From The Margery Book, the journal kept by Margery’s father, the Terapia top left.
The Serbs sent the Berry unit to Vrnjača Banja, once a fashionable spa in the highlands 80 miles south of Belgrade. Margery arrived on April 19. The Berrys had been there since February. For their HQ and hospital, they had chosen the Terapia, a grand sanatorium gone to seed but where water and a generator could be made to run with the aid of Austrian POW’s. Of these there was an ample supply, Serbia having routed the initial Hapsburg invasion. Deloused, the prisoners came with many skills and made excellent helpers, only too happy to be out of a war whose point few could fathom. Margery’s German came in handy.
On arrival she sent her mother a postcard. “The country is like Switzerland…all the people in fancy dress and so nice to talk to. Lovely, but” — a “but” tinged with disappointment — “I have struck a most luxurious spot, just like a hotel, with not enough work to go round. The awful time is apparently all over and we have got here too late.” She had not given up hope. “Perhaps a hard time may come.”
It came early for Mabel Dearmer, who had also arrived in Serbia that month, but on a different ship. She was wife of the Reverend Percy Dearmer whose name will be familiar to any who read the credits below the hymns in an Anglican hymnal; he would certainly have been well known to Margery’s father. They were an independent couple. He was the socialist vicar of St Mary-the-Virgin, Primrose Hill, London1, she was a playwright, novelist, illustrator and gardener. Her chief concern when war came in the summer of 1914 was finding takers for the plums in the garden of her Cotswold cottage. “The murder of an Archduke meant no more to me that some tale of an imaginary kingdom in Zenda.”
When Reverend Dearmer officiated at a send-off for the Stobart unit organized by the Church League for Women’s Suffrage at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields, she was in the pews to say goodbye to Lady Paget, a friend. “This is only an au revoir,” she heard her husband tell the volunteers, “for I myself am to accompany you to Serbia.”
Mrs Stobart takes up the story in her memoir, The Flaming Sword.
As I walked down the down the aisle at the conclusion of the service, Mrs Dearmer, with tears in her eyes, came up to me. “This is the first I have heard of my husband going to Serbia. Mrs Stobart, you must take me with you — as an orderly. My sons are at the front2 and now my husband is going. I must go too.”
I’m afraid I was brutal. I pointed at her earrings and pretty chiffons. “This kind of thing isn’t suitable,” I said.
“I will leave them all behind, and wear — well, your uniform!” as she looked bravely at my dull grey clothes.
“But you would have to obey discipline and as an orderly do all sorts of things disagreeable to you.”
“Oh, I should love discipline and I wouldn’t care what I did; anything would better than” — and tears would not be restrained — “being in that house alone.”
Mrs Stobart relented and would confess she had been wrong about Mrs Dearmer. “None of her various roles in life were better played than her role of orderly in a Serbian camp hospital…My instinct about her suitability had only been right in regard to her physique.”
Soon after arriving at the Stobart camp in Kragujevač, at that point the plague-ridden Serbian capital, Mrs Dearmer was told by a fellow volunteer of similar background: “You know, there is never a tea-party in Serbia that doesn’t begin with lice and end with latrines.” From the lice, you caught typhus; from bad or non-existent latrines, typhoid. It was the latter that did for her. Mrs Stobart caught it too but fought it off. Margery was visiting the Stobart camp at the time and attended the funeral at the Orthodox cathedral. In a card to Mith, she wasted no space describing the obsequies . “It was grand,” was all she had to say before continuing “I am very well indeed, but cut my finger with a scythe mowing before breakfast.”
William Coulson, the Stobart unit driver Margery had dazzled on the voyage to Salonika, gave her father additional details. “The Orthodox priest held forth for an hour or so and then others took it up. They tied her feet together at the great toes — but the Serbs wanted to untie [them] so as to put on her shoes. I would not let them.”3
Back at Vrnjača Banja, the “hard time” Margery seemed to be hoping for had yet to arrive but she was enjoying herself nonetheless. She wrote home in May:
I have been ‘special nurse’ to two patients, one a little girl with diphtheria and malaria, and an old man with erysipelas. Both legs have got it all the way up, and he has lead lotion lint bound round them 3 times a day.
My work is: first wash and fix up the little girl, then have breakfast at 6.30 and go down to another hospital and get the table for dressing ready, sterilize all the instruments, undo the bandages and prepare for the doctor or sister who does the dressings; stand and hand them lint gauzes, forceps etc. … and interpret orders to the Austrian prisoner orderlies. Then sterilize and clear up again and get tea for doctors or nurses. Take temperatures, wash up tea things, feed patients, and have dinner. After dinner look for lice, wash feet and do heads with paraffin, give feeds, take temperatures, do especially bad cases again. Come back and fix up kid for the night; and, after supper (a secret) help Austrian prisoners clean and wash up.
