Trechos de An English Woman-Sergeant In The Serbian Army (1916), de Flora Sandes.
Events moved so rapidly in Serbia after the Bulgarians declared war that when I reached Salonica last winter I found it full of nurses and doctors who had been home on leave and who had gone out there to rejoin their various British hospital units, only to find themselves unable to get up into the country.
I had been home for a holiday after working in Serbian hospitals since the very beginning of the war, but when things began to look so serious again I hurried back to Serbia. We had rather an eventful voyage, as the French boat I was on was carrying ammunition as well as passengers, and the submarines seemed to make a dead set at us. At Malta we were held up for three days, waiting for the coast to clear. The third night I had been dining ashore, and on getting back to the boat, about eleven, found the military police in charge, and the ship and all the passengers being searched for a spy and some missing documents. We were not allowed to go down to our cabins until they had been thoroughly ransacked, but as nothing incriminating was found we eventually proceeded on our way, with a torpedo-destroyer on either side of us as an escort. The boats were always slung out in readiness, and we were cautioned never to lose sight of our life-belts. We had to put in again at Piraeus, and again at Lemnos for a few days, so that it was November 3rd before we finally reached Salonica - having taken fourteen days from Marseilles - only to find that the railway line had been cut, and there was no possible way of getting up into Serbia.
- - -
Prilip, about twenty-five miles farther on, was still in the hands of the Serbians, though its evacuation was expected any minute, and even now the road from Bitol to Prilip was not considered safe on account of marauding Bulgarian comitadjes, or irregulars.
- - -
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.
- - -
I think my morbid reflections must have been brought on by the supper I had had.
- - -
There were not very many wounded in the hospital, but a great many sick, and dysentery cases beginning to come in rapidly.
- - -
The Second and Fourteenth Regiments were then holding the Baboona Pass, a very strongly fortified position in the mountains, against the Bulgarians.
- - -
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.
- - -
These tents are only a sort of little lean-to's, which you crawl into, just the height of a rifle, two of which can be used instead of poles.
- - -
Putting brandy in my water-bottle had been suggested to me by a tale a young Austrian officer, a prisoner, who was one of my patients in Kragujewatz hospital, told me.
- - -
Corporal punishment, that is to say, a certain number of strokes with a stick (maximum 25 - schoolboys will know on what part), is the legitimate and recognised way of punishing in the Serbian Army, and the sentence is carried out by a non-commissioned officer.
- - -
I used to sit over the camp fires in the evenings with the soldiers, and we used to exchange cigarettes and discuss the war by the hour. I was picking up a few more words of Serbian every day, and they used to take endless trouble to make me understand, though our conversations were very largely made up of signs, but I understood what they meant if I couldn't always understand what they said. It was heartbreaking the way they used to ask me every evening, "Did I think the English were coming to help them?" and "Would they send cannon? The Bulgarians had big guns, and we had nothing but some little old cannon about ten years old, which were really only what the comitadjes used to use. If we had had a few big guns we could have held the Baboona Pass practically for any length of time, for it was an almost impregnable position."
- - -
Only a few days before Bulgarian comitadjes had swooped down and taken prisoner a Serbian soldier who had gone to fetch some water not a quarter of a mile from his own camp.
- - -
The first line of trenches that we came to were little shallow trenches dotted about on the hillside, with about a dozen men in each. We sat in one of them and drank coffee, and I thought then that I should be able to tell them at home that I had been in a real Serbian trench, little thinking at the time that I was going to do it in good earnest later on under different circumstances.
After that we went on up to another position right at the top of Kalabac. It was a tremendous ride, and I could never have believed that horses could have climbed such steep places, or have kept their feet on some of the obstacles we went over, but these horses were trained to it, and could get through or over anything. Just the last bit of the way we all had to dismount, and, leaving the horses with the gendarmes, did the rest on foot. There was no need for trenches there, as it was very rocky, and there was plenty of natural cover.
- - -
This "Slava" day is an institution peculiar only to the Serbians, and which they always keep most faithfully. Every family and every regiment has one. It is the day of their particular patron saint, and is handed down from father to son. It is kept up for three days with as much jollification as circumstances permit, even in wartime.
