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

  The First World War held out the prospect of great adventure abroad for thousands more British women who were keen to “do their bit” for a suitably patriotic cause, just like their brothers. It provided a chance for them to live and travel independently and work in fields that had hitherto been restricted to men, while its fluid circumstances gave unheard-of opportunities to women with courage and initiative. For the more adventurous of them, often their potential was more easily realized in the campaigns in the Balkans and Russia than in the west because, where the British, French and Belgians controlled access, women were barred from working near the front.62 Paradoxically, their desire to “protect” women who did not want to be protected meant that many ended up working in some of the most dangerous sectors of the war. Many would pay with their lives, among them twenty-one British women in Serbia alone.63

  The majority of the women who left Britain for Serbia during the First World War were volunteers with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, an organization formed in Edinburgh in 1914 after its head, the suffragist Dr Elsie Inglis, was told by an official upon offering her services to the War Office, “My good lady, go home and sit still.” Flora would come to know many of them, including Dr Katherine MacPhail, who became a lifelong friend. Katherine had also experienced the prevailing hostility to professional women. The daughter of a Scottish doctor, she had graduated in medicine from Glasgow University, winning several prizes during the course of her studies, but found most general hospitals unwilling to appoint a woman to their staffs and few opportunities in general surgery. She too had been rebuffed by the War Office upon the outbreak of war. After the British Red Cross also refused her assistance, she became one of the early recruits of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals.64 “Well, I hardly knew where Serbia was, but from what I had read I knew that they were having a very hard time in the war, and so I said to Dr Elsie Inglis that I’d be very willing to go,” recalled Katherine, who had never been abroad before. “Most of us had the vaguest idea of what Serbia was like, we had read it was a wild country with wilder people. Therein lay half the attraction for the more adventurous of us.”65

  The aim of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals was both political and patriotic. Like Mabel Stobart, its organizers set out to prove that women were fit to work in the theatre of war and thus deserved the full rights of citizenship, including the ability to vote.66 They were run and staffed by women, from doctors, nurses and X-ray technicians to stretcher-bearers, orderlies and drivers. Men, however, were not necessarily excluded from membership: although some units were doctrinaire, taking pride in not accepting male help, a couple of men became fully-fledged members, most units had a “handyman” and male prisoners-of-war were accepted to work as orderlies.67 Nevertheless, men were kept “in a thoroughly subordinate position; they were the labourers, the odd men of the hospital, and did as they were told!”68

  During the war, a myriad of British relief organizations in addition to the Scottish Women’s Hospitals offered their services in Serbia and the Balkans, in which many British men and women distinguished themselves both as doctors and relief workers. Others travelled independently to Serbia and worked courageously as “freelancers”. Irrespective of their background or motivation in leaving Britain, the suffering, stoicism and quiet courage of the Serbs would make a deep impression on them all. Politically, socially and economically disenfranchised in Britain, the women volunteers were treated with great courtesy within Serbia and, more importantly, as equals. The Serbs in turn were almost pathetically grateful for their assistance and bestowed awards and honours upon them.

  Although the most important medical help given to Serbia during the war was British, other countries – some Allied, some neutral – also sent units. Significant missions arrived from America, France, the Netherlands, Greece and Switzerland. Even Russia, which was struggling to find enough medical staff and supplies for its own armies, sent generously equipped and well-staffed units. The Serbians themselves, ravaged by disease and war, did what they could under the auspices of organizations like the Serbian Red Cross.

