A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Read online

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  First published by Alma Books Limited in 2012

  Copyright © Louise Miller, 2012

  Louise Miller asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Extract from ‘Many Sisters to Many Brothers’ from Poems of Today by Rose Macaulay reprinted by permission of Peters Fraser & Dunlop

  (www.petersfraserdunlop.com) on behalf of the Estate of Rose Macaulay

  Printed in England by CPI Antony Rowe

  Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon

  ISBN: 978-1-84688-184-8

  eBook ISBN : 978-1-84688-230-2

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part One

  Chapter 1: Departure

  Chapter 2: Antebellum

  Chapter 3: Kragujevac

  Chapter 4: Typhus

  Chapter 5: Invasion

  Part Two

  Chapter 6: Retreat

  Chapter 7: Coast

  Chapter 8: Corfu

  Chapter 9: Monastir

  Chapter 10: Wounded

  Chapter 11: The Front

  Chapter 12: Canteens

  Chapter 13: Breakthrough

  Chapter 14: Spanish Influenza

  Chapter 15: Hungary

  Chapter 16: Travels

  Chapter 17: Frontier Troops

  Part Three

  Chapter 18: Interbellum

  Chapter 19: Occupation

  Chapter 20: “Folly’s End”

  Afterword

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Notes and References

  Illustrations

  For my father, Tony Miller, who also liked a good adventure

  Oh it’s you that have the luck, out there in blood and muck:

  You were born beneath a kindly star;

  All we dreamt, I and you, you can really go and do,

  And I can’t, the way things are.

  In a trench you are sitting, while I am knitting

  A hopeless sock that never gets done.

  Well, here’s luck, my dear – and you’ve got it, no fear;

  But for me… a war is poor fun.

  Rose Macaulay,

  ‘Many Sisters to Many Brothers’, 1914

  Prologue

  During the night of 15th November 1916, snow fell softly on the bare hills and mountains of Macedonia. Had it fallen two years previously, none would have noticed except perhaps the few villagers who scraped a meagre living in this inhospitable region. Most of the unhappy inhabitants by now had fled in the wake of bitter fighting between the Serbian and Bulgarian armies, who were both grimly determined to lay claim to territory that they believed was theirs by historical right.

  In the autumn of 1915, after the Bulgarians had sided with the Germans to declare war on the British-allied Serbs, they had marched their brown-clad soldiers into Serbian-held Macedonia to seize the strategic town of Monastir. The following September the Serbs had counter-attacked in an attempt to recapture this key location. By the middle of November, after fighting a series of vicious battles in the mountains to the east, they had very nearly succeeded.

  Hill 1212, which rose to a peak over the plain on which the town lay, was now one of only two mountain strongholds still in Bulgarian hands. The Serbs were halfway up this remove elevation, named solely for its altitude, after days of dogged fighting over the rough ground. Their orders were to take the Hill at all costs. Ahead of their impending attack they huddled behind the boulders that lay scattered across the steep terrain. Others had dug themselves shallow trenches for shelter in the hard earth.

  During the night, five hundred reinforcements in a mixture of horizon-blue and khaki uniforms joined their compatriots in the front lines. As they moved into position, indistinguishable in her uniform among them was a forty-year-old woman from Suffolk, Flora Sandes, the granddaughter of an Irish bishop. She took her place behind a pile of rocks alongside the men and lay shivering on the snow in her heavy overcoat. Eventually, despite the bitter cold, she fell asleep.

  At the break of dawn she woke abruptly to the sharp crack of rifle fire. In a surprise pre-emptive assault, the Bulgarians had attacked under the cover of the early-morning mist that now accompanied the snow. Flora jumped up and grabbed her rifle. To the shouts of her commandant ordering “Drugi Vod napred!” (“Second Platoon forward!”) she joined the men as they scrambled up the hillside. They advanced, taking cover behind the rocks that dotted the barren, snow-covered terrain. As she paused, panting from the excitement and exertion, she could see the men of her regiment sheltering behind similar outcrops from the withering enemy rifle and machine-gun fire. Although she could hear how close the Bulgarians were by their shouts, she was unable to see them through the thick fog that lay atop the mountain.

  The Serbian defence began to disintegrate into chaos in the face of the ferocity of the attack. The men refused to leave their cover, despite the efforts of their officers to dislodge them. In a desperate effort to save their positions from being overwhelmed, a captain was valiantly attempting to organize a counter-attack. He ordered the regimental bugler to signal his men into battle, but the man was so terrified that he was unable to make a noise. The exasperated captain seized the instrument from his shaking hands, stood up against the skyline and began to blow with all his might. His example was enough to rally the soldiers, including Flora. She left her shelter with the men of her platoon and raced ahead for a few paces before throwing herself flat on the snow alongside them. Just then, a group of Bulgarians emerged from the mist a few steps away and hurled a well-aimed grenade into their midst.