- - -
In the middle of lunch I had my first sight of the enemy, a Bulgarian patrol in the distance, and orders were promptly given to some of our men to go down and head them off. The men all seemed to be in high spirits up there, in spite of the cold, and some of them were roasting a pig, although I suppose that was a "Slava" luxury for them, not to be had every day.
- - -
I was very sorry afterwards that I had not taken my camera with me up to the positions, but I was not sure at the time if they would like me to, though afterwards they told me I might take it anywhere I liked.
- - -
The villagers themselves, those who had not already fled in terror, seemed to live in the most abject poverty, huddled together in houses no better than pigsties. The place was infested by enormous mongrel dogs, which used to pursue me in gangs, barking and growling, but they had a wholesome respect for a stone, and never came to close quarters.
- - -
A company of reinforcements passed us and floundered off through the deep snow drifts across the fields in the direction of the firing. There was no artillery fire (I suppose they could not haul the guns through the snow), but the crackle of the rifles got nearer and nearer, and at last about midday they were so close that we could hear the wild "Hourrah, Hourrahs" of the Bulgarians as they took our trenches, and as the blizzard had stopped for a bit we could see them coming streaking across the snow towards us, our little handful of men retreating and reforming as they went.
- - -
This bridge was heavily mined and was to be blown up as soon as our men were over, thus cutting off, or anyhow considerably delaying, the Bulgarians, as the river was now a swollen icy torrent. We sat round the fire of the ambulance and dried our feet. Some of the men were soaking to the knees, having no boots, but only opankis, leather sandals fastened on with a strap which winds round the leg up to the knee.
- - -
The soldiers were all retreating across the snow, and I never saw such a depressing sight. The grey November twilight, the endless white expanse of snow, lit up every moment by the flashes of the guns, and the long column of men trailing away into the dusk wailing a sort of dismal dirge - I don't know what it was they were singing - something between a song and a sob, it sounded like the cry of a Banshee. I have never heard it before or since, but it was a most heartbreaking sound.
- - -
I had some wild visions in my head - as I knew the Commandant would wait until the last moment - of a tremendous gallop over the snow, hotly pursued by Bulgarian cavalry. I imagine I must once have seen something like it on a cinematograph.
- - -
Rather to my surprise he submitted quite meekly, and let me dose him with quinine, and tuck him up in his blankets by the stove.
- - -
We sat by the camp fire and pored over the map of Albania, whither we should soon be going, and discussed the war as usual.
- - -
It was bitterly cold, and every few yards we passed horrible looking corpses of bullocks, donkeys and ponies, with the hides and some of the flesh stripped from them; sometimes there were packs, ammunition and rifles thrown away by the roadside, but very, very few of the latter.
- - -
At the very top we stopped at the ruins of a filthy little hut, where a halt was called and the field telephone rigged up. We built a fire outside - it was too dirty to go inside - under the wall, and had some coffee, and tried, very unsuccessfully, to get out of the howling, bitter wind.
- - -
One of the old [Serbian] ladies explained volubly that she had once had something - I never could quite make out whether it was a husband or a cat - and had lost it, and I was now to take its place in the family circle.
- - -
The Serbians laugh at me because I declare that they always pick their gendarmes for their good looks.
- - -
He had never seen a thermos flask before, and when he brought it back and I shared the tea with him he was perfectly thunderstruck to find it still hot.
- - -
The Bulgarians kept up a heavy bombardment with their big guns over the Struga road, responded to by our little antiquated cannon. We looked right down on it, and watched the shrapnel bursting all day and the enemy gradually coming closer. Some of our artillery was concealed in a little wood just below the village, and presently the enemy got the range of this beautifully, and the shells were falling fast among the trees.
- - -
These Albanian villages were a perfect picture of squalor and filth. I don't know what the people subsist on, but they seem to live like animals.
- - -
And prided himself upon always having a "reserve," from a tin of sardines or a piece of chocolate when you were hungry and had nothing to eat, to a spare bridle when someone's broke, as mine did one day, although he seemed to carry no more luggage than anyone else.