  Like Flora, almost all of the British women who volunteered for overseas service were financially self-sustaining.69 Many were professionally trained and a number in turn were heavily involved in the fight for the right to vote. Although there is no record of Flora having been actively involved in the suffrage movement, she mixed widely before the war with its supporters in the FANY and the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps. At the very least she was influenced by the spirit of the movement, recalled Dick. “At dinner she would insist on smoking (which was not done in those days),” he wrote of a fund-raising show that he had attended with her for one of these organizations. “I remonstrated and was promptly told to go home alone. I rather fancy at the time she was in some way mixed up with Sylvia Pankhurst and had an idea that women must stick up for their own rights.” Flora soon forgave him. “A few nights later I was allowed to see the show,” he remembered.70 At best, Flora was a passive supporter of the suffragists. Although it is improbable that she would have been a founding member of the Women’s Convoy Corps, whose watchword was “loyalty to country and to womanhood”, if she felt any antipathy to the movement, more than likely she was simply indifferent. Throughout her life, she remained motivated more by the thought of adventure than politics.

  For the first time in their lives, many such women and men were free from the constraints of Edwardian morality and the prying eyes of their friends and neighbours. Although most distinguished themselves in their work, the rigid discipline and hierarchy found in hospitals along the Western Front was just as notable for its absence in Serbia. The directors of the units were often the sole authority. Theirs was an unenviable task. Not only was it difficult to send their charges all the way back to Britain for misconduct, they knew that any transgressors with enough initiative had the option of leaving their unit to work directly for the Serbs.

  And there were transgressions aplenty, most of which were successfully hushed up in the press at the time. But the gossip about the behaviour of the volunteers flew wildly. “Most of them are grand but two doctors and a parson had to be sent home on account of drunkenness and two others were deported for spying,” wrote two members of one of the organizations. “Mrs X—— seems to have made an almost international reputation, somebody said, ‘She breaks all the commandments every night.’ A nurse is living openly with one of the interpreters. One of the London hospital committees is reported to have said, ‘Don’t be too particular about whom we send or we won’t get anybody to go at all.’”71 What is described in this account was merely the tip of the iceberg. Life in Serbia for medical and relief workers was a bit of a free-for-all. It was just the kind of environment where a headstrong and determined English nurse could join the Serbian army.

  Chapter 3

  Kragujevac

  1914

  Bags in hand, the women of the unit walked across the cracked, baked earth bordering the First Reserve Military Hospital, past the litter that fluttered in dusty heaps against its walls. They were welcomed through the front doors by the portly and middle-aged hospital director, Dr Vučetić, with a grandiose sweep of his hand.1 They stepped out of the searing heat of the afternoon sun into the gloom of the poorly lit building, squinting while their eyes adjusted, and breathing in for the first time the fetid smell that permeated every room, of crowded human bodies, badly infected wounds, antiseptic, tobacco and stale food.2

  The hospital, on the outskirts of Kragujevac, was overflowing with patients, both Serbs and POWs. They had been placed side by side in the small, unventilated rooms, which were connected by dark and seemingly interminable corridors. These too were packed full of gaunt, tired men. “Over a thousand rough iron cots had been placed with sacks stuffed with straw for mattresses, one small pillow also of straw, one sheet and one thick army blanket to each,” wrote Emily later, describing the dismay she felt on getting her first good look at the surroundings. “We had none of the equip
ment or conveniences of an ordinary hospital, not even running water. All had to be carted from the village, half an hour’s journey away.”3

  What was now one of the largest military hospitals in Serbia had been hurriedly converted from an army barracks. Its twelve hundred patients were housed in a pair of two-storey buildings that were identical in design and relatively modern. One was set aside for six hundred sick, the other for the same number of wounded.4 Like many official constructions of the time, the buildings were finished in cream-coloured stucco. They were otherwise simply adorned and stood plainly, marked by row upon row of evenly spaced windows and capped by low, red-tiled roofs. They stretched out lengthwise, dominating spacious and tree-bordered grounds that had been well kept before the war.5

  The women of the Anglo-American Unit were given as enthusiastic a welcome as the energies of the exhausted staff permitted. Surgeon Dr Roman Sondermeyer, the immaculately dressed head of the Military Medical Service of the Serbian army, stepped forward smartly to meet them, while Dr Vučetić introduced them to his wife, who was also a doctor, and their young daughter, who assisted in the wards. Other than a few untrained Serbian women, the staff included a mere five orderlies and, briefly, Catharina Sturzenegger, a Swiss-German nurse of indelicate build. “Twelve hundred patients and we were only two surgeons, eight nurses and some five hospital orderlies!” wrote Emily of her shock upon realizing how many patients there were and how few staff.6