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Departure

  1914

  On 12th August 1914, a mere eight days after war had been declared between Britain and Germany, a group of nurses gathered on the platform at Charing Cross station. Around them swirled bustling crowds of uniformed Territorial soldiers returning from training, Naval Reserve men who had just been called up and civilians wearing little flags on their lapels, clutching the latest edition of the newspapers.1 The eight women were a mixed group. Some, properly speaking, were not even nurses. In the excitement and enthusiasm of the early days of the war all that was needed to lay claim to the title was a uniform, the correct bearing and a patriotic desire to serve one’s country.

  Among them was Flora Sandes, a tall, thirty-eight-year-old Englishwoman who spoke with a soft Irish accent. She too was not a qualified nurse – she had enjoyed far too privileged an upbringing to have trained for a commonplace career – but her leisured background had given her the time to take up nursing as a hobby. It was one at which she was supremely competent, although at times her unbridled enthusiasm tempered her ability. She had sailed through numerous St John Ambulance Brigade courses. She was also one of the few women who had been trained specifically to give first aid in wartime conditions through her membership of two quasi-military women’s organizations, the First Ai
d Nursing Yeomanry (FANY) and the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps.

  When, a week before, she heard the news that Britain was at war, she was camping with her family and a couple of friends near Rye in Sussex. Leaving everyone behind, she leapt into her French racing car and sped back to her home in Thornton Heath, then a prosperous suburb of London.2 That week, she had joined the throngs of women all frantically looking for war work at the offices of the British Red Cross in London’s Vincent Square.3 There she had been put in touch with Mabel Grouitch,4 the elegant forty-one-year-old American wife of Slavko Grouitch, the Under-secretary of Foreign Affairs for Serbia. Mabel was scrambling to enrol a corps of volunteer surgeons and nurses willing to travel to Serbia with her “Anglo-American Unit” but, in the two weeks she gave herself, her efforts at recruitment had been a disappointment. She was only able to hire those who could leave at a moment’s notice and had failed to attract a single surgeon. Short of trained volunteers, she had agreed to interview Flora, who was determined to join the Unit and had argued her case hard. Despite her experience, she had already received her first rejection by the time she sat nervously before Mabel. A day or two earlier she had eagerly applied to become a Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD), an assistant attached to a British hospital, fully expecting to be hired immediately. Instead, to her disbelief, the interviewing matron had “snubbed” her. “There are others who are better trained than you. And anyway, the war will only last six months,” she told her brusquely.5

  Although the matron had rejected her on the grounds of insufficient experience, Flora also had the wrong sort of experience. Few hospitals at the time were willing to hire women doctors, let alone a former member of the FANY and Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps, organizations with strong links to the suffrage movement. Her prospective employers would have written her off as a potential troublemaker, unlikely to submit meekly to the discipline of an Edwardian hospital ward. And Flora was anything but meek. But Mabel, desperate for all the competent help she could get, agreed to take her on. She may not have been a nurse, she reasoned, but her training in first aid had been comprehensive. She also needed women who were practical and adaptable, able to serve under potentially gruelling conditions, and Flora was both to a fault.

  On the day the Anglo-American Unit left England, Austria-Hungary attacked Serbia. The assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, at the hands of a Bosnian Serb provided the pretext that it had been waiting for to teach the fledgling but troublesome kingdom a lesson in humility it believed it sorely needed. The dynamic Serb state to its south had been an irritant for years. Flush with its territorial gains from the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, it had served as an increasingly attractive magnet for the large Slav population in the south of Austria-Hungary who desired, if not union with Serbia, then certainly a closer alliance. The Serbs knew exactly what they wanted – the formation of a Greater Serbia within the territories that had formed their medieval empire, including parts of Austria-Hungary. On 28th June 1914, the night of the assassination, the Austro-Hungarian army turned its spotlights threateningly across the Sava River on Belgrade.

  The flurry of diplomatic activity in the wake of the murder was unable to prevent Austria-Hungary from issuing an ultimatum designed to be impossible for Serbia to accept. Mabel Grouitch’s husband Slavko was one of two representatives of the Serbian government to be handed the ultimatum.6 Anxious to avoid further warfare after two years of fighting in the Balkan Wars, the government accepted its humiliating terms with only three reservations, which they offered to submit to international arbitration. But these reservations were enough to give Austria-Hungary the excuse they required to declare war, on 28th July. That day, when they lobbed their first shell on Belgrade, they set in motion a chain of events that led to full-scale global conflict.

  The train carrying the Anglo-American Unit pulled out of Charing Cross just before three o’clock on a hot summer’s afternoon. Flora was waved off by several members of her large and tight-knit family. The youngest child of eight, she was the epitome of the independent, forthright and determined “new woman”, with an interest in fast cars, gruelling physical challenges and, above all, travel. A seasoned camper, she had used her experience to prepare herself well for this trip. In addition to her violin, she had packed a tea basket, a portable rubber bath, a hot-water bottle, a campbed, a first-aid kit and all the cigarettes she could carry.7

  Among the women travelling with her was Emily Simmonds, a spirited, competent and conscientious “private duty” nurse in her early thirties, of British origin but American training. She was newly versed in the latest techniques, having transcended an impoverished upbringing to specialize as a surgical assistant.8 When war was declared she had been on holiday in Paris. Cancelling her return trip, she had joined the throngs of excited passengers leaving the French capital for London. On arrival, she approached the British Red Cross for work, only to be refused forthwith on the grounds that she was American-trained.9 Her options curtailed, she volunteered for Mabel Grouitch’s Unit to work under the auspices of the Serbian Red Cross, who had no such qualms about nationality.

