later the inhabitants of Belgrade were wakened by the sound of explosions as the Serbs blew up the bridges over the Sava and Danube in an attempt to slow the German advance.19 Their efforts were futile. That afternoon, the first German motorcycle patrols appeared in the streets. “There was no spectacular entrance into the city,” wrote Lena Yovitchitch. “The primary detachments of the Wehrmacht seemed as bewildered as we were.”20 That evening, the mayor surrendered his capital to a captain of the SS.21

  “There are no trains from here to Užice,” the transport officer told Flora after she had been dropped off on the platform at Topčider. He paused, then added, “Perhaps, if you’re willing to wait, there might be one to Palanka. You can change there.” In the middle of the afternoon, he finally found her a seat in the mail van of a train carrying families of refugees from Belgrade. The train steamed out of the station and began to crawl south. At three thirty p.m. it stopped in the middle of snow-covered fields. There it remained stationary. “At first we thought the engine had run out of water, but presently we learnt that German tanks were ahead of us,” recalled Flora. “[We feared they were] preparing to make matchwood of our train, to say nothing of the aeroplanes which we could hear in the distance.”

  Around midnight the train began to inch back along the route they had already travelled. It halted finally in a siding near the small town of Mladenovac. “Back to the army at last,” Flora thought happily to herself when she spotted the captain of a labour battalion, Major Stefan Buković, authoritatively issuing orders. When she introduced herself and suggested she join them as their vodnik, he nodded his assent and gestured her into a horse car with the men of her new vod. “He showed no surprise,” she commented flatly, “nor would if the devil himself had dropped from the skies into their midst, provided he wasn’t German.”

  At daybreak, the train came to a stop. Under the charge of Buković, Flora and the eighty men of his heterogeneous unit piled out and began to march. All day long they walked across hills and through mud under the burning sun. “The going was hard,” commented Flora tersely. By the end of the first day she wrote in her diary that she was “lame”. As darkness fell she gratefully accepted a bed at a house in the village of Rogača, in which the major was also quartered. That night she watched as he wordlessly changed his epaulettes to hide his rank from the Germans.22

  The next morning she rose again at dawn, rubbed her aching feet and put on her boots for another day’s march. “We wandered along all day through roads like a morass, knee deep in mud,” wrote Flora. Several times they were forced to dive suddenly under hedgerows when German aeroplanes appeared overhead, scouring the lanes and roads for targets. The sound of heavy firing echoed round them from the right and they looked to the horizons expecting any moment to be chased down by columns of panzers. By the time they reached the mineral spa town of Aranđelovac after nightfall, forty miles south of the capital, Flora was dropping with exhaustion. There they were met by the news that the Germans were entering the town at the same moment. “We numbered only 80, of whom only 40 had rifles,” explained Flora. “So our major led his force back to a wood, dispersed them, and told them to make their way to their homes by devious routes.”23 She was too fatigued to go on. Instead, in the company of two others, a man she called either “the old gasbag” or the “Sudija” – Judge – and her sole fellow officer, Lieutenant Dušan Miloradović, “a sick man with an awful cough”, she limped slowly through the dark streets to the hospital, a former hotel, knowing full well that they would shortly be taken prisoner.

  Across Yugoslavia one defeat had followed another. By the middle of the month the royal authorities and government realized that the battle was all but over. They fled the country on 14th and 15th April respectively. On the 17th, after the fall of both Sarajevo and Dubrovnik, the army surrendered. It had taken the Germans only eleven days to crush and humiliate the Yugoslav army.

  The capitulation of the army marked the end of Yugoslavia as a political unit for the duration of the war. The brown-uniformed fascist Ustaše took charge in Croatia, while Italy, Bulgaria, Albania and Hungary seized territory adjacent to their borders.24 The Germans annexed part of Slovenia, occupied Serbia in force and set up a puppet government. Next, they moved to consolidate their authority over the defeated Serbs.

