A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes by Louise Miller

Author:Louise Miller [Miller, Louise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: surrey, flora sandes, serbia, women during the war, red cross, women soldiers, gestapo, WWI, world war one, first world war
Publisher: Alma Books
Published: 2012-06-21T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 13

Breakthrough

1918

By early September preparations were well under way for an attack spearheaded by the Serbs. The plan, devised by General Živojin Mišić, the Serbian Chief-of-Staff, had first been dismissed by the Allied command as near impossible. He proposed striking the Bulgarians along the Moglena mountain range, a forbidding line of windswept naked peaks east of Monastir, which were at points over seven thousand feet in height. Not only did his plan envisage lifting heavy guns into position on the slopes without the Bulgarians noticing, it relied on driving them out of their mountain-top trenches and concrete gun emplacements.1

The key to Mišić’s plan was speed and momentum. The Serbs would have to drive the Bulgarians back without giving them the chance to regroup and reform. He would have to push his army to the limits of their endurance. They would have to fight their way across pitiless mountains and dry, scorched plains with little rest and few supplies.2 Mišić believed that they could do it. So too did his soldiers. By September 1918 he had convinced the Allied command to let him try.

As the “great day” loomed, the men of Flora’s company waited anxiously for their chance to advance. “Once back on Serbian ground we don’t care if we’re killed,” the men avowed, as they gazed hard towards the Moglena mountains, on the other side of which lay their beloved country.3 From her small tent in the hospital grounds Flora sensed that something was about to happen. She packed her things resolutely and told the doctor she was leaving. “It’s been five weeks,” she told him. “I’ve been recuperating quite long enough.”

At eight o’clock on the morning of 14th September, from her position on a wooded hillside next to some Serbian batteries, Flora watched as the artillerymen sprang to their guns and opened fire, on a fine but hazy day. “Prvi top pali, Drugi top pali” (“First gun fire, Second gun fire”), they shouted while they rained shells on Bulgarian positions atop the heights. Nearby the ground vibrated under Flora’s feet and her ears rang with the most “incessant, ear-splitting noise” she had ever experienced, in what was the start of the largest concentration of fire ever seen in the Balkans.4

To the north-east of Monastir the Italian and French armies readied themselves to advance while, east of the Vardar River, the British prepared for an assault on their sector of the front around Lake Doiran. These were to be diversionary battles only, designed to prevent the Bulgarians from rushing troops to the focus of the attack. The men of the six Serbian divisions, reinforced by two French Colonial ones, waited for their chance to storm the Moglena heights. They were ordered to capture the peaks of Sokol and Vetrenik, which lay on either side of the Dobropolje ridge.5

In the early hours of 15th September the Serbian Second Army and French Colonial divisions began to advance. Flora and the men of the First Army remained impatiently behind. Above them the blue-grey-clad

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