  Mabel had warned the women before they left that they would face a difficult and comfortless trip. They had also been told by all who ventured an opinion that it was “impossible to get a party of women across Europe at that time”. Trains throughout France were being diverted for military use, towns were crowded, hotels were full and that August was one of the hottest months in years. They were also travelling on a shoestring budget. Mabel had not been able to find time to raise funds for the expedition and was forced to finance the party herself. Still, the women shrugged off the warnings of discomfort. “We were all very proud of the fact that our boat was the first to cross the Channel after the British Expeditionary Force,” remembered Flora.10

  Early that evening they arrived in Folkestone, lugging their bags from the train to a boat and, once across the Channel, from the boat to a Paris-bound train. They pulled into the dark station, exhausted, at five o’clock in the morning. By the time they caught the 6.16 p.m. train south in the “awful” heat, they had thirty Serbian students with them who wanted to join their country’s army but were unable to travel to Serbia through neutral countries without an alibi. When Mabel had visited the Serbian legation earlier that day, the Minister had asked her if she would take the students with her and tell any authorities who asked that they were part of her Unit. After she readily agreed, the students were kitted out with Red Cross armbands.11

  To save what little funds they had, the women travelled mainly third-class in the relentless August heat, in the spirited company of the students. At every stop, Mabel and her eight nurses – Flora, Emily, Mrs Ada Barlow, Miss Violet O’Brien, Miss Ada Mann, Mrs Rebecca Hartney, Mrs Barber and Miss Grace Saunders12 – had to push their way through platforms seething with soldiers and civilians, with their baggage and medical supplies in tow. Finding accommodation in the crowded towns along the route was no less of a struggle; the disruption to train schedules played havoc with any attempts they made to plan ahead.

  From Paris their sleeping arrangements became increasingly makeshift. They spent some nights sleeping on the floor of their train, wrapped in their overcoats. At other times, they shared rooms in inexpensive and none-too-clean hotels. “Mrs Barlow and I shared a room with four beds. I broke two of them. Bugs galore,” wrote Flora in her diary after one particularly sleepless night. But not all nights were so miserable, thanks to the considerable charms of Mabel Grouitch. “Importantly she had very fascinating manners and was extremely pretty,” Flora recalled. “We used to get stuck at some little wayward station, with nobody to meet us and nowhere to go, and Mme Grouitch used just to go up to the Military Commander and smile at him, and in five minutes there would be motor cars to fetch us and we’d be taken up to the best hotel in town and everything done for us, and the next morning there would be the Military Commander to see us off all smiles and bows –
and bouquets of flowers for Mme Grouitch.”13

  Nonetheless, despite Mabel’s best efforts the ad-hoc travel arrangements took their toll on the women. “All looked rather the worst for wear [sic],” Flora reported, before commenting soon after that they were all “hot and cross”.14 They had set out from Paris for Marseilles, from where they intended to catch a ship to Salonika. However, on arrival they were turned away from its busy port, which had been closed to allow Indian troops to land. Mabel Grouitch improvised. She took her nurses by train through neutral Italy while trying to keep the Serbian students quiet and as inconspicuous as possible.15

  The Italian authorities soon grew highly suspicious at the sight of a small group of Englishwomen in the company of a large group of Serbian men of military age. They first threatened to lock all the women up as “spies”, before deciding that the best thing to do would be to get the group out of their country as rapidly as possible. On the second of their two-day trip through Italy, the authorities posted a soldier outside the door of each of their railway carriages, with orders not to allow the women out. “Well, I don’t like sitting still too long without moving about,” commented Flora, “so I had the presence of mind to give the sentry nearest to me a drink – after that I was allowed to move about wherever I liked.”16

  By the time the group had reached Italy any initial reticence they felt in each other’s company had vanished. “Sandy” and “Americano”, as Flora and Emily had nicknamed each other, formed an immediate friendship. Flora, at thirty-eight, was the older of the two, round-faced, brown-eyed and a fairly sturdy 5'7". To the other nurses, at first glance, she appeared the picture of propriety. However, her prematurely greying hair was too short to be properly ladylike, she had a penchant for what she called “galumphing” (which almost always involved alcohol) and she smoked far too much.

  Emily, at 5'5", stood slightly shorter than Flora. Born in London to an English mother,17 her home was New York, where she had remained after graduating from the Roosevelt Hospital Training School in 1911. She was slender and attractive, “a blue-eyed, delicate, small-featured, curly-haired, pink-cheeked, soft-voiced slip of a girl”.18 Like Flora, she had seized the chance to join Mabel’s Unit. It promised an opportunity to put her training to full use and offered far more variety and excitement than her work as a private-duty nurse, which involved looking after a single patient at a time, could ever give her. Mabel could not provide her with a salary – and Emily was far from financially self-sufficient – but she had placed any pecuniary concerns to the back of her mind as she set out with the others.19