  The news of the surrender reached Katherine and Alice in the small coastal town of Herceg Novi. “You must leave at once,” they were told by a harried messenger from the British legation. “There’s no time. You need to get to Perast where you’ll find the minister [Ronald Campbell]. There’s a chance of getting you all off from there in a British destroyer.” Twelve hours later they reached the ancient grey-stone village, where they joined a “strange collection of British people who had come from every direction”.25

  Only eight days earlier Katherine and Alice had reached Dubrovnik hoping to set up a hospital unit, unaware that enemy pincers were beginning to close around them. Other British nationals from across Yugoslavia had also begun to converge on the coast. Many had travelled there in the false hope that the British and Americans were advancing north from Greece to come to the assistance of the Yugoslavs.26 When it became clear that no help would be forthcoming they turned their hopes instead to rumours that the British would be able to evacuate them in time to allow them to escape capture.

  The British Defence Attaché had done his very best to arrange just that. He had spent the last few days scrambling in an attempt to buy vessels to take them all to safety in Corfu but had been rebuffed at every turn by the Croat element of the population who had become noticeably more hostile to the British with the announcement of every German victory. All the while the Germans were reported to be less than twenty miles away.27

  None of them were overly worried. News had reached them that a British destroyer was on the way to pick them up that evening. “At 11 o’clock at night we heard voices calling us to collect at once at the village inn,” reported Katherine. “We gathered together by light of candles and then began our exit into the pitch-dark night.” They emerged at the quay four miles away into a scene of chaos. Among the British were nearly two hundred Yugoslav officers and men, all hoping to be evacuated.28 At four thirty a.m. those holding British passports were ordered to embark on a wine boat to carry them to the entrance of the Bay of Kotor to meet the destroyer.29 It was barely large enough to hold the British, let alone the panicked Yugoslavs. “Just before we pushed off,” recalled Flavia Kingscote, one of the nine women in the British party, “one of these desperate men on shore pulled a hand grenade out of his pocket and said if we refused to let him and his friends on board he would blow the whole boat sky high. We called his bluff, as there was no alternative, and pushed off, whereupon he took a running jump across the intervening space and clung despairingly to the side of the ship. I am glad I was below in the hold then and never saw the horrible scene that followed.” The boat eased out into the dark waters and made its way cautiously through the winding bay. “Everything looked grey and unearthly,” wrote Flavia. “A fine rain was falling. The drowned body of a soldier floated very slowly past the side of the boat. It was to us a presage of defeat.”30

  The rays of the sun were framing the mountains in warm silhouette by the time the ship rounded the last headland. Katherine and Alice scanned the horizon expectantly with the other passengers hoping to catch the first sight of the destroyer. Instead the expanse was empty. For several hours the boat cruised up and down the entrance to the bay while, in the direction of the shore, they could hear distant firing. The British Defence Attaché sent out repeated SOS messages searching for news of their rescue. Other than the crackle of the wireless, he was met with silence. Finally, at eleven a.m., the Minister huddled together his legation staff, then announced grimly that they were returning to shore. They stepped onto land near the village of Herceg Novi to await their fate at the hands of the enemy.31

  The doctors and nurses ushered Flora, the lieutenant and judge
into the hospital, a former hotel. Then they led them into the soldiers’ ward, gave them coffee and cognac and tucked them up side by side.32 The next morning Flora sat up brightly in her hospital bed to keep watch for Germans. “We haven’t seen any yet, though always expecting to,” she recorded, with a twinge of disappointment at the anticlimax. Instead, she spent the week resting quietly in bed and sitting in the sun on the terrace in the company of the lieutenant, until the doctors isolated him in a room for officers with tuberculosis. “He has it,” they told her.33

  All the while, Flora fretted terribly about the worry she knew she was putting Yurie through. When a young sergeant she had befriended offered conspiratorially to secrete her on board a lorry evacuating the wounded to the military hospital in Belgrade, she leapt at the chance. At least if she was in Belgrade she would have a chance of getting word to Yurie that she was safe. “We’ll have to smuggle you in,” he told her. “The Germans are disarming the soldiers and letting them go home, but they’re taking the officers prisoner. If there’s trouble en route just stick by me.”

