Page:Women Wanted.djvu/114

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104
WOMEN WANTED

refugee barracks in Russia, in a tent in Serbia where they themselves must dig the drainage trenches.

Their surgeons have stood at the operating table a week at a stretch with only an hour or two of sleep each night. Their doctors have battled with epidemics of typhoid and plague. Their ambulance girls have brought in the wounded from the battlefield under shell-fire. Hospitals have been conducted under bombardment with all the patients carried to the cellar. Hospitals have been captured by the enemy. Hospitals have been evacuated at command with the patients loaded on trains or motor cars or bullock wagons for retreat with the army. There were forty-six British women who shared in the historic retreat of the Serbian army three hundred miles over the Plain of Kossovo and the mountains of Albania. Men and cattle perished by the score. But the women doctors, freezing, starving, sleeping in the fields, struggling against a blinding blizzard with an amazing physical endurance and a dauntless courage, all came through to Scutari. Out on the far-flung frontiers of civilisation, the woman in khaki who has done these things is memorialised. At Mladanovatz, the Serbians have erected a fountain with the inscription: "In memory of the Scottish Women's Hospitals and their founder, Dr. Elsie Inglis."

SUFFRAGISTS LED ALL THE REST

When the great call, "Women wanted," first commenced in all lands, there were those who stood with