- - -
One officer with an old wound through his chest, and another bullet still in his side, just dropped on his face when we got to the top, though he had not uttered a word of complaint before.
- - -
We lay there and fired at them all that day, and I took a lot of photographs which I wanted very much to turn out well; but, alas! During the journey through Albania the films, together with nearly all the others that I took, got wet and spoilt.
- - -
The inhabitants were as hostile as they dared to be, and used to refuse to sell us anything.
- - -
I presented her with a small pocket mirror. I do not think she had ever seen such a thing before, and gazed into it with the greatest delight though she looked about a hundred and was ugly enough to frighten the devil.
- - -
The Serbian Christmas is not till thirteen days later than ours, but we celebrated my English Christmas Eve over the camp fire that night. A plate of beans and dry bread had to take the place of roast beef and plum pudding, but we drank Christmas healths in a small flask of cognac, after which I played "God Save the King" on the violin, and we all stood up and sang it.
- - -
We passed a company of Italian soldiers, and some of the officers came up early in the morning and visited our camp. Durazzo was being bombarded from the sea, and we could hear the boom of the big naval guns in the distance, but it was all over before we arrived.
- - -
There were several wrecks round there, one of them a Greek steamer, which had hit a floating mine. There were a great many of these floating mines about, and the Austrian submarines were also very active, adding immensely to the difficulty of getting food and supplies, which all had to be brought by sea to the troops.
- - -
We all stood at the salute and repeated the oath all together, sentence by sentence after the priest, swearing loyalty to Serbia and King Peter, and after that we marched in single file past the table, removing our caps as we did so for the priest to sprinkle our foreheads, and then kissed the cross, the priest's hand, and, last of all, the regimental flag. It was a very impressive ceremony, winding up by the band playing the Serbian National Anthem while we stood at the salute.
- - -
They could not be buried in the small island, dying as they were at the rate of 150 a day, and the bodies were taken out to sea. The Serbs are not a maritime nation, and the idea of a burial at sea is repugnant to them.
- - -
We all - guests, officers and men - danced the "Kolo" and all the other Serbian national dances together until evening.
Mais:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2566552/INCREDIBLE-story-Flora-Sandes.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqvNeaHQDg
I had been home for a holiday after working in Serbian hospitals since the very beginning of the war, but when things began to look so serious again I hurried back to Serbia. We had rather an eventful voyage, as the French boat I was on was carrying ammunition as well as passengers, and the submarines seemed to make a dead set at us. At Malta we were held up for three days, waiting for the coast to clear. The third night I had been dining ashore, and on getting back to the boat, about eleven, found the military police in charge, and the ship and all the passengers being searched for a spy and some missing documents. We were not allowed to go down to our cabins until they had been thoroughly ransacked, but as nothing incriminating was found we eventually proceeded on our way, with a torpedo-destroyer on either side of us as an escort. The boats were always slung out in readiness, and we were cautioned never to lose sight of our life-belts. We had to put in again at Piraeus, and again at Lemnos for a few days, so that it was November 3rd before we finally reached Salonica - having taken fourteen days from Marseilles - only to find that the railway line had been cut, and there was no possible way of getting up into Serbia.
- - -
Prilip, about twenty-five miles farther on, was still in the hands of the Serbians, though its evacuation was expected any minute, and even now the road from Bitol to Prilip was not considered safe on account of marauding Bulgarian comitadjes, or irregulars.
- - -
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.
- - -
I think my morbid reflections must have been brought on by the supper I had had.
- - -
There were not very many wounded in the hospital, but a great many sick, and dysentery cases beginning to come in rapidly.
- - -
The Second and Fourteenth Regiments were then holding the Baboona Pass, a very strongly fortified position in the mountains, against the Bulgarians.
- - -
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.
- - -
These tents are only a sort of little lean-to's, which you crawl into, just the height of a rifle, two of which can be used instead of poles.
- - -
Putting brandy in my water-bottle had been suggested to me by a tale a young Austrian officer, a prisoner, who was one of my patients in Kragujewatz hospital, told me.
