British women of the Eastern Front: War, writing and experience in Serbia and Russia, 1914-20 Paperback – Illustrated, 28 Aug. 2018

Really useful book well written and informative.

This book gave me some fascinating and surprising insights into the First world war through the eyes of women. Highly recommend !

Many of us are au fait with stories of heroism, suffering, unspeakable casualties on the Western Front: the Somme, Passchendaele, Ypres are evocative names. Thirty two thousand women served as military nurses between 1914-19 and most of those served on the Western Front. Probably we are less familiar with names, places and travails of the Eastern front. As Smith quotes, to be Balkanised is to be marginalised. It appears that the records have too often been lost, destroyed or suppressed. Is this in part because the UK doesn’t come out of these theatres of war looking too clever? One of the saddest moments in the book is when the Serbian town is all decked out in Union Jacks with the Serbs waiting for their allies who never appear. Smith studies the Serbian and the Russian fronts. She states that it was precisely because the Eastern front was not under British and French control that women, especially women doctors, were welcomed to the Eastern front and given greater autonomy. She argues that the suffrage movement had organised and resourced a lot women who were keen to represent and to serve the Empire, to travel, to experience that Boys’ Own, great colonial adventure and when war broke out, to perform their patriotic duty as surely as men took up arms. Medicine and nursing were acceptable ways for women to serve. In terms of sources what Smith does cleverly, is to find both obscured details and the voices of women in the “lost” records of long forgotten organisations: the Scottish Women’s Hospital, the privately funded Farmers’ Hospitals for Serbians (supported entirely by British farmers and landowners), the Serbian Relief Fund. Most touching of all the records is the war diary, written in pencil, falling apart and barely legible. Smith examines how their national background coloured these women’s reactions, conduct and attitudes: these beacons of Britishness. She also unearths a panoply of quite remarkable individual women whose capacity for organisation and work, survival, compassion for both soldiers and POWs is impressive. In no particular order they include Flora Sandes the only British women to fight as a soldier in the Serbian Army, Dr Elsie Inglis, Mabel Dearmer, hospital orderly, E Agnes Greg, Mabel Stobart, Dr Caroline Twigg Matthews. The hospitals became ‘fever hospitals’ with patients and staff engulfed by typhus. I found the burial of the 3 British nurses to be enormously moving as is the fact that their deaths are still marked annually. When Serbia collapsed many personnel escaped across the mountains to Albania but some women refused to leave their patients and remained as POWs. After Versailles some women stayed on to help with war orphans and disease from starvation and to establish free roadside clinics. The privations of the Serbian campaign reminded me of Roumania/Rumania (spelling has changed) but at least Roumania was a big winner at Versailles. Did poor old Serbia get anything? I was a bit more familiar with the Russian front, both militarily and with nursing via the splendid F Farmborough who was part of the British colony in Russia, the GDs who nursed: Olga A, Marie P (jnr) and OTMA. Farmborough spoke fluent Russian and via her diary (only a small section was published in book form in 1974) she acted as a kind of amanuensis for the essentially mute Russian peasant soldier. She joined the Russian Red Cross as did Mary Britnieva daughter of an English father and Violetta Thurstan, a professionally trained nurse, captured in Belgium who then offered her services to Russia. Both these women joined the flying columns or letuchkas which served the Russian front line. Then there is the Anglo-Russian hospital in Petrograd founded by Ambassador Buchanan’s wife in GD Dmitri’s palace ( you know, he shot Rasputin) and this was superseded by the Anglo Russian Base Hospital, headed up by the redoubtable Lady Muriel Paget. Many of the soldiers suffered from gas-gangrene, roundworms and severe scurvy. There were multiple amputations in field hospitals. The Revolution drove most of the foreign staff out of the country. The indefatigable Lady Muriel, some time after her visit with President Wilson, made a return trip to Russia in order to raise funds for the organisation, the Distressed British Subjects in Russia. I think that this is a really worthwhile book that draws together rare and valuable sources. It is a shame that these sources are so scant. This is not a criticism. It’s a fact whenever one has to rely wholly on English language sources for an international case study. I felt the book could have benefited from a few more maps. A minor point perhaps but Smith is given to splitting her infinitives and she could be a little more judicious in her use of the pluperfect tense.