  On 30th August, the day after her arrival, Flora rose early with the others and attempted to turn herself out as smartly as possible in her uniform. She eased uncomfortably into a starched, high-collared, ankle-length grey dress, over which she wore a plain white coat. Then she pinned a white nurse’s cap onto her unruly brown-grey hair.7 After running her hands down her uniform one final time, she hurried with Emily to the five wards that they had jointly been assigned to by Dr Vučetić. He had also given them all the men in the corridors to care for, one hundred and forty patients in all.8

  With the aid of gestures and the few words of Serbian she had been taught by Mabel, Flora set to work. “Gave several baths etc., and rubbed backs,” she scribbled in her diary one week after arrival.9 On a typical day she began work in the morning, stopped for lunch, and then returned to the wards mid-afternoon, finishing in the early evening. Every sixth day she took her turn at night duty in one of the two dimly lit hospital buildings. In practice, this meant an exhausting “36 hours on duty without sleep”.10 The shift was daunting even for the trained nurses. “It has been an agitating night,” wrote one of them near the end of one such shift. “A man suddenly had an arterial haemorrhage, and I had to hold on to him for nearly half an hour before the doctor was awake and dressed, pressing with all my might on the artery. I am drenched in blood and cannot go and change till my night duty is done. We see some pretty awful things.”11

  At the end of each long, hard day, Flora returned to the sparsely furnished room that she shared with the other women. It had one table, two backless benches and a makeshift bed for each of them, which was nothing more than wooden planks raised on bricks, covered with the same lumpy straw mattress given to patients and a single, coarse soldier’s blanket. For privacy, they rigged a curtain across one corner to give them a space to wash. The room served as their “dining, sitting, writing and bathroom”, where they would sit down most nights to their evening meal. “I never want to eat a chicken again, or a cabbage,” sighed one of them. “All the chickens undergo the severest drill and physical exercise, and it is most exhausting to try and make a meal of them.”12

  When new patients arrived, it was almost always at two or three a.m. Up to one hundred men would be carried into the hospital yard, having survived an agonizing journey of several days in ox wagons, their injuries jolted at every bump. “Many of the worst wounded died on the way, and those that did arrive were in a terrible condition,” recorded Flora.13 By the time their stretchers were laid in the yard, their uniforms were stiff with congealed blood, their wounds infected, foul-smelling and swollen with pus and the dressings crawling with lice.14 Exhausted, Flora and the other nurses dragged themselves wearily from their beds to attend to them. Even Emily was shaken by their numbers and condition. “I remember standing appalled as batch after batch of fresh wounded were brought in,” she wrote, “wondering how far the very few words of Servian [sic] which I had learnt on the trip out would carry me through.”15

  Working alongside the doctors and male orderlies, the women cut through the men’s clothing with knives and scissors and eased off the stinking, encrusted bandages. They cleansed the infected, oozing wounds with lint, working to the outside of the injury with each gentle stroke. Then they treated them with iodine before redressing them with a layer of absorbent cotton wool atop thin gauze, topped by a carefully tied bandage. Where operations were required, the patients were wheeled to the two surgeons who were often forced to work without anaesthetic. “We had to keep it for major cases,” explained Emily. For her the work was a turning point. Previously she had looked after a single patient at a time. Now, at last, she had the opportunity to push herself to her very limits. “We had all read the wonderful experiences of Florence Nightingale in Scutari not so very far away but we are privileged, in a small measure, to realize some of them here in Servia [sic],” she wrote with an almost missionary zeal.16