- - -
Corporal punishment, that is to say, a certain number of strokes with a stick (maximum 25 - schoolboys will know on what part), is the legitimate and recognised way of punishing in the Serbian Army, and the sentence is carried out by a non-commissioned officer.
- - -
I used to sit over the camp fires in the evenings with the soldiers, and we used to exchange cigarettes and discuss the war by the hour. I was picking up a few more words of Serbian every day, and they used to take endless trouble to make me understand, though our conversations were very largely made up of signs, but I understood what they meant if I couldn't always understand what they said. It was heartbreaking the way they used to ask me every evening, "Did I think the English were coming to help them?" and "Would they send cannon? The Bulgarians had big guns, and we had nothing but some little old cannon about ten years old, which were really only what the comitadjes used to use. If we had had a few big guns we could have held the Baboona Pass practically for any length of time, for it was an almost impregnable position."
- - -
Only a few days before Bulgarian comitadjes had swooped down and taken prisoner a Serbian soldier who had gone to fetch some water not a quarter of a mile from his own camp.
- - -
The first line of trenches that we came to were little shallow trenches dotted about on the hillside, with about a dozen men in each. We sat in one of them and drank coffee, and I thought then that I should be able to tell them at home that I had been in a real Serbian trench, little thinking at the time that I was going to do it in good earnest later on under different circumstances.
After that we went on up to another position right at the top of Kalabac. It was a tremendous ride, and I could never have believed that horses could have climbed such steep places, or have kept their feet on some of the obstacles we went over, but these horses were trained to it, and could get through or over anything. Just the last bit of the way we all had to dismount, and, leaving the horses with the gendarmes, did the rest on foot. There was no need for trenches there, as it was very rocky, and there was plenty of natural cover.
- - -
This "Slava" day is an institution peculiar only to the Serbians, and which they always keep most faithfully. Every family and every regiment has one. It is the day of their particular patron saint, and is handed down from father to son. It is kept up for three days with as much jollification as circumstances permit, even in wartime.
- - -
In the middle of lunch I had my first sight of the enemy, a Bulgarian patrol in the distance, and orders were promptly given to some of our men to go down and head them off. The men all seemed to be in high spirits up there, in spite of the cold, and some of them were roasting a pig, although I suppose that was a "Slava" luxury for them, not to be had every day.
- - -
I was very sorry afterwards that I had not taken my camera with me up to the positions, but I was not sure at the time if they would like me to, though afterwards they told me I might take it anywhere I liked.
- - -
The villagers themselves, those who had not already fled in terror, seemed to live in the most abject poverty, huddled together in houses no better than pigsties. The place was infested by enormous mongrel dogs, which used to pursue me in gangs, barking and growling, but they had a wholesome respect for a stone, and never came to close quarters.
- - -
A company of reinforcements passed us and floundered off through the deep snow drifts across the fields in the direction of the firing. There was no artillery fire (I suppose they could not haul the guns through the snow), but the crackle of the rifles got nearer and nearer, and at last about midday they were so close that we could hear the wild "Hourrah, Hourrahs" of the Bulgarians as they took our trenches, and as the blizzard had stopped for a bit we could see them coming streaking across the snow towards us, our little handful of men retreating and reforming as they went.
- - -
This bridge was heavily mined and was to be blown up as soon as our men were over, thus cutting off, or anyhow considerably delaying, the Bulgarians, as the river was now a swollen icy torrent. We sat round the fire of the ambulance and dried our feet. Some of the men were soaking to the knees, having no boots, but only opankis, leather sandals fastened on with a strap which winds round the leg up to the knee.
- - -
The soldiers were all retreating across the snow, and I never saw such a depressing sight. The grey November twilight, the endless white expanse of snow, lit up every moment by the flashes of the guns, and the long column of men trailing away into the dusk wailing a sort of dismal dirge - I don't know what it was they were singing - something between a song and a sob, it sounded like the cry of a Banshee. I have never heard it before or since, but it was a most heartbreaking sound.
- - -
I had some wild visions in my head - as I knew the Commandant would wait until the last moment - of a tremendous gallop over the snow, hotly pursued by Bulgarian cavalry. I imagine I must once have seen something like it on a cinematograph.
