Page:EB1922 - Volume 32.djvu/1100

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1060
WOMEN'S WAR-WORK

with a London Committee under Baron D'Erlanger as chairman. Each department was conducted by a voluntary woman worker drawn'from one of the proved women's war organizations, who wore the uniform of her society, and did her last piece of war-work for the British in an officially recognized institution opened at the invitation of the army.

IV. Voluntary Work For Allies. Scottish Women's Hospitals. On Aug. 12 1914 Dr. Elsie Inglis, president of the Scottish Federation of Women's Suffrage Societies, proposed that the Federation should equip a hospital " staffed entirely by women, if not required at home to be sent abroad." Within a week the War Office had declined the offer of a unit, and on Aug. 20 over- tures were made to the embassies of Belgium, France and Russia. Mrs. Fawcett agreed that the N.U.W.S.S. should join in the appeal for funds, and by the end of the war 449,000 had been collected. In all, 14 different hospitals staffed entirely by women were mo- bilized and worked for the Belgian, French, Serbian and Russian armies. The first opportunity of service came when typhoid broke out in the Belgian army; on Dec. 5 1914 Dr. Alice Hutch- ison and Dr. Phillips, with 10 trained nurses, were put in charge of the typhoid annexe of Dr. de Page's hospital at Calais, where they worked for three months, until the epidemic had been over- come. On the same day the first complete unit under Dr. Ivens, consisting of 3 surgeons, 2 physicians, a radiologist, 10 trained nurses and as many dressers and orderlies, arrived in Paris on their way to the Abbaye de Royaumont, which had been allotted them by the French Red Cross. In this ancient edifice, founded by St. Louis, French wounded were tended by the Scottish women till Feb. 1919. An offshoot of the hospital, established at Villers- Cottere'ts in huts in the spring of 1917, was evacuated before the German push on May 30 1918, being the last hospital in the district to remain at work. In both hospitals 10,861 patients were treated.

The Girton and Newnham unit worked uninterruptedly under the French War Office for four years. It went to Troyes in May 1915 with Dr. Louise Mcllroy as C.M.O. and with Mrs. Harley (d. 1917) as administrator. As the hospital was entirely under canvas, it was ordered to accompany the French Expeditionary Force to Salonika in Oct. 1915, and went for a short time to Ghev- geli. The unit then settled down in Salonika for three years and opened an orthopaedic department for disabled Serbian soldiers.

The remaining S.W.H. units worked for the Serbian army. The first went to Kragujevatz under Dr. Eleanor Soltau in Dec. 1914, and was the second British unit to arrive in Serbia in time for the typhus epidemic. With an equipment of 100 beds, Dr. Soltau had to take 250 patients immediately on arrival, and in March took charge of two fever hospitals as well. Three of the staff died of typhus. The next unit went out in May under Dr. Alice Hutchison to Valjevo, and was detained at Malta for a fortnight to look after British wounded from the Dardanelles, the one occasion on which a S.W.H. unit worked officially for the British army. By this time the typhus epidemic was over and a long peaceful summer intervened before the autumn invasion. The starts of the two fever hospitals formed a camp hospital at Mladanovatz under Dr. McGregor, and Dr. Hollway with some sisters took over a Serbian hospital of 200 beds at Lazorovatz. Both these were evacuated at once when the storm of invasion broke out in Nov.; Dr. McGregor's party joined the great retreat through Albania; and Dr. Hutchison's party, with Dr. Inglis, who had come out to Serbia in May, remained working for the Serbs at Krushevatz, as prisoners of the enemy, from Nov. to Feb. 1916. The Austrians then sent them home.

In Aug. 1915 a party of Scottish women under Dr. Mary Blair had been sent to Serbia to reinforce Dr. Alice Hutchison's unit at Valjevo. As the invasion was pending they went to Salonika in- stead, to wait for work, and when it was decided that the Serbian civilian refugees were to accept the hospitality of the French Govern- ment at Corsica, this unit was invited to be in charge of the medical affairs of the colony. The hospital remained open at Ajaccio till April 1919 and treated 1,704 in-patients and 15,515 out-patients.

Among these were many of the Serbian soldiers who had accom- plished the retreat through Albania, and after two months' rest were re-equipped to form a second Serbian army. A new S.W.H. unit, called the " America " unit, under Dr. Agnes Bennett, with a transport column under Mrs. Harley, was formed to accompany this army to Salonika. In Sept. 1916 they went to Ostrovo, to act as a casualty clearing station for the push to Monastir, and after the fall of the town a dressing station was opened at Dobreveni. The unit worked at Ostrovo till Nov. 1918, and then went to Vranja in Serbia, under Dr. Elmslie, till Oct. 1919, and coped with another typhus epidemic. Mrs. Harley, Gen. French's sister, left to do relief work in Jan. 1917, and was killed by a stray shell.