Margery’s solicitude for the Austrians was no secret to the Berry’s. This is from their memoir, A Red Cross Unit in Serbia:
Some of the prisoners were possibly…a little spoiled by sympathetic members of the Unit, but probably this did little harm either to the spoiled or the spoilers. Perhaps one of the worst offenders in this respect was one of our V.A.D.'s, whom we will call Doña Quixota, because that is a name which certainly fits her well. She was tall and comely, indeed beautiful, though not exactly of the buxom type which fulfils the Serbian ideal…
On the voyage out she had passed her time feeding miserable animals and attending to the seasick and infirm. She was always looking for and helping the sick and suffering, always standing up for the oppressed. If she sometimes imagined the suffering or mistook the oppressor for the oppressed, "Que voulez-vous?" she was a feminine Don Quixote!
She was splendidly genuine, and before the final release of the Unit she was reduced to the depths of destitution in regard to shoes and clothes, as she had given away most of her belongings. She would have driven a charity organisation committee to distraction, and she made heads of units and keepers of stores feel stony-hearted misers when they withstood the white heat of her generosity.
Doña Quixota pitied the poor prisoners and tried to alleviate their sad lot by doing part of their work herself ! She thought Julius overworked — Julius, the ever-growing rotundity of whose form made him resemble an incipient alderman — and she would squeeze time from her multitudinous duties to wash dishes or peel potatoes for him. One day she was seen vigorously sweeping a garden path while Johann of the auburn hair reclined at ease on the grass by the side, enjoying his off-duty hour. I thought of Gilbert and Sullivan's line "the prisoner's lot is not a happy one" and wished for a camera! But the proceeding was too much even for the easy-going Johann, and he spoilt the picture by springing up and taking the broom out of the hands of Doña Quixota.
From a letter to her mother, July 1915
The men wear cotton shirts and trousers — shirts worn outside with bright striped belts bound round tight. They have thick sort of zouave waistcoats sometimes of a good blue and braided with black but more often of brown with black. Sometimes the shirts have colored stitching and buttons. The women wear yellow or green handkerchiefs on heads two corners tied at back of head as per sketch. The same thick stuff is used for the little coats which are sometimes made of leather (lined with wool and decorated with beads and patches of bright coloured leather) even in the hot weather. Their skirts are of thick stuff dark — with large check or stripe pattern or the prettiest on plain with a deep border pattern of flowers worked into the stuff. They all wear thick stockings which have flower patterns on the foot and the top which just shows above the strappings of the opanchie shoes. These are leather sandals with a piece over the toe and up the sides formed of straps worked like crochet to allow you to thread the long strap that binds them to the leg thro’ wherever convenient. The women’s skirts are very full and made in long strip and tied round. They very often go barefoot. The women walk splendidly and carry water in earthenware bottles on either end of a curved stick over one shoulder. Or they walk along making thread. In one left hand a spatula as big as this paper with a handle like a mirror round which is roughly wound the wool from sheep or goats they have killed at home. In right hand a long bobbin which they spin round as they walk making the rough wool with wool thread.
From Rev. Dearmer’s obituary in the The Musical Times, July 1936: He ran full tilt against all that was gloomy, perfunctory, or stodgy in public worship; so that he could not be regarded as that paragon in the eyes of the upper hierarchy – a “safe” man. The Yorkshireman in the story would certainly not have voted for him: “My vote goes to Mester Blank.” “Why?” “Eh, he’ll say nowt and he’ll do nowt.” Percy Dearmer would say things and also do them so preferment was slow and it was not until 1931 that he was appointed canon of Westminster.
Christopher, a pilot, was killed in the Gallipoli campaign. Geoffrey, a sailor, survived the war and lived to 103.
Dr Helen Hanson, a member of the Stobart unit, wrote: The service was conducted in Serbian, and as the coffin was borne down the Cathedral steps and English-speaking Serb made a funeral aeration, addressing the deceased and saying how she had lived sans peur et sans reproche, and died as bravely as any soldier. Emphasis was laid on these words by the fact that the authorities had sent up for her a hearse usually reserved for officers, on the top of which shone the upper half of a suit of armor, and they had sent also to burn beside her all the previous day a candle in a beautiful, huge silver candlestick. The procession that followed her to the grave must have been nearly a quarter of a mile long.