  All the women grew to respect the courage of their patients, none more so than Flora, for whom there was no greater value than stoicism. “The Serbian soldier prides himself on being able to stand an operation and he will draw himself up proudly, and say ‘Ja sam Srbin’ – that means ‘I am a Serb’ – by which he means to imply that he will go through anything without flinching,” she recalled. “They have more endurance than any other race I have ever met.”17 They were also great fun as soon as they began to recover their strength. “A nurse would leave a patient at night going on splendidly, far into the stage of convalescence,” reported one journal of their experiences. “Going [on] her rounds the next morning she would hear heart-rending groans from his bed, and see his head buried in the pillow apparently in agonies of pain; at a solicitous inquiry he would spring up with a laugh, and declare himself quite well, whilst the occupants of the surrounding beds shook with laughter at the success of the little jest.”18 The other nurses shared Flora’s regard for them. “I cannot find words to express my admiration for them, both as patients and men,” wrote twenty-eight-year-old Violet O’Brien in a letter home. “They are simply charming, so grateful for the least attention.”19 It was one of the few things on which they agreed.

  The patients the women were nursing were casualties of one of the first battles of the First World War. On 12th August, the day that the Anglo-American Unit sailed from England, two hundred thousand soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army crossed the rivers that formed the northern and western borders of Serbia. The aim of the invasion was clear from the name given to the campaign by the Austrians, the “Strafexpedition” (“Punitive Expedition”).20 The two sides were well matched but, with the arrogance that came with their position as a great power, the Austro-Hungarians had dismissed the capabilities of the Serbian army. They expected to defeat them in fourteen days.21

  At the outset of the war, Serbia had a relatively small but disciplined army of four hundred thousand soldiers. Although many of its men were experienced fighters who had fought in the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913, the two years of warfare had left the army utterly unprepared for an invasion. The fighting had drained its medical stores. Most of its artillery was outdated, there was little money to re-equip and there were not enough rifles for all the soldiers. More than half the men had to fight in peasant dress for lack of uniforms, and many did not even have boots.22 But while the invaders had superior equipment and artillery, the Serbian army had strengths of its own. It had able soldiers who were accustomed to hardship and led by experienced commanders. They were also patriotic, unlike the soldiers of Austria-Hungary, many of whom were fellow Slavs w
ho sympathized with the Serbs and disliked the thought of fighting them.

  The blue uniforms of the Austro-Hungarian army met the grey-brown uniforms and tattered brown homespuns of the Serbs in mountainous north-west Serbia. To the stunned amazement of the invaders, the highly motivated but poorly armed peasant soldiers fought them to a standstill. The Austrian commander soon reported to his superiors in Vienna that he was suffering “heavy losses” and pleaded with them to send support.23 Reinforcements reached the Serbs first. In a surprise attack, they drove the Austrians back across the frontier in what became known as the Battle of Cer Mountain. By 24th August the Serbians had won the first Allied victory of the war.24

  The triumphant Serbians now referred to the punishing army as the “bestrafte”, the “punished” one, but both sides had suffered greatly. Between six and ten thousand of the invaders were killed, along with three to five thousand Serbian soldiers. “The area between Cer and the River Jadar where this tremendous battle took place was nothing but mass graves and putrefying flesh,” commented a French journalist.25 Forty-five thousand wounded filled the hospitals, both Serbs and Austro-Hungarians.26 Serbian civilians also suffered heavily. While the Austro-German and Slav soldiers of the Austro-Hungarian army appear to have conducted themselves reasonably well, the campaign was characterized by widespread atrocities by the Hungarian component of the army, who massacred an estimated three to four thousand non-combatants.27

  The Anglo-American Unit had arrived in Kragujevac a mere five days after the Serbian victory. Although the Serbs had defeated the invaders, throughout September and October bitter trench warfare continued along the northern and western frontiers of Serbia, following a short-lived invasion of Bosnia and southern Hungary by the victorious army.28 The fighting provided the First Reserve Military Hospital with a continuous stream of casualties, which steadily eroded their limited supplies.