- - -
Rather to my surprise he submitted quite meekly, and let me dose him with quinine, and tuck him up in his blankets by the stove.
- - -
We sat by the camp fire and pored over the map of Albania, whither we should soon be going, and discussed the war as usual.
- - -
It was bitterly cold, and every few yards we passed horrible looking corpses of bullocks, donkeys and ponies, with the hides and some of the flesh stripped from them; sometimes there were packs, ammunition and rifles thrown away by the roadside, but very, very few of the latter.
- - -
At the very top we stopped at the ruins of a filthy little hut, where a halt was called and the field telephone rigged up. We built a fire outside - it was too dirty to go inside - under the wall, and had some coffee, and tried, very unsuccessfully, to get out of the howling, bitter wind.
- - -
One of the old [Serbian] ladies explained volubly that she had once had something - I never could quite make out whether it was a husband or a cat - and had lost it, and I was now to take its place in the family circle.
- - -
The Serbians laugh at me because I declare that they always pick their gendarmes for their good looks.
- - -
He had never seen a thermos flask before, and when he brought it back and I shared the tea with him he was perfectly thunderstruck to find it still hot.
- - -
The Bulgarians kept up a heavy bombardment with their big guns over the Struga road, responded to by our little antiquated cannon. We looked right down on it, and watched the shrapnel bursting all day and the enemy gradually coming closer. Some of our artillery was concealed in a little wood just below the village, and presently the enemy got the range of this beautifully, and the shells were falling fast among the trees.
- - -
These Albanian villages were a perfect picture of squalor and filth. I don't know what the people subsist on, but they seem to live like animals.
- - -
And prided himself upon always having a "reserve," from a tin of sardines or a piece of chocolate when you were hungry and had nothing to eat, to a spare bridle when someone's broke, as mine did one day, although he seemed to carry no more luggage than anyone else.
- - -
One officer with an old wound through his chest, and another bullet still in his side, just dropped on his face when we got to the top, though he had not uttered a word of complaint before.
- - -
We lay there and fired at them all that day, and I took a lot of photographs which I wanted very much to turn out well; but, alas! During the journey through Albania the films, together with nearly all the others that I took, got wet and spoilt.
- - -
The inhabitants were as hostile as they dared to be, and used to refuse to sell us anything.
- - -
I presented her with a small pocket mirror. I do not think she had ever seen such a thing before, and gazed into it with the greatest delight though she looked about a hundred and was ugly enough to frighten the devil.
- - -
The Serbian Christmas is not till thirteen days later than ours, but we celebrated my English Christmas Eve over the camp fire that night. A plate of beans and dry bread had to take the place of roast beef and plum pudding, but we drank Christmas healths in a small flask of cognac, after which I played "God Save the King" on the violin, and we all stood up and sang it.
- - -
We passed a company of Italian soldiers, and some of the officers came up early in the morning and visited our camp. Durazzo was being bombarded from the sea, and we could hear the boom of the big naval guns in the distance, but it was all over before we arrived.
- - -
There were several wrecks round there, one of them a Greek steamer, which had hit a floating mine. There were a great many of these floating mines about, and the Austrian submarines were also very active, adding immensely to the difficulty of getting food and supplies, which all had to be brought by sea to the troops.
- - -
We all stood at the salute and repeated the oath all together, sentence by sentence after the priest, swearing loyalty to Serbia and King Peter, and after that we marched in single file past the table, removing our caps as we did so for the priest to sprinkle our foreheads, and then kissed the cross, the priest's hand, and, last of all, the regimental flag. It was a very impressive ceremony, winding up by the band playing the Serbian National Anthem while we stood at the salute.
- - -
They could not be buried in the small island, dying as they were at the rate of 150 a day, and the bodies were taken out to sea. The Serbs are not a maritime nation, and the idea of a burial at sea is repugnant to them.
- - -
We all - guests, officers and men - danced the "Kolo" and all the other Serbian national dances together until evening.
Mais:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2566552/INCREDIBLE-story-Flora-Sandes.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3sqvNeaHQDg
