Dr Edward Ryan
Dr Ryan left Macedonia at the end of the war for Berlin to become second-in-command of a Red Cross unit tasked with overseeing the return of Russian prisoners. In the summer of 1919, after he took charge of Red Cross activities in northern Russia and the Baltic states, he imposed draconian but almost certainly essential travel restrictions across Estonia in an effort to combat a typhus epidemic.19 No stranger to controversy, he reported back to the US State Department that the Bolshevik government was a “social adventure become a ghastly failure”, invoking the full fury of the Russians.20 In August 1921 he was accused by both the Russians and a Bolshevik-sympathizing US senator of helping to foment the Kronstadt rebellion – a short-lived and brutally suppressed uprising against the Bolsheviks led by the sailors of the Baltic Fleet – an accusation of which he was later exonerated by another Red Cross Commission.21 In early 1923, as a sanitary advisor with the rank of lieutenant colonel in the US Army Medical Corps, he left for Tehran, Persia (now Iran), to design water and sewage plants. Aged only thirty-nine, he died in September of the same combination of overwork and heart failure brought on by malaria that had killed his chief detractor in Macedonia, Amelia Tileston. In February 1924 his body was repatriated to his home town of Scranton, Pennsylvania.22
Dick Sandes
In 1948 Flora’s nephew became the warden of two national parks and the curator of the Great Zimbabwe Ruins, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, near the town of Fort Victoria (now Masvingo), southern Rhodesia, which enabled him to pursue his “hobby” of archaeology. It was a “peaceful life out in the bush looking after my farm – the Ruins – and National Parks,” he wrote. But the savage guerrilla fighting that eventually put an end to oppressive British white minority rule in 1980 also rent the new country of Zimbabwe in an orgy of violence. At the age of eighty-two Dick became a refugee from the country that had been his home for sixty-two years. “My neighbours were murdered – my wife had died,” he wrote, “so I had to set about trying to dispose of my assets and get over the border.” He packed a suitcase and fled to stay with his daughter in South Africa but missed his old life. “I hate concrete jungles, and miss my boat, sailing and fishing,” he wrote. Three years later, in 1984, he died in exile.23
Milunka Savić
The twenty-eight-year-old woman soldier with whom Flora shared a tent at the 41st General Hospital was later sent to Bizerte and then France, where she was fêted and awarded the Legion d’Honneur and Croix de Guerre, which she added to her string of Serbian and Allied medals.24 She remains the most decorated woman in history. She left the Army in 1919, married and moved to Belgrade, had a daughter, divorced and remarried. She worked first as a seamstress in a factory producing military uniforms, then as a cleaning lady at a bank, then as a manager of its cleaning staff, making what must have been an adequate if not luxurious living.25 During the course of her working life, she adopted three homeless girls and fostered many more children. By the 1950s her husband had died and her exploits were largely forgotten, although she kept in close touch with her fellow soldiers during veterans’ events.26 In 1972, a newspaper article recalling her remarkable war service and highlighting her predicament as an elderly, impoverished widow prompted the city authorities to give her a tiny one-storey house in a village outside of Belgrade, amid rolling cornfields, which is now marked with a plaque in her honour. She is remembered to this day by the inhabitants of what is now “Milunka Savić Street”, which has long since been subsumed in the conurbation of Belgrade. “She used to go out for hours whatever the weather,” one recalled. “She was tough and energetic and used to be collected to go to ceremonies.”27 She died on 5th October 1973.