On her return from Serbia in Feb. 1916 Dr. Inglis spent six months in England trying in vain to obtain authority to take a unit to Meso- potamia for the British. Then the Serbian Government asked her to equip and maintain a field hospital, with a motor transport column attached, for service with the newly formed Serbian division, consisting of ex-Austrian subjects, who had allowed themselves to be made prisoners by the Russians and were attached to their army. The unit started in Aug. 1916 in charge of Dr. Inglis herself, with Mrs. Haverfield commanding the transport column, and went to the Dobrudja. They only had 19 days of work for the Serbs before


becoming involved in the retreat of the Russian army, and while the Serb division was resting the unit worked for the Russian Red Cross. Once again they had to retire to Galatz, and then were helped by the British Armoured-Car Corps to get to Reni, where they were able to settle down for eight months and work for the Russians. An offshoot of the hospital under Dr. Chesney went to the Rumanian front. The Russian Revolution had meanwhile broken out, and the demoralization of the Russian army was so complete that Dr. Inglis was determined to prevent the Serb division from being sacri- ficed on that front in order to stiffen up the Russian moral. She sent two members of the unit to England to deliver a memorized message of 2,500 words to the Foreign Office, and, after pressure from the British Government, the Russians permitted the Serb division to go to Archangel, and the Admiralty sent transports to bring them to England. Although by that time Dr. Inglis was very ill, she insisted on waiting to return home with the Serb division, and as the first Admiralty transport was filled by the Russians with refugees, she had to wait for the second. They landed at Newcastle-on-Tyne on Sunday, and on Monday Nov. 27 1917 she died. The " Elsie Inglis " unit, equipped immediately after her death, left for Serbia in Feb. 1918, under Dr. Annette Benson, and worked at the first dressing station behind the lines during the Serbian offensive that

E receded the Armistice. The transport column followed on the eels of the victorious army into Serbia.

Work for French and Belgian Armies. At the beginning of the war the regulations affecting the entry of British subjects into France and Belgium were not strict, and as the British authorities dis- couraged voluntary offers, British organizations, individuals and groups of friends gave lavishly of funds, stores and the service of trained nurses to the French, Belgian and Serbian allies. Milliccnt Duchess of Sutherland had installed an ambulance of 8 trained nurses and a surgeon at Namur by Aug. 17, and by Aug. 24 they were all prisoners of the Germans. The British Red Cross Society sent out 12 parties of nurses to Belgium before the end of Sept., and 25 parties to different voluntary units in France before the end of the year, besides two parties to Serbia and one to Montenegro.

The second hospital unit to be officered by medical women only was organized by Mrs. St. Clair Stobart as administrator, under the name of the Women's Imperial Service Hospital, and left for Ant- werp to work under the Belgian Red Cross Sept. 20 1914. It con- sisted of 6 doctors, 10 nurses and 10 orderlies under Miss Sally McNaughtan (d. 1916), who described the 14-days' work in An Englishwoman's Diary of the War. The wounded were evacuated just before the entry of the Germans. Within three weeks of their return the unit was re-formed and worked at Cherbourg until March 1915 under the French Red Cross.

Miss Sally McNaughtan had stayed behind at Ostend and joined the Hector Munro Ambulance Corps, a mixed body to which Miss May Sinclair, Lady Dorothie Feilding (the first woman to win the Military Medal), Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm belonged. Dur- ing this time of greatest hardship for the Belgian army the corps established a hospital at Furnes, to which ambulance drivers brought in wounded under fire. Early in 1915 Mrs. Knocker and Miss Chisholm left the corps and started a dressing station of their own at Pervyse, close to the Belgian lines, where they served the soldiers till both were badly gassed in their dug-out in April 1918. Miss Sally McNaughtan ran a portable soup kitchen for the Belgians in Furnes during the winter of 1914-5 and laid the seeds of the illness to which she succumbed in 1916. During this first winter of the war the Belgian army was in deplorable need of help, and Lady Bagot, who worked at Dunkirk in Nov. and Dec. 1914, dressing wounded at the station, raised funds to establish a transportable " Hospital of Friendship " at Adinkerke, which became the surgical section of the H&pital d'Evacuation for the Belgian army. It was too close to the front for nurses to be allowed to work there, but Lady Bagot herself remained there for two years, before handing it over to the Belgian authorities. To meet the dearth of hospital requisites and clothing, Mrs. Bernard Allen started fhe Belgian Hospital Fund in Jan. 1915, which collected 25,000 in money and 25,000 in kind and aided 137 Belgian military hospitals and convalescent dep6ts in France and Belgium, and 30 colonies for refugee children, besides providing a club for soldiers, a recreation hut for the front, a hospice for refugees and 450 surgical outfits for regimental doctors.

During the battle of the Yser in Oct. 1914 the Belgian wounded poured into Calais, and Mrs. McDougall, of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, who had offered the services of the corps to the Belgian army, was asked to take over two old schools full of wounded as a hospital. There was no equipment, and the unit worked incredibly hard to produce a good military hospital out of nothing. The workers, with the exception of the trained nurses, paid all their expenses and subscribed to the hospital as well. From Nov. to Jan. 1915 they established a regimental aid post for the Belgians at Oostkerk, and during the height of the typhoid epidemic ran a convalescent home as an offshoot of the Lamarck hospital. The convalescent soldiers were drafted off in large numbers to the Camp de Ruchard near Tours, and the're the F.A.N.Y. maintained a hut for them, with a canteen and cinema, and paid a trained nurse to look after the consumptives.

The motor-drivers originally belonging to the Lamarck hospital, who also conveyed the Belgian wounded from the clearing hospital