British women of the Eastern Front

War, writing and experience in Serbia and Russia, 1914–20

Angela K. Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780719096181
• eBook ISBN: 9781526100030
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book explores the experiences of a range of women from the early days of 1914, through the big events of the war on the Eastern Front. Their diaries, letters, memoirs and journalism are used to investigate the extraordinary role played by British women during the fall of Serbia, the Russian Revolution and the final push, and their role in reconstruction following the Armistice. These women, and their writings, are examined through the multiple lenses of gender, nationality, patriotism, imperialism and legacy, but the book also tells the stories of individuals, and will appeal across audiences to students, researchers and general readers. This is the first book to examine the war in the East through the eyes of British women and as such makes an important contribution to First World War Studies.

1

Travel writers and romantics?

From 1914 onwards, British women, determined to do their bit for king and country, travelled East. They were quick to realise that it was in the Balkans that their greatest opportunities lay; quick to understand how the traditional reserve of their fathers, brothers and sons would prove a significant obstacle to their involvement in the war effort on the Western Front. While on the one hand it is clear that the same ethos of duty and patriotism that caused men to enlist, also inspired many women to look for these opportunities, at the same time the war seemed to offer them something more, something rather different. For many women, the war represented a chance to escape from the restricted lives of the Edwardian world, and for some a chance to travel. And just as the notion of victory on the foreign battlefield held glamour and excitement for so many young men, so the ideas of a high romanticism, a glory of war, proved equally attractive to their sisters. In Britain and France military leaders were slow to comprehend the services women could offer, particularly in the field of medicine. But the Allies in the East were more open to the suggestion of women’s participation in the war effort: recent experience in the Balkan Wars had shown the commitment and the potential of British women’s medical units. Word of this interest spread quickly among the women at home in Britain, many of whom were impatient to sign up to do some practical war work.

But the East held something more. Many of the young women who were keen to play an active part in the war were from upper- or middle-class backgrounds. They were often self-supporting – they had to be, to get their places in the various hospital units if they were not trained nurses. For many, the landscapes of the Western Front were reasonably familiar. Travel in France and Germany had become much more widespread and the cultural identities of these European neighbours shared many traits with Britain, not least because of the close blood links of the various royal families. The East, however, suggested a different world. Other women were trained nurses, often from very different social backgrounds, for whom the need to earn a living was an imperative and the idea of foreign travel an impossible dream. All of a sudden that dream was impossible no longer. And the potential glamour and excitement was increased because the kingdoms of the East represented something else, something different and something other. Serbia, as we have seen, the first of these countries to welcome the assistance of the communities of British women, was just far enough away to be viewed differently. In 1914 it was, as John Keegan puts it, ‘an aggressive, backward and domestically violent Christian kingdom’.¹ It had only fairly recently won its independence from the Ottoman Turks and the legacy of centuries of Muslim rule remained strong. It was also a country of remarkable ethnic diversity, in part as a consequence of this Ottoman heritage, but also as a result of close relations with both Austria and Russia, and the tribal structures of Balkan communities. It was a place of potential adventure: it offered a range of British women the chance to see aspects of the world that would have been unthinkable in the years before the war. And as luck would have it, many of these women were inspired to record what they saw and experienced. As Christine Hallett has suggested:

The personal writings of nurses who were posted to hospitals far from their homes resonate with a sense of adventure and a feeling of excitement. The opportunity to journey to places they regarded as ‘strange and exotic’ meant a great deal to upper-working-class and middle-class trained nurses who lacked the means to travel. Wealthier VADs also valued the opportunities that overseas postings could present. Even women from wealthy backgrounds were expected to remain at home, listen to the stories and admire the exploits of their brothers in the army or on foreign Imperial service. Becoming a nurse meant that a woman could make adventures of her own.²

As these women ventured to the new landscapes of the East, they wrote about it, in diaries, in letters home, and later some of them wrote memoirs or autobiographies. As this book contests, these writings have significant value to scholarship, in historical and in feminist terms. They help us to write new histories of women’s experience, to rethink our ideas of the First World War in alternative ways. But equally, many of the written testimonies have important literary value. Although few of the women who served in the East chose to reinterpret their experiences through fiction, we can examine their works through other literary genres, and in so doing, identify this literary as well as historic importance. In this chapter, I will argue that these testimonies are influenced by and can be read through two connected literary forms. Most of the writing addressed here is life writing, as all the women are writing about profound life experiences. Equally pertinent, however, is travel writing, a genre that had become increasingly popular throughout the nineteenth century, with a particular emphasis on the ‘lady’ traveller.

