Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Flora Sands, the only woman to enlist and fight in World War I, was an expert in most facets of a soldier's life.

She could ride, she could shoot, she loved camping, she was very hardy, very fit despite

smoking and drinking a huge amount.

That's Louise Miller, the author of a fine brother, a biography of Sands.

And she got a reputation as being a very brave and capable soldier.

She was no mascot.

She was there at the front of her own merits.

Miller's book about Sands has been optioned for a movie and for good reason.

In her time, Sands lived a life almost perfectly scripted for the big screen.

Born to wealthy parents in Victorian England, her grandfather was an Irish bishop,

Sands was, to put it mildly, a nonconformist.

If you look at her life before the First World War, she was clearly a rule breaker.

She didn't have much respect for authority, and I think you needed those kind of

characteristics to end up doing what she did.

Which was essentially to embrace, then thumb her nose at the social norms of the day.

When the war broke out in 1914, Sands joined a volunteer nursing contingent that traveled to Serbia,

a British ally that had been invaded

by Austria-Hungary early in the war.

The conditions there were brutal.

Sands, along with an American nurse named Emily Simmons, treated scores of citizen soldiers

in POWs suffering from typhus and other diseases arising from horrific,

...