An English woman-sergeant in the Serbian Army

by Flora Sandes

I take the following extract out of my diary, written on my first night in Prilip:

“Monday, 8th, 8.30 p.m.—I am sitting up in bed in my sleeping sack, writing this in a very small room in S—— Hotel, Prilip. The room contains (besides my camp bed) a rickety chair, and a small table with my little rubber basin, a cracked mirror and my faithful tea-basket. From the café below comes a deafening chorus of Serbian soldiers. I am glad there is a good lock on the door, as someone is making a violent effort to come in, and from the fierce altercation going on between him and the boy-chambermaid, scraps of which I can understand, he is apparently under the impression that I have taken his room—I may have for all I know, but anyhow the proprietor gave it to me.

“The view from my window is not calculated to inspire confidence either. It looks on to a stableyard full of pigs, donkeys and the most villainous-looking Turks squatting about at their supper. These, I tell myself, are the ones who will come in and cut my throat if Prilip is taken to-night, as I don’t think any responsible person in the town knows I am here. However, if I live through the night things will probably look more cheery in the morning.”

In the middle of the night I was awakened by another fearful racket in the passage. “That’s done it,” I thought, sitting up in bed with my electric torch in one hand and my service revolver in the other, “it’s like my rotten luck that the Bulgars should pitch on to-night to come in and sack the town.” However, a very few minutes convinced me that it was only two drunks coming up to bed, and, telling myself not to be more of a fool than nature intended, I turned over and went to sleep again.

I think my morbid reflections must have been brought on by the supper I had had. Joe, my orderly, had, for reasons best known to himself, taken me to a different restaurant to the one where we had been to lunch with the Consul, assuring me that it was much better; it was not, very much worse, in fact, though I should not have thought such a thing could be possible. It was full of soldiers and comitadjes drinking. At first I could get no food at all, and when it did come it was uneatable. I had supper with an American doctor I met in the town next night, and he informed me that food was so scarce and dear in Prilip that to get anything of a meal you had to have your meat in one restaurant, your potatoes in another, and your coffee in a third!

Next morning I went round to the hospital, and in the afternoon one of the doctors took me round and introduced me to the Serbian Chief of Police, who was most friendly and polite, got me a nice little room close to the hospital, and apologised for not being able to ask me to come to his house as his guest as his wife was ill. This is the sort of courtesy that has always been extended to me in Serbia; they think the best of everything they can offer is not too good for the stranger within their gates, and I began to feel much cheered up.

There were not very many wounded in the hospital, but a great many sick, and dysentery cases beginning to come in rapidly. I was soon quite at home there, being used to the ways of Serbian hospitals. The Director was going to Bitol for a few days, and I asked him to ask the head of the Sanitary Department there, Dr. Nikotitch, if I might join a regimental ambulance as nurse, as I heard that the ambulance of the Second Regiment was some miles farther up the road, just behind the Front. The Second and Fourteenth Regiments were then holding the Baboona Pass, a very strongly fortified position in the mountains, against the Bulgarians.

I stayed about a week in the hospital; there was plenty of work to do—in fact, to have done it properly there would have been enough for a dozen nurses, as dysentery was rapidly becoming an epidemic, and the hospital was soon full up; we could take in no more. We were fearfully short of everything, beds, bedding, drugs, and we simply had to do the best we could with practically no kind of hospital appliances. Any kind of proper nursing was impossible, most of the patients lying on the floor in their muddy, trench-stained uniforms.

One afternoon two of the doctors motored out to the ambulance of the Second Regiment and took me with them. We stopped first at the ambulance of the Fourteenth, where we found twenty unfortunate dysentery cases lying on the bare ground in two ragged tents groaning. We had a long chat with the doctor of the Second Regimental ambulance, and had coffee and cigarettes in his room—a loft over the stable. That is to say, I did not do much of the talking as he was a Greek, and besides his own language only talked Turkish and not very fluent Serbian, although later on, strange to say, when I joined the same ambulance, we used to carry on long conversations together in a kind of mongrel lingo very largely helped out by signs.