Emily Simmonds
After seven years of work in the Balkans, Emily returned to New York in March 1921.28 Afflicted by the same failure to settle back into normal existence that had blighted the lives of so many women who had seen war service, six weeks later she applied to the Quakers for relief work under their auspices.29 Over the next year she bided her time working as a private-duty nurse. In September 1922 she finally received the summons she had been hoping for.30 Her referees, knowing how desperate she was to return to the work she loved, had already written her glowing references. “She is almost over-conscientious, intensely loyal, clear-headed, quick witted, scrupulously honest, cheerful, a hard worker, understands and gets on with all sorts and conditions of people,” wrote her friend Marjorie Daw Johnson, who had worked alongside Emily during her brief posting in Italy during the war.31 “She would I think have to have an allowance beside her full expenses as she has no money at all and no one to turn to, but she is so indifferent on that subject she would demand little and possibly not mention it at all, but knowing her circumstances do not feel she might be asked to go for only her expenses… She is the personification of self-sacrificing devotion.”32
At the end of September, presumably having agreed to pay her a small salary, the Quakers sent Emily with a small team to the “worst place in the world” – the Volga famine district in Bolshevik Russia.33 There she put on the grey Quaker uniform with its distinctive red-and-black star and set to work inspecting hospitals, orphanages and warehouses to help determine how their limited resources could be best used to keep the population alive.34 After Emily had completed her year’s contract she left for war-devastated Berlin, where passport and passenger records indicate she may have remained for five months. She travelled back to New York in March 1924, where she again returned to the private-duty nursing of her pre-war years.35 In 1926 she applied for the position of superintendent of a nursing school in the Caucasus with the Near East Relief, a charitable organization founded in response to the Turkish campaign of genocide against the Armenians, but the American Red Cross dashed the hopes of the nurse who had served them so loyally by sending her prospective employers such a scathing reference as to make it impossible for them to hire her. “[She is] not of such a character as would make it possible for me to recommend her for service with your organization,” wrote Clara Noyes, the National Director of the Nursing Service. “While she is capable and resourceful she is very individualistic, likes to go her own way, and would not I believe be a particularly good teamworker… Our records would not indicate that she was the type that would serve best as a leader for young people.”36 Denied a posting that she longed for, Emily instead had to scrape an impoverished living from private-duty nursing into the early 1930s, in a succession of what must have been dreary and spirit-sapping postings.
From the early 1930s the outlines of her life become sketchy. By 1934 she had moved to Hollywood, California, although the reason for this is unknown. In 1940, in her mid-fifties, she crossed the Atlantic, giving her destination as Ramsgate, where it is likely she found work in a war hospital.37 She moved permanently to California in 1950, where she shared a house in Pasadena with nurse Jean MacKay, a friend since their days together at the Roosevelt Hospital Training School in New York, until the latter’s death in 1958.38 In 1962, Emily moved to Chino, California. On New Year’s Eve, 1965, she fractured her hip during a fall. According to her death certificate, after six weeks in hospital in Los Angeles she succumbed to pneumonia on 18th February 1966. Her brief and shamefully inadequate obituary mentioned only that the woman who had done so much – nursed the wounded in Kragujevac, survived typhus in Valjevo, rescued refugees in Albania and Serbian boys in Corfu, fought cholera on refugee ships, cared for children in Brod and refugees in Vodena, set up soldiers’ canteens in Macedonia and Belgrade, helped defeat typhus in Dubrovnik and fed the starving in Russia – had been a Red Cross nurse.39 After she was cremated at Pomona Cemetery, no one claimed her ashes, which were buried in one of two sites used for unclaimed remains. In 2006, with the help of the American Red Cross and the cemetery authorities, a small stone memorial was erected in her memory, and a Serbian Orthodox ceremony was held in her honour.
Acknowledgements
I am indebted to many for helping to make this book possible,
none more so than Arthur and Nan Baker, who shared their recollections of Flora and allowed me access to her diaries, papers and photographs. I am also obliged to the late Allison Blackmore for sending me her father’s vivid accounts of Flora and for taking the time to send me her own. I also appreciate the generous help given to me by Ben and Sue Johnston and am grateful to other members of Flora’s extended family, including Brian Evans for his assistance over many years. I am thankful too to Mike Sandes, Frank Sandes, Steve Sandes and Isabelle Abu-Hejleh.
