Flora Sandes

Officer of the Royal Serbian Army and the only British woman known to have served officially as a combat soldier in the First World War. Born on 22 January 1876 in Yorkshire, a rector's daughter. She was brought up in a way unusual for a woman of her time, learning to shoot, to ride and to drive. In August 1914, aged thirty-eight, she went to Serbia as a nurse with a volunteer unit, working in field hospitals through the typhus epidemic that killed more people than the fighting did. In the autumn of 1915, during the Serbian army's retreat through the Albanian mountains, she became separated from her hospital and attached herself to an infantry regiment. She was enrolled as a private — the Serbian army had no rule that made it impossible. So she became a soldier. She went through the retreat across Albania and then the fighting on the Salonika front. In 1916, in an assault on a hill position, she was severely wounded by a grenade, taking more than twenty fragments. For that action she received the Order of the Star of Karadjordje, Serbia's highest award for bravery, and was promoted sergeant. She ended the war as an officer and later reached the rank of captain. In 1927 she married Yuri Yudenitch, a Russian émigré and former officer, and lived in Belgrade. She was briefly interned during the German occupation of Yugoslavia. She returned to England after the war and died on 24 November 1956.