Page 27 - AECA.org.uk ¦ Koinonia 64

A telegram from Lady Paget2, published under the banner headline “Ser-
bia Needs Your Help” said: “Conditions here defy description. If we are to save
lives it is paramount you send us more medical and surgical equipment. We are
short of everything. We won’t to be able to do anything unless we get aid im-
mediately”. She goes on to list goods received from the Serbian Relief Fund and
those still needed urgently.

The magazine also published instructions on how and where donations
in cash, blankets, pillows and bed sheets should be sent as well as parcels.

In August 1915 monk Nikolai went to the USA on a lecture tour in Chi-
cago. He won over many Serbs, Croats and Americans so that many volun-
teered to go to the Salonika front to help the Serbian and Allied armies liberate
Serbia and create Yugoslavia.

I have been told by my parishioner Miladin Novakovic, (who was a
Chetnik ?ghter under the command of Vojvoda Momcilo Djujic during the
Second World War), that his father who had emigrated to the USA before the
outbreak of the First World War, after having heard Nikolai speak in the USA
decided to return home and then went on to the Salonika front. No wonder
then that a British army commander, said after the war: “Father Nikolai was
Serbia’s third army”.

On his return to England from the USA Nikolai continued to make
speeches and give lectures all over the UK; many were published in English.

2 Lady Paget (1881 – 1958) went to Serbia for the ?rst time in 1910 with her husband Sir Ralph when
he was appointed British envoy to the Kingdom of Serbia. They stayed in Serbia for three years and
she got to know the Serbian people well, becoming their friend and life-long benefactress. During
the Balkan wars she worked as a nurse in Belgrade hospitals. With the outbreak of the First World
War she returned to Serbia as head of the British medical mission and with the help of the Serbian
Relief Fund in London organised a Serbian military hospital in Skopje. She caught typhoid and had
to be evacuated temporarily to Switzerland but returned to Skopje in 1915 and remained with her
patients even when the Bulgarians occupied the city.
) Lady Paget was honoured for her services by Prince Regent Alexander who awarded her
St Sava’s Order “as a token of gratitude from my entire nation”. She left Skopje only in 1916 and
returned to England. She published two books of her war memoirs under the title With our Serbian
Allies.
) Lady Paget renewed her links with the Serbs during the Second World War when the
Yugoslav Government arrived in London after Hitler’s invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941. When
the war ended she helped many Serbian exiles who refused to go back to Tito’s Yugoslavia. Lady
Paget especially helped the Serbian Church in London where her many decorations are exhibited
in a case on the wall of St Bishop Nikolai’s Hall. She commissioned a bas-relief of General Draza
Mihailovic, the leader of the royalist resistance movement in Yugoslavia, which hangs on a wall of
St Sava’s church. The citation reads: “In Recognition of Bravery, From Lady Paget”.

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