Although many of the sources used in this book can be categorised as ‘life writing’, few of them represent conventional autobiography, which Philippe Lejeune described as ‘A retrospective prose narrative produced by a real person concerning his own existence, focusing on his individual life, in particular on the development of his personality.’³ The writing of these women, although constructed around their own experience, is as likely to be focused on the external world, that which they have entered as foreigners. Their own responses are usually of secondary concern. Their interest is less in self-analysis than in making sense of the impact of the war experience on all those involved. Even where the texts considered are presented as conventional autobiographies, for example in the case of Flora Sandes, they do not necessarily conform to critical expectations. As Liz Stanley suggests:

The autobiographical archetype is the Bildungsroman, the tale of the progressive travelling of a life from troubled or stifled beginnings; in which obstacles are overcome and the true self actualised or revealed; and then the tale may, prototypically, end, or it may go on to document yet further troubles turned to triumphs.⁴

Sandes’ two volumes of autobiography, An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army (1916) and The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier (1927), are concerned almost entirely with her wartime experience, but with the emphasis on the collective experience of the soldiers with whom she served. And although the Serbian army was ultimately on the winning side of the war, the overall sense of triumph is tempered by Sandes’ representations of the hardships suffered by the Serbian people and by her own emptiness when she was finally demobbed and forced to return to her old life. As Shari Benstock argues, ‘the self that would reside at the center of the text is de-centered – and often is absent altogether – in women’s autobiographical texts’.⁵ While Sandes is never absent from her text – indeed as the only British woman soldier in the Serbian army she must play a significant role – she uses that position to publicise the plight of her comrades. That she is accepted as one of them, a part of a larger whole, is central to the books.

Much of the life writing considered here falls into more ambiguous categories than conventional autobiography. Many of the texts are memoirs, based on diaries, published immediately after the actual experiences that they relate, often long before the end of the war. The published diaries of women such as Caroline Twigge Matthews and Ellen Chivers Davies were published so quickly that it is impossible to imagine that much editing has taken place, unlike that of Elsie Corbett, published in 1964, in which it is sometimes hard to tell what is original text and what is retrospective reflection. Some of the texts are even less easy to categorise. Trev Lynn Broughton and Linda Anderson suggest that ‘many varieties of women’s life-writing are not recognized as autobiography, but that some are not legible as “texts” at all’.⁶ This is particularly true of some of the manuscript diaries and letters featured. For example Mabel St Clair Stobart’s dairy of the Serbian retreat measures five inches by three, is pencil-scrawled in note form and barely legible. Rebecca Hogan has argued that ‘immersion in the horizontal, non-hierarchical flow of events and details – in other words, radical parataxis – seems to be one of the striking features of the diary as a form’.⁷ Nowhere is this disruption of form and syntax more apparent than in this diary. Yet it is still possible to read a great deal about both the woman and the broader experience in its pages.

As interest in women’s autobiographical practice grew and developed from the 1980s onwards, so scholarly interest in diaries as a form of life writing has also developed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia Hoff have argued that:

The diary’s flexibility and adaptability enhance its uses in our lives and academic disciplines. Its form, simultaneously elastic and tight, borrows from and at the same time contributes to other narrative structures. Its content is wide-ranging yet patterned, and what is excluded is as important as what is included. Because the form and content of the diary are so adaptable and flexible, the study of diaries brings into play issues of historical, social, and self-construction; exchanges between reader and text; and connections between, and differing effects of, published and manuscript diaries.⁸

The diary, as a form of life writing, becomes a vital textual source for studies such as this one, offering experiences of war previously marginalised or excluded altogether. But how reliable are they as subjective personal records, whether intended for publication or not? Liz Stanley suggests that ‘Both biography and autobiography lay claim to facticity, yet both are by nature artful enterprises which select, shape and produce a very unnatural product, for no life is lived quite so much under a single spotlight as the conventional form of written auto/biographies suggests.’⁹ This may also be true of diaries and letters. It is impossible to identify absolute fact and truth in these writings because they are shaped by the subjective influences of the writers. Social class, nationality, politics, gender and upbringing will all impact on the biases of the works. But for my purposes it is here that the spotlight is most useful. It is precisely the ways in which all these influences impact upon the experience of the individual that most interest me here. What these life writings convey is the way these British women understood their experience, that is, experience inevitably coloured by who they were. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the way they responded to the often harsh and sometimes exotic geographical surroundings of the East. For these reasons it is useful to examine some of the writings through one specific aspect of life writing, reading them through the tropes of travel writing.

Paul Fussell has described travel writing as ‘a sub-species of memoir in which the autobiographical narrative arises from the speaker’s encounter with distant or unfamiliar data and in which the narrative – unlike that of a novel or a romance – claims literal validity by constant reference to actuality’.¹⁰ Although Fussell is principally concerned with travel writing between the wars, and pays very little attention to women travel writers of the period, his summary is appropriate in reading back through the developments of the ni...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Maps
• Introduction: the road east
• 1  Travel writers and romantics?
• 2  Early days: the typhus colony and other stories
• 3  Role call? The female body and gender identity on the Eastern Front
• 4  Waiting for the Allies: prisoners of war
• 5  Domestic survival strategies: the Serbian retreat, 1915
• 6  The road to revolution: Russia, 1916–17
• 7  The aftermath and the legacy
• Select bibliography
• Index