I feel humbled by the hospitality I have received during several visits to Serbia, which could not have been dissimilar to that extended to the British women who worked there during the war. I would like to thank, in particular, my “Serbian family” – Žarko, Vera, Nenad, Ana Vuković and Iva Brajović – for making their country feel like my second home. I am deeply grateful to the late Žarko who, by force of character and determination, helped to keep alive the memory of women, like Dr Elsie Inglis, who risked their lives in their work for the Serbs. So too would I like to thank my friends Bojan Dragićević, Daniel Sunter and Igor Sunter of the Euro-Atlantic Initiative for their valuable research, friendship and support. Acknowledgements are also due to Nataša Djulić of RTS, Goran Vuković, Professor Želimir and Marija Mikić, Dr Sladjana Filipović, John White and Slavko Jugović. I would also like to thank Miloje Pantović, Liljana Naumova and Trajche Slaklevski for their memorable tours of Serbia and Macedonia, the staff of the Serbian Red Cross and, in particular, Nevenka Bogdanović for allowing me to participate in the ceremony held annually in Kragujevac in honour of Dr Elizabeth Ross.
I should also mention my obligation to my great friends Dr Jonathan Standley and Elizabeth Greene of Kingston, Ontario, for their support and assistance. I also appreciate the help of Mrs Edith Ross, Mrs Mirjana Harding, Colonel Simon Vandeleur, Dr Vivien Newman, Lynette Beardwood, Jean Waldman, Sarah Frankenburg and Gethyn Rees. I am indebted to Ella Skrigitil for her painstaking work translating Yurie’s service document. I would also like to thank Charles R. Furlong for giving me permission to use a photograph taken by his great-grandfather for the front cover. Thanks are further due to Marijana Matić and Ann Trevor.
Many others, from the following archives and libraries, have been of great assistance: Donald Davis of the American Friends Service Committee; Christina V. Jones, Archivist, the National Archives at College Park, Maryland; Jennie Levine Knies and Elizabeth A. Novara of the University of Maryland Libraries; Paul Barth of the St Luke’s Roosevelt Hospital Center Medical Library; Pamela Bonham of the University of Kansas Libraries; Jocelyn K. Wilk of Columbia University Archives; Clare Ellis of the East Anglian Film Archive; Robin Bray of News Anglia; Frances E. O’Donnell of the Andover-Harvard Theological Library; Stephen E. Novak and Henry Blanco of the Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library; Stephen Greenberg of the National Library of Medicine; John Tarring of Brooklands Museum; Janel Quirante of the Hoover Institution Archives; Trish McCormack of Archives New Zealand; Steven Kerr and Marianne Smith of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh; Bill Cronauer of the Albright Memorial Library, Scranton, and the Lackawanna Historical Society. I would also like to thank the staff of the Croydon Council Local Studies Library, Leeds and Edinburgh University Libraries, the Countway Library of Medicine, the Seeley G. Mudd Manuscript Library, British Colombia Archives, the Imperial War Museum, the Women’s Library, the Wellcome Library, the Mitchell Library, the National Library of Scotland, the British Newspaper Library and the British Library.
My research into the life of the extraordinary Emily Simmonds brought me to Pomona, California in September 2006. I am deeply grateful to the following for their assistance and for helping me to erect a small memorial in her honour: Patti and Jack French, Joe Blackstock of the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin, Dan McLaughlin of Pasadena Public Library, Alan Beadle of the American Red Cross, Melody Baxter of the Pomona Cemetery Association, Permeco (Monument Company), Don Ebbeler, and Father Petar and Mrs Ljiljana Jovanović and the congregation of the St Sava Serbian Orthodox Church, San Gabriel.
I am also obliged to Alexander Middleton, Caroline Miller, Peter Martin, Ajda Vučićević and David Smith for their considerable editorial assistance.
Finally, I would like to thank my family for their considerable forbearance during the research and writing of this book. I am grateful above all to Caroline, Claire and Laura Miller, Jennie and Peter Newton and, above all, Paul and Tom Newton.
