European Reading Challenge #7

I read this war memoir for the 2024 European Reading Challenge.

An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army – Flora Sandes

Trained in nursing, Flora Sandes volunteered in early 1915 to go to Serbia to work in a humanitarian organization. She later joined the Serbian Red Cross and worked in the ambulance corps of the Serbian Army’s 2^nd Infantry Regiment.

This memoir begins in November 1915. After a brief break in England, she was able to re-join the ambulance corps of the same regiment just in time for the Great Retreat.

It was no use throwing men's lives away by holding on to positions when no purpose could be gained by it, though the Colonel felt it keenly that the finest regiment in the Army should have to abandon position after position, although contesting every inch, without having a chance of going on the offensive. It was heartbreaking work for all concerned, and the way they accomplished it is an everlasting credit to officers and men alike.

In the tragic weeks of this retreat, almost 80,000 soldiers died of starvation, exposure, and action; almost 80,000 soldiers went missing; and about 220,000 civilians lost their lives. It is not strange that Serbians call this retreat the Albanian Golgotha, since they marched through the mountains of Albania to reach the Adriatic.

Yorkshire people are known for their determination. Sandes is the personification of the proverbial expression, “Yorkshire-stubborn.” She overcomes obstacles in travel and transports. She does without and makes do with constant supply shortages. She learns Serbian by ear since there were not even Berlitzes for Slavic languages. She reads directives carefully to distinguish “order” from “advisement,” so that she can stay and help the Serbians, whom she admires as much as Rebecca West did later in the 1930s.

The popular image in Western Europe at that time was the Balkans were populated by brutish peasants and wild-eyed savages. So one of Sandes’ goals in this memoir was convince people in the UK that Serbians were allies worthy of support. To be honest, I too assumed that she would get condescending male guff every time she turned around. But no:

People who do not know anything about them have sometimes asked me if I was not afraid to go about among what they imagine to be a race of wild savages, but quite the opposite is the case. I cannot imagine anything more unlikely than to be insulted by a Serbian soldier. I should feel safer walking through any town or village in Serbia at any hour of the night than I should in most English or Continental towns.

When they cross into Albania she is made a soldier as she has proven her ability to handle a horse and rifle and has maintained her poise under rifle fire and shelling from Bulgarian troops. She also had enough French, German, and Serbian to cut through incessant logistics snarls which are inevitable in wartime. She finds the Albanians dirty and so angry at the Serbs that they over-charge for food and irregulars snipe at the troops. Marching up to 15 hours is an ordeal but strong people learn from both good and bad experiences.

....I had often been rather puzzled at the general reply of the new arrivals,"Sve me boli"

(“Everything hurts me"), it seemed such a vague description and such a curious malady; but in these days I learnt to understand perfectly what they meant by it, when you seem to be nothing but one pain from the crown of your aching head to the soles of your blistered feet, and I thought it was a very good thing that the next time I was working in a military hospital I should be able to enter into my patient's feelings, and realise that all he felt he wanted was to be let alone to sleep for about a week and only rouse up for his meals.

As in Rebecca West’s epic, the spellings may be confusing. Babuna is rendered “Baboona.” And Mogilee for Mogila and Orizir for Orizari. This mild confusion is balanced by the charm of the old-fashioned idioms like “They all at once got terribly worried on my account, began to work like steam.”

Worth reading for hardcore readers into war memoirs and nursing chronicles and readers interested in people and things Serbian. In a gesture of fond respect, the Serbians put Flora Sandes on a stamp in 2015.

On the web: Librivox – Text