  On a grey and bitterly cold morning Flora crowded into the open lorry with around seventeen others, wrapped a blanket around her and lay down shivering on a mattress. As the lorry neared the town of Mladenovac, Flora was gestured urgently to hide when a German sentry post was spotted ahead. She lay still and covered herself from head to toe with the blanket. The truck slowed and came to a stop while the Germans peered into the back. Then they waved them impatiently on. “I got through safely,” Flora wrote triumphantly, “feeling very much as if I were being rescued by the Scarlet Pimpernel.”34

  By dusk Flora was wrapped up in bed in the military hospital in Belgrade, which was packed to capacity with victims of the bombing and the fighting. The staff had gone to great lengths to find her a room. Many knew her already – she had spent weeks in their wards the previous December and January after her old injuries had played up again. The next day she sent a note to Yurie to tell him that she was alive. Sick with worry about him in turn, she waited anxiously overnight for a response. It came in the form of Marica. Flora hurried down to meet her at the gate of the German-controlled hospital. The maid passed her a note and packet from Yurie through the bars. “He’s been very ill while you’ve been away but he’s a bit better now,” she told her. “He would have come himself but he’s not strong enough.” Relief and emotion flooded over her at the news. “He knows now thank goodness that I am alive,” she wrote in a rush. “I was determined he should know by [Russian] Easter.”35

  Flora was desperate to find a way to return home to him. “I thought it might be fun to stay and puzzle the Germans,” she commented, “but I decided I must get out.” But how to get past the armed sentries at the gate, she wondered. There was no way that they would permit a captain in the Yugoslav army to sally forth past them. Then she struck on a simple plan. She knew that she was on the hospital register as Captain Sandes. The answer was obvious; she would leave instead as “Mrs X”. Flora sent another message to Marica to bring her women’s clothes. The next morning, her maid bribed her way through the gates to hand her the package. Flora thanked her, said goodbye to a junior doctor and a few officers in whom she had gleefully confided her plans and hurried into a lavatory to change. Then she walked through the gate past the sentries without a second glance. “I arrived home very fit, very sunburnt and looking – so my husband and friends declared – 10 years younger, and as if I had been away for a holiday.”36

  Sinister rumours had gathered pace in Belgrade that the Germans would finish with the gallows what they had started with the bombing. Instead, to the great surprise of everyone including Flora, the behaviour of the first detachments of the Wehrmacht to enter the capital was “exemplary”. The Germans put an end to widespread looting, calmed the first fears of starvation by forcing shop owners to open their doors, ordered everyone to be inoculated against typhoid and drew up plans to restore electricity, running water and the tram service. The behaviour, too, of German officers billeted on resentful families was “very correct”.37

  Within days, as one edict followed another in rapid succession, the Germans began to tighten their grip on the capital. Loudspeakers were set up across town to bellow orders to the population, who were expected to stand still and listen obediently, while notices were posted in public spaces across the city.38 “They ruled with an iron fist; but if you strictly obeyed orders you were safe,” commented Flora. “If you did not you were shot out of hand. There were no two ways about it.”