Notes and References
Cue Titles
1. Books
AFT
Wilson, Francesca M., Aftermath (West Drayton, Middlesex: Penguin, 1947)
AMM
Wheelwright, Julie, Amazons and Military Maids (London: Pandora, 1989)
APT
Tileston, Amelia Peabody, Amelia Peabody Tileston and her Canteens for the Serbs (Boston, MA: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1920)
ASF
Stebbing, E.P., At the Serbian Front in Macedonia (London: John Lane, the Bodley Head, 1917)
ASSA
van Tienhoven, A., Avec les Serbs en Serbie et en Albanie (Paris: Imprimerie Typographique H. Richard, 1918)
AWS
Sandes, Flora, The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier (New York, NY: Frederick A. Stokes Co., 1927)
BAL
Glenny, Misha, The Balkans (London: Granta Books, 1999)
BBF
Komski, Victor, Blackbirds’ Field (New York, NY: Rae D. Henkle, 1934)
BE
Kingscote, Flavia, Balkan Exit (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942)
BLGF
West, Rebecca, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (Edinburgh: Canongate Press, 1993)
BSL
Hilton-Young, E., By Sea and Land, 2nd edn. (London: Methuen & Co., 1924)
BTR
Allsebrook, Mary, Born to Rebel: The Life of Harriet Boyd Hawes (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 1992)
CCD
Whitsed, Juliet de Key, Come to the Cookhouse Door! (London: Herbert Joseph, 1932)
CE
Wratislaw, A.C., A Consul in the East (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1924)
CTC
Adie, Kate, Corsets to Camouflage (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2003)
DAB
Manson, Cecil and Celia, Doctor Agnes Bennett (London: Michael Joseph, 1960)
DH
de Ripert d’Alauzier, Lieutenant Colonel, Un Drame historique: Résurrection de l’armée serbe Albanie-Corfou 1915–1916 (Paris: Payot, 1923)
DMH
Walker, David, Death at My Heels (London: Chapman & Hall Ltd, 1942)
DOS
Fryer, Charles E.J., The Destruction of Serbia in 1915 (New York, NY: Eastern European Monographs, 1997)
EA
MacLean, Fitzroy, Eastern Approaches (London: Reprint Society, 1951)
EWB
Graham, Stephen, Europe – Whither Bound? (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1921)
EWD
Matthews, Caroline, Experiences of a Woman Doctor in Serbia (London: Mills & Boon, 1916)
EWS
Sandes, Flora, An English Woman Sergeant in the Serbian Army (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1916)
EYS
Mikić, Želimir, Ever Yours Sincerely: The Life and Work of Dr Katherine S. MacPhail (Cambridge: Perfect Publishers, 2007)
FBF
Evans, Martin Marix, Forgotten Battlefronts of the First World War (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton Publishing, 2003)
FHFC
Thurstan, Violetta, Field Hospital and Flying Column (London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1915)
FIS
Chivers Davies, Ellen, A Farmer in Serbia (London: Methuen & Co., 1916)
FLSP
St John, Robert, From the Land of Silent People (London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1942)
FMC
Moffet, Una P., and Yovitchitch, Lena A., Florence Maw: The Chronicle of Her Lifework in Serbia (London: privately printed for Nellie Hooker, 1957)
FNS
Allan, Sheila, Fear Not
to Sow: A Life of Elsie Stephenson (Penzance: Jamieson Library, 1990)
FPW
Popham, Hugh, The FANY in Peace and War, revised edn. (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2003)
FSJ
Gordon-Smith, Gordon, From Serbia to Jugoslavia (New York, NY, and London: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1920)
FSS
Stobart, M.A. St Clair, The Flaming Sword in Serbia and Elsewhere, 2nd edn. (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1917)
FW
Adams, John Clinton, Flight in Winter (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1942)
FY
Dragnich, Alex N., The First Yugoslavia: Search for a Viable Political System (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1983)
GS
Palmer, Alan, The Gardeners of Salonika (London: Andre Deutsch, 1965)
HARCN
Dock, Lavinia L., et al., History of American Red Cross Nursing (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1922)
HD
Downer, Earl Bishop, The Highway of Death (Philadelphia, PA: F.A. Davis Co., 1916)
HSWH
McLaren, Eva Shaw, ed., A History of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1919)
IMC
Wilson, Francesca M., In the Margins of Chaos (London: John Murray, 1944)
ISL
Leneman, Leah, In the Service of Life (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1994)
JBM
Bruce, James, Memoirs (Baltimore, MD: Gateway Press Inc., 1997)
JEB
Bellows, John Earnshaw, Miscellaneous Writings (Gloucester: John Bellows, 1958)
LBN
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 40