Page:Women Wanted.djvu/285

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IN THE PROFESSIONS
263

the enemy, only eventually to reach London and start out once more for new fields to conquer.

These women in the grey uniforms with Tartan trimmings and the sign of the thistle embroidered on their hats and their epaulets, have crossed the vision of the central armies with a frequency that has seemed, to the common soldier at least, to partake of the supernatural. Bulgarian prisoners brought into the Scottish Women's Hospital operating at Mejidia on the Roumanian front looked up into the doctors' faces in amazement to inquire: "Who are you? We thought we had done for you. There you were in the south. Now here you are in north. Are you double?" Of this work in the north, in the Dobrudja from where they were obliged to retreat into Russia, the Prefect of Constanza said in admiration: "It is extraordinary how these women endure hardship. They refuse help and carry the wounded themselves. They work like navvies."

At the very beginning of the war, the Scottish women left their first record of efficiency at Calais. Their hospital there in the Rue Archimede, operated by Dr. Alice Hutchinson, had the lowest percentage of mortality for the epidemic of enteric fever. In France the hospital at Troyes under Dr. Louise McElroy was so good that it received an official command to pick up and proceed to Salonika to be regularly attached to the French army, this being one of the very few instances on record where a voluntary hospital has been so honoured. The