  One of their first measures was to impose a six-p.m. curfew. They sent out armed patrols to every part of town to ensure it was obeyed. “At first the Serbs, who do not take kindly to discipline, could not grasp the seriousness of curfew,” Flora observed. “All night one heard shooting, and in the morning there were bodies lying in the streets with a paper pinned to the chest, ‘found out in the street after 6 p.m.’ One woman living near us went a few steps outside to call in her cat, and she was shot.”39 On 16th April, three days after the occupation of Belgrade, a new series of diktats were posted. “All Jews must report to Tašmajdan Square at 8 a.m. on 19th April. Those who do not report will be shot,” they read. Those who obeyed were handed yellow armbands and were later set to work sweeping streets, tearing down ruined buildings and digging out corpses from fire- and bomb-damaged buildings.40 Another set of orders were designed to shut down all but German-controlled press and media. First they announced that anyone caught listening to a foreign radio station would face the death penalty. Later they insisted that anyone with a wireless radio needed to register it. Finally they simply outlawed their possession. With no independent radio, no post and only a single permitted newspaper, the Novo Vreme (New Times), which published a continuous stream of fascist propaganda, the population were shut off from the outside world.41

  Flora had returned home after twelve days away to a jubilant reunion with Yurie. “Great rejoicings,” she wrote that evening in her diary. But during the days that followed she had to face the harsh reality of life in the occupied capital, made harder still by her knowledge that she was liable to be arrested at any time. For the first week after her escape from hospital she stayed at home with her husband. “Didn’t like to go into the town,” she commented miserably. But soon the edicts forced her out. Initially she only dared go in company, in fear that she would be simply lifted from the streets with no one to tell Yurie what had happened. First she walked into town with him to get their typhoid inoculations, one of a requisite two to protect them from the water-borne illness. (“Yurie got out of his second one on account of his heart,” she noted.42) Then they queued repeatedly over subsequent days to register for their papers, as required by their new overlords. Finally, “expecting to be arrested every step”, Flora furtively ventured out alone for the first time, certain that her British nationality, her Yugoslav military rank and her recent escape from the clutches of the Germans were evident from her bearing. She returned home safely, having received hardly a second glance. From that moment on, she walked to and from town as she pleased.

  Although life was increasingly difficult and she could never escape the fear of arrest, Flora returned to the same sort of mundane tasks that had occupied her before the war. She mended jumpers and darned socks, shopped at the grocer’s, fought to keep moths under control, visited friends during the day and spent evenings playing cards with Yurie, the details of which she dutifully jotted in her diary along, regularly, with comments on the state of the weather, Yurie’s health and what she had eaten for lunch.

  In many respects, Flora and Yurie were better off than most. Their house was situated well away from the worst of the destruction, unlike many others who were forced to live in proximity to the stench of bodies, buried under collapsed houses, which grew worse following rain or on torrid spring days.43 They had a nearby well from which they could obtain clean water and friends who checked in on them frequently. They also had the “invaluable” Marica (along with her
“worthless” husband Sava) as live-in help. Although they were by no means wealthy – particularly as Yurie’s health no longer allowed him to work – they had enough to get by.

  For others in the capital life was a daily struggle to survive. Those who had lost their homes and possessions were forced to rely on the charity of others. Men and women, their faces drawn with hunger, spent their days in search of the little food remaining that had neither been commandeered by the Wehrmacht nor purchased by its soldiers with the Reichsmark at rates of exchange that made them feel wealthy. All municipal services had ceased to operate, leaving stinking heaps of rubbish to pile in the already rubble-clogged and cratered streets. There was no running water or operational toilets – hence the edict about typhoid inoculation. Instead the citizens were forced to use makeshift and foul “conveniences” in courtyards and cellars.44

  Certain services were re-established with remarkable efficiency, given the extent of the damage, as gangs of Jews and starving, ragged Yugoslav POWs appeared in the streets to mend roads, lay tramlines, rebuild sewers and fix electric wires.45 “The electricity came on,” wrote Flora on 7th May, only a month after the bombing. But against the backdrop of some seeming improvements in conditions, she was unsettled. A friend had related a conversation to her he had had with a German sergeant on the subject of German discipline. “‘Yes,’ said the sergeant, ‘it is all right now we are the army, and are here only to do our own job. Our discipline is very severe. It is the death penalty for molesting a woman. But you just wait till the Gestapo comes along. It has been the same in every country. When we have done our own bit, the Gestapo follows on our heels.’”46