Nurse on the Russian Front 1914 - 1918 Florence Farmborough

[Peter Harvey]

Interesting card this and I would appreciate any help with the datestamp and the word at the top of the address panel, which I assume is the senders location.

25.11.18 with a Moscow Censor, so I assume posted in Moscow, although the message states 'On my way to Moscow from the Crimea' so maybe posted before that train journey started.

Signed 'Flos' to mother Mrs Farmborough at Steple Claydon Bucks. This would have been from Florence Farmborough, who you can reads about with a simple google search. She served with the Russian Red Cross in WW1 alongside the Imperial Russian Army on both the Galician and Russian fronts. In fact her diaries were the subject of the book 'Nurse on the Russian Front 1914 - 1918'.

Any thoughts appreciated.

[Chris Grimshaw]

Hi Peter

Nice card..

Not sure about the date of the card, 25.11.18  are we looking at November (11) or February (II) as the month. I favour February.

Extract below is taken from, An English woman's Journey,

"In March 1918, then, Farmborough and a few dozen other westerners managed to secure passage on a rickety, filthy goods train traveling to Vladivostok via the trans-Siberian railway. Their icy, fearful journey was for Farmborough a fitting culmination to an epic personal journey over the past decade that wrought a personal transformation."

[Howard Weinert]

Peter,

The stamp was canceled in Simferopol in the Crimea in Nov. 1916 (can't make out the day).
The year can't be 1918 as the rates went up in late 1917.
The censor mark is from Odessa as is the roller cancel dated 25 Nov. 1916.
The word at the top of the address is Anglia = England in Russian.

[Peter Harvey]

Thank you both,

I really need to sit down in a quiet space and get my head around Speeckaert - Russian Postal censorship.... I don't think I will ever get the datestamps.

So I could not find any more about her activities in Nov 1916, but the below relates to June July....onward.

In the summer of 1916, Florence Farmborough accompanied the Russian Army to Poland (31st July, 1916)
As we continued our journey, we passed more than one battlefield. The dead were still lying around, in strange, unnatural postures - remaining where they had fallen: crouching, doubled up, stretched out, prostrate, prone, Austrians and Russians lying side by side. And there were lacerated, crushed bodies lying on darkly stained patches of earth. There was one Austrian without a leg and with a blackened, swollen face; another with a smashed face, terrible to look at; a Russian soldier, with legs doubled under him, leaning against the barbed wire. And on more than one open wound flies were crawling and there were other moving, thread-like things.

I was glad Anna and Ekaterina were with me; they, too, were silent; they, too, were sorely shaken. Those "heaps" were once human beings: men who were young, strong and vigorous; now they lay lifeless and inert; shapeless forms of what had been living flesh and bone. What a frail and fragile thing is human life! A bullet passes through the living flesh and it ceases to live.