An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army

In 1914, Flora Sandes was a British nurse volunteering in Serbia. By 1915, she was a sergeant in the Serbian army, the only foreign woman ever to serve in a combat role during the Great War. When Serbian forces retreated through Albania in the winter of 1915-16, Sandes walked alongside them, carrying a rifle and revolver, sleeping in frozen fields, eating nothing for days. She wasn't supposed to be there. No woman was. But she'd found something in Serbia that England had never offered her: purpose, belonging, the chance to be more than a spectator to her own century. The narrative captures the chaos and camaraderie of war with startling immediacy. Sandes writes without sentimentality about the horror and the boredom, the friendships forged in extremity, the small indignities and great dignities of military life. This is a document of immense historical rarity: a woman's-eye view of combat, logistics, and survival from inside the trenches. It endures because Sandes refuses to be a footnote. She was there. She saw it. She fought.