One of the most influential women during the First World War was Flora Sandes. She was the only British woman that fought on the front line. She officially served as unofficially called infantry women, because women weren’t really “important” at that time so they were called infantryman. In the war she was the first woman to ever be commissioned as an officer in the Serbian army, and performed so many intense acts of patriotism that she's now considered a war hero in both her homeland and her adopted country of Serbia. The youngest daughter of an Irish clergyman, Flora Sandes was born in North Yorkshire, England on 22 January, 1876. Flora grew up in a typical middle class family in rural of Suffolk. According to her father, Flora was a tomboy …show more content…
Coming back in 1922 Flora had found it impossible to snap back to everyday life back in England so later had she returned to Serbia and got married to a white Russian officer in 1927 who was 12 years younger than her, later they moved to the new kingdom of Yugoslavia. In April 1941 Yugoslavia had been invaded by Nazi Germany. Despite her age of being sixty-five and her health, she enlisted to fight. Eleven days later the Germans had defeated the Yugoslav army and captured the country. During that time Flora had been imprisoned by the Gestapo; a group of political police of Nazi Germany. After being imprisoned Flora had found herself out of money and alone, her husband also had died in 1941, although she was penniless this didn’t stop her from travelling and over the next few years she went with her nephew Dick to Jerusalem and then on to Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe. In the end she had finally returned to Suffolk - a East Anglian county of historic origin in England, and where after a brief illness she had died on the 24th of November 1956 aged 80. Furthermore while being ill she had renewed her passport shortly before her death to prepare for new