Like Elsie Inglis, Flora Sandes did neither. She left England almost immediately and went to Serbia in August 1914 with a women’s volunteer ambulance unit.
When in late 1915 the Serbs were in full retreat, making their trek across the mountains, Flora refused repeated orders to abandon the forces she’d been assigned to and withdraw to safety. Eventually she was the only woman left.
Her biographer, Louise Miller, says she had long wanted to be a soldier. She’d been raised on the stories of Kipling and had read and re-read the Charge of the Light Brigade. “To be in the thick of battle was something that Flora had long dreamt of… and [she] had spent hours imagining herself as the central character in Kipling’s tales of heroism and adventure. She had high hopes for the climax of the Bulgarian attack.
“By now there was little point pretending she could be useful as a nurse in such conditions. Desperate not to be sent back to Salonica, she rested all her hopes on being accepted into the ranks of the Serbian army as a soldier.”
She expected rejection. Instead, Milos Vasic, the Serb commander whose men she had served, welcomed her. “If you remain with the army,” he told her, “you will have to go with them through Albania. The trip will be terrible, like nothing you have ever experienced.”
Flora asked: “Will I be a burden?”
“Quite the reverse,” Vasic said. “It will be better for us as your presence will encourage the soldiers. You represent the whole of England to them”.
That night, Flora Sandes became a private in the Serbian Army.
Of all the allied burial sites in Thessaloniki the one that receives by far the highest number of visitors today is the Serbian one. It is a vast and cavernous mausoleum that contains the remains of more than 7,000 Serbian soldiers.
Many of them were survivors of the long and deadly winter trek across the Albanian mountains.
The burial site was founded by a Serb veteran called Savo Mihailovic, who was put in charge of collecting the bodies – many of them his friends and comrades – and burying them together on the site of a former field hospital. He never left the memorial, guarding it until his death in 1928. He was replaced by his son, Djure Mihailovic, who guarded the site until his death in 1961. He and his father are both buried in the cemetery. The keeper of the site now is Djordje Mihailovic, Djure’s son and Savo’s grandson.
The Greek authorities have banned further burials in the cemetery but an exception has been made for Djordje, who will one day be the last Serb to be interred there.
Djordje’s presence is a living link with the Serbian experience of World War One. The cavernous interior of the mausoleum he guards is a shrine to the Serb martial tradition. It connects Serbia’s wars against the Ottoman Empire in the 19th Century to both world wars and the wars that Serbs waged during the break-up of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
Many of today’s visitors are veterans of those later wars. The kinship they feel with the men of 1914-18 is immediate and powerful.
Then the goal was to drive the Bulgarians out. But the Bulgarians could not have asked for a geography better suited to a defending army. Head north from Thessaloniki and the parched low-lying plains give way to a very different landscape.
What separates Greece from its northern neighbours is a chain of mountains, running east to west, that rises steeply and suddenly. It is a forbidding sight. Even in summer the slopes appear black and impenetrable. And it was on these mountaintops that Bulgarian forces dug in. There they would sit, for the rest of the war, ready to swat away successive attempts by the British and French to dislodge them. The allied armies gathering on the plains below were spread out like a map beneath their feet.
On 18 September 1918, the day before Pte John Fulton of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders died, the British launched an offensive against Bulgarian troops dug in along their mountain tops at Doiran, on the Greek border.
It was futile. In one British unit, 500-strong, fewer than 30 men survived. The bodies of many of those killed were never recovered. The Doiran memorial, erected after the war, stands near the Greek-Macedonian border and is engraved with the names of more than 2,000 Commonwealth soldiers with no known grave.
Further west, the main allied force, mostly French and Serbian, was commanded by General Franchet d’Esperey, whom British troops nicknamed Desperate Frenchie or Desperate Frankie. They launched what turned out to be the decisive attack at the end of September 1918.
The Bulgarians abandoned the positions they’d held for three years along hundreds of kilometres of the line. Bulgaria asked the allies for an armistice on 29 September 1918 – the first of Germany’s allies to sue for peace.
The road to the great imperial capitals, Vienna and Budapest, now lay wide open to allied forces. World War One had started in the Balkans – it was now ending there too.
But no nation lost more than Serbia. Sixty per cent of its army of 450,000 died by the end of 1918 – 25% of its entire population were killed in combat or died from disease, including more than half of its entire male population.
Aftermath
The men of the British Salonica Campaign went home to a nation that knew little about what they had done. The disastrous battles they had fought and the long and arduous months they had spent on the barren plains and mountain sides of northern Greece scarcely featured in the national narratives and quickly slipped from collective memory.
There were no victories to celebrate and it was hard to see what their presence in the Balkans had achieved.
In the vast literature of World War One studies, there is almost nothing on this forgotten theatre. The outstanding account is by Alan Wakefield and Simon Moody, in Under the Devil’s Eye.
It is a story of failed and – for the most part futile – offensives. “That evening I sat, clad in an old civvy suit, in my mother’s flat in St John’s Wood,” one survivor wrote of the day he was demobbed. “A strange feeling of loneliness came over me. No longer was the Army there to take care of me; I faced, on my own, a new and strange world.”
After the war, Flora Sandes, now promoted to Captain, found life “dull and irksome” and pined for a war she had clearly relished. She lived for a time in Paris, then South Africa. She married a Russian emigre a dozen years her junior, returned to Belgrade and tried to re-enlist, at the age of 65, when Belgrade was bombed by the Germans in 1941.
She returned to England in old age, and died at the age of 80 in a Suffolk village. In Britain she is largely unknown. There was a pub named the Flora Sandes in Thornton Heath in South London, but it closed down earlier this year. The building was boarded up and her name removed from over the front door.
But in Serbia she remains celebrated. As recently as 2009, the Belgrade authorities named a street after her. In 2015 her face appeared on a special issue of Serbian postage stamps.
At Karasouli, visitors are asked to enter their names in a registry to record their visit. Not long ago I counted the entries: there had been 160 visits in four years. Forty a year; fewer than one a week.
But the cemeteries are there, maintained in perpetuity by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission. They are what stand between the men of that unremembered conflict and the cold indifference of posterity.
(We recommend going to the link for the extraordinary photos accompanying the article.)