Flora Sandes: The queer and complicated legacy of a First World War combatant

In January 2026, we hosted our inaugural symposium exploring The History of Women in the Uniformed Public Services, which brought together researchers working on contemporary challenges around equity across the uniformed public services with historians whose work spans from the Roman Empire to the Cold War.

One of the many themes that resonated between past and present experiences was that of visibility, with women navigating an awkward path to take up their place on the front lines of these services, often in the face of considerable resistance. This meant women’s stories were written out of the mainstream histories, or narratives were constructed to make their presence in traditionally male domains acceptable, very often resulting in them being made invisible to the public consciousness.

One woman who did become a household name at this time was Flora Sandes. We were fascinated to hear from Dr Julie Wheelwright about her story, and invited her to share a reflection on Flora’s queer and complicated legacy as part of LGBTQ+ History Month.

For centuries, British women such as Christian Davies, Hannah Snell, and Dorothy Lawrence, directly challenged easy definitions of gender by disguising themselves as men to enter the military. Although military historians had, until Second Wave feminist historians began to revisit these narratives, dismissed them as amusing anomalies, they represent a hidden ‘queer’ history in which ambitious women projected themselves into masculine roles to achieve their goals.

From Red Cross nurse to decorated soldier

Among the most striking examples of this quiet and courageous rebellion is Flora Sandes, an English nurse who became a Serbian army officer during the First World War. At the age of 40, Sandes joined Serbia’s Second Infantry Regiment as a private and rose to become a captain.

When Pvt Sandes enlisted, it completed a process which she would later describe as "naturally drift[ing], by successive stages from nurse to soldier". Rejected by the War Office for a coveted place on the Volunteer Aid Detachment in August 1914, she immediately joined a Red Cross Unit, organised by an American surgical nurse, Mabel Grouitch, and departed for Serbia.

With only rudimentary medical training, Sandes was thrown into front line nursing during a typhus epidemic at the First Reserve Hospital in Kragujevatz, Serbia. By late 1915, she faced a stark choice. As the Central Powers had invaded Serbia, the regiment to which her hospital was attached was retreating; her commanding officer gave her the choice of joining the regiment as a private or transferring to a stationary post.

Without hesitation she enlisted with the Fourth Company, where she would experience the full horror of the ‘Great Retreat’, marching through Montenegro and Albania, across snow-covered mountain passes. More than 70,000 soldiers and 140,000 civilians would freeze to death or fall to hostile Albanian forces before the survivors would reach the Adriatic Coast.

Sandes proved a brave and capable soldier. By January 1916, she was promoted to corporal, and a month later to sergeant, and in May that year, to honorary second lieutenant by a special act of the Serbian parliament. Sandes was severely wounded during a battle with the Bulgarian forces near Salonika, and in December 1916 received the Kara George (Karadorde) Star for NCOs and was promoted to the rank of sergeant-major. She was wounded again in July 1917 but returned to her unit the following October and demobbed in 1923.

A well-known figure

Sandes is a key figure for the scholarship of women’s military participation in the First World War because of her role as an active combatant at a time when other British women served only in auxiliary forces. Since Sandes moved from an acceptably female role, nursing, into active combat, even fighting in hand-to-hand combat, British press reports highlighted her heroism and military skills.

Her first memoir, published in 1916 as An English Woman-Sergeant in the Serbian Army, included publicity trips back to the UK where she had a royal audience, in uniform, with Queen Alexandra, spoke at the Imperial War Museum, and gave press interviews which made her a household name. In 1927, she would publish a second memoir, The Autobiography of a Woman Soldier: A Brief Record of Adventure with the Serbian Army 1916-1919.

'One of the boys'?

Sandes’s second book opens with the extraordinary statement that reflected how, as an ambitious young girl in Victorian England, she regarded her female body as a ‘misfortune’ whose limitations must be overcome, writing: "When a very small child, I used to pray every night that I might wake up in the morning and find myself a boy."

Her seven-year career in the Serbian army, she continued, allowed her to live "practically a man’s life." To the British public, Sandes reinforced this conflation of masculinity, military participation and the power of the New Woman by wearing her uniform, including tunic and breeches, in public.

Although Sandes was deeply loyal to her fellow Serbs during the war, her internal reflections reveal her struggle to resolve the gendered contradictions of being female and a soldier. As she wrote in her memoirs and diaries, her comrades treated Sandes as "a kind of mascot", addressing her as "brother" and urging her participation in masculine rites such as drinking, gambling at cards, and visiting sex workers. But this acceptance had its limits which were thrown into sharp relief on social occasions, especially after the peace.

One example among many in her 1927 memoir occurs while Sandes was serving as an officer and expected to attend formal dinners, including an Officers’ Ball where the Serbian King was present.

"I did not care to dance with the girls, nor probably they with me, and I couldn’t dance anything but the kola [the national dance] with the officers, being myself in uniform," she wrote. However, King Alexander told her: "If you won’t find a partner for yourself, I am going to find one for you."

The King reappeared with Sandes’s friend Dr MacPhail, director of the Children’s Hospital in Belgrade, and forced the women to dance together, laughing "at the joke". The women found this public humiliation undermined their status as professionals by reminding the guests of their ambiguous status, balanced between masculine and feminine spheres.

Negotiating highly-circumscribed gender roles

To assess Sandes’ legacy: she provides important insights into how a middle-class Edwardian woman negotiated the conundrum of gender and military participation. Sandes exposed the arbitrary lines drawn between the female spheres of ‘nursing’ and ‘combat’, masculine killing and female nurturing, and even patriotism and nationality. Her memoirs invite the reader to understand the larger complexities of women’s struggle to belong within male occupations and lobbied for their contribution to be acknowledged.

But despite Sandes' honesty about the challenges she faced, she is silent about the egregious ‘unbelonging’ of sexual violence and finds little solidarity with the Serbian women fighters, such as Milunka Savic, who served alongside her in the Second Infantry regiment (and to whom a museum will be soon open in Novi Sad, Serbia).

The post-war struggles of both women – Savic fell into poverty and Sandes felt marginalised back in the UK – reflect those of contemporary women in the armed services who continue to face both active and passive resistance to their presence.

Dr Julie Wheelwright is an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of Historical studies, Birkbeck, University of London, a historian and senior lecturer in creative writing. Her most recent article exploring the significance of interwar European spy writers in perpetuating fantasies of female agents appears in Intelligence and National Security (December 2024).

She is the author of four books, including Sisters in Arms: Female Warriors from Antiquity to the New Millennium (Osprey, 2020) and has written extensively about Mata Hari, most recently for Writers in Intelligence. She is currently writing an essay on the Belgian intelligence agent Martha McKenna for the Oxford Handbook of Women in Intelligence. You can email her at [email protected]