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Capt. Flora Sandes
Serbian Army
from:Suffolk,
Flora Sandes was the only British woman to officially serve as a soldier in the trenches during World War I. How she got there is testament to a very determined character. A St John's Ambulance volunteer who'd once shot a man in self-defence, she went to Serbia to serve as a nurse; but when she was separated from her colleagues, she promptly joined the Serbian army as a soldier instead. This was, for a 40-year-old British woman and the daughter of a clergyman, completely unthinkable but Sandes did it anyway. Not only that, she fought alongside men (the Serbian army accepted women) so well that she became a sergeant-major. She was wounded by a grenade in the line of fire, and the Serbian Military gave her their highest honour, the Order of the Karadorde's Star.
