Jack and Eve

CHAPTER 1

Under the Stars

Serbia, June 1915

AS THEY SAT outside their tent on the hillside they could see a vast panorama of valleys and mountains. Below them the little cottages of the village huddled together and in the distance the Kosmaj mountain formed a mauve blur in the west.

It was glorious stretching out on the grass under a cloudless blue sky in the blazing sunshine. It was glorious too being reunited after nearly two months apart, their longest separation since they had first met seven years ago. The green hills and distant mountains reminded them of carefree days together in Scotland, and especially one autumn morning not long after they had met when they had ridden out to Arthur's Seat, the rocky outcrop overlooking Edinburgh. Then, as they looked down on the city sprawling below, they had declared themselves 'twin souls'. Now, as they surveyed this foreign landscape under summer skies, they made a pledge. When peace came they would return to Serbia and tour the country in a horse-drawn caravan. But for now the war dominated everything. Their break over, it was time to get back to work. All around them the hillside was covered with hospital tents, their red crosses gleaming against white canvas backgrounds in the sun. Everywhere women were scurrying backwards and forwards, carrying blankets, cooking pots and bandages. Brushing down their uniforms, they hurried over to help.

Vera - or Jack as she liked to be known - had arrived in Serbia just a few days earlier. She had travelled from England in an army transport ship, its cabins crammed with British sailors and volunteer workers and its hold packed with explosives. The boat had sailed through the Mediterranean and into the Aegean Sea, dodging enemy submarines, then docked at the Greek port of Salonika (Thessaloniki) where Jack had boarded a train heading north into Serbia. She knew nobody when she set out and was responsible not only for getting herself safely to Serbia but also for bringing a motor ambulance and a seven-seater car. But Jack, being Jack, had soon made friends on the ship with others heading out to Serbia. She needed no second invitation to share her provisions and join in sing-songs with fellow volunteers she met along the way.

Evelina - Eve as Jack usually called her - had come out to Serbia two months earlier. She had journeyed more sedately, travelling first class by train from Victoria Station and then down through France and Italy before sailing the short hop across the Adriatic to Greece. Even so, the challenges of travelling through foreign territories in wartime, negotiating tickets and accommodation in trains and towns jammed with troops, were considerable. Eve's fluency in various languages, including French, Italian and German, and her experience as a seasoned traveller had helped smooth the way with border officials and military red tape en route. But she had missed Jack from the moment she had set out and wired immediately on arrival urging her to follow. Now that they were reunited in Serbia, twin souls joined together again, they were brimming with excitement at the prospect of what lay ahead. After nearly a year of voluntary work on the home front in Britain, they were finally close to the real scene of action.

They had signed up as volunteers with the Scottish Women's Hospitals (SWH), a medical organization founded at the outbreak of war by a quiet yet formidable Scottish surgeon named Elsie Inglis. Within two weeks of Britain declaring war on Germany in August 1914, Inglis had approached British Army headquarters in Edinburgh and offered to set up and run a military hospital staffed entirely by women. The idea that women doctors could treat wounded men, let alone run a military hospital by themselves, was greeted with undisguised scorn. The official she met brushed her off with the words, 'My good lady, go home and sit still.' Far from sitting still, Inglis had launched the SWH and raised thousands of pounds for medical supplies and equipment from her friends in the suffrage movement within a matter of weeks. She then recruited women doctors, nurses and orderlies, not only from Scotland but from every corner of the British Isles, who were willing to offer their services to Britain's Allies overseas and kitted them out in grey uniforms trimmed with tartan. The help that had been so brusquely rejected by Britain had been welcomed with open arms by the governments of France, Belgium and Serbia. By the end of 1914, the SWH had set up a typhoid hospital in Calais for Belgian troops and another hospital near the frontline for wounded French soldiers. A further unit had set out for Serbia. Jack and Eve could easily have volunteered to work in France, where they both knew the language and something of the country. But they had chosen to go to Serbia with its compelling combination of mystery and exoticism. In Serbia they were sure they would find the adventure they craved.

Before the war Jack and Eve had no more idea of what to expect in Serbia than they had of the surface of the moon. Like most people in Britain at the time they could barely have found Serbia on a map. If pressed, they could, perhaps, have roughly traced the course of the Danube, the mighty river which stretches like a long jagged scar across the belly of Europe from its source in the west in the Black Forest of Germany to its mouth in the east where it empties into the Black Sea in Romania. If they did, they might have noticed the river curling around the northern border of Serbia as it carved the nation's boundary between Austria and Bulgaria. Beyond that, Serbia seemed like an unearthly place of mountains and myths. Occasionally Serbia had warranted mentions in the foreign news columns of British newspapers during the two Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913. But these conflicts, which had finally freed the Serbs from the yoke of the Turkish Ottoman Empire, had seemed remote and insignificant to most British people. Even though Serbia had enlarged its borders as a result of the treaties which ended those two wars, it was still one of the smallest nations in Europe, with a population of just 4.5 million who lived mainly off the land.

Now, however, Serbia was on everybody's minds. Two shots fired from a revolver in Sarajevo, the capital of Serbia's neighbour Bosnia, on 28 June 1914 had catapulted Serbia onto the world stage and engulfed most of Europe in the deadliest conflict in history. On that day a nineteen-year-old Bosnian student, Gavrilo Princip, assassinated the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie as part of a nationalist campaign to wrest Bosnia from Austrian control and unite it with Serbia. This random act of terrorism had been seized on by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a convenient excuse to invade Serbia a month later. At the same time Austria's chief ally Germany had used the crisis as a long-awaited opportunity to invade its neighbour France and occupy Belgium en route. The tiny kingdom of Serbia was the tinderbox which had ignited the war and swiftly dragged Britain, France, Russia and other nations into the conflict.

To everybody's surprise, Serbia's largely peasant army had succeeded in repulsing the Austrian invaders and driving them back across the Danube by the end of 1914. This heroic stand had won fervent admiration from the Allies for 'plucky little Serbia'. But Serbia's triumph had soon turned to disaster as the thwarted invasion left in its wake thousands of dead and wounded soldiers and thousands more Austrian prisoners of war, which in turn unleashed an epidemic of typhus fever that engulfed the country like a forest fire. The women in the first SWH unit to arrive in Serbia at the beginning of 1915 had battled valiantly to treat the wounded and stem the spread of disease but they were powerless to prevent many thousands from dying, including three of their own staff. Desperately short of trained nurses and medical supplies, the SWH unit had wired its headquarters for more help. A second unit of doctors, nurses and other women had been hastily recruited and set sail for Serbia in April 1915. After the unit had left, and been waylaid in Malta to treat British troops there, Elsie Inglis herself set out for Serbia, determined to throw herself into the thick of it at the age of fifty. At the last minute, and partly against her better judgement, she had agreed to take Eve with her.

Eve and Inglis had arrived in Serbia in early May and headed straight for the northern town of Kragujevac, where the Serbian Army had set up its headquarters and main medical base. Although the typhus epidemic had begun to decline in the intervening months, the infection rate had risen again in a worrying second wave. By now the SWH women were running three hospitals in the town - one for surgery, one for typhus and a third for other fevers. While Inglis took command of the general fever hospital, she put Eve to work as an administrator.

Eve had no previous experience of running a hospital, indeed she had no experience in medical care whatsoever. But what she lacked in direct experience she more than made up for in determination and resourcefulness. In Britain since the onset of war she had already founded or co-founded three voluntary organizations dedicated to recruiting and training women to take over jobs previously done by men in order to release men for the front. Under Eve's initiative, thousands of women had donned khaki uniforms and taken on jobs ranging from driving ambulances to digging trenches for home defence. With military-style discipline, Eve's female army ran soup kitchens, delivered telegrams and...