Dr. Elsie Inglis

‘It is difficult for people who have never been prisoners to know what the first day’s freedom means. Everybody had a different expression, and seemed to have a different outlook on life. But already we could see our leader was engrossed with plans and busy with schemes for the future work of the unit.

‘The next day the Consul-General made a speech in which he told the unit all that had passed during the last four months, of which they knew nothing.’

To her Sister‘Brindisi, en route for Serbia,‘April 28, 1915.

‘The boat ought to have left last night, but it did not even come in till this morning. However, we have only lost twenty-four hours.

‘It has been a most luxurious journey, except the bit from Naples here, and that was rather awful, with spitting men and shut windows, in first-class carriages, remember. When we got here we immediately ordered baths, but “the boiler was broken.” So, I said, “Well, then, we must go somewhere else” – with the result that we were promised baths in our rooms at once. That was a nice bath, and then I curled up on the sofa and went to sleep. Our windows look right on to the docks, and the blue Mediterranean beyond. It is so queer to see the red, white, and green flags, and to think they mean Italy, and not the N.U.W.S.S.!

‘I went out before dinner last night, and strolled through the quaint streets. The whole population was out, and most whole-hearted and openly interested in my uniform.

‘This is a most delightful window, with all the ships and the colours. There are three men-of-war in, and half a dozen of the quaintest little boats, which a soldier told me were “scouts.” I wished I had asked a sailor, for I had never heard of “scouts.” The soldier I asked is one of the bersaglieri with cock’s feathers, a huge mass of them, in his hat. They all say Italy is certainly coming into the war. One man on the train to Rome was coming from Cardiff to sell coal to the Italian Government. He told us weird stories about German tricks to get our coal through Spain and other countries.

‘It was a pleasure seeing Royaumont. It is a huge success, and I do think Dr. Ivens deserves a lot of credit. The wards and the theatre, and the X-Ray department, and the rooms for mending and cleaning the men’s clothes were all perfect.’

To Mrs. Simson‘S.W.H., Kragujevatz,May 30/15.

‘Well, this is a perfectly lovely place, and the Serbians are delightful. I am staying with a charming woman, Madame Milanovitz. She is a Vice-President of the Serbian Women’s League, formed to help the country in time of war. I think she wanted to help us because of all the hospital has done here. Any how, I score – I have a beautiful room and everything. She gives me an early cup of coffee, and for the rest I live with the unit. Neither she nor I can speak six words of one another’s languages, but her husband can talk a little French. Now, she has asked the little Serbian lady who teaches the unit Serbian, to live with her to interpret. Anyhow, we are great friends!

‘We have had a busy time since we arrived. The unit is nursing 550 beds, in three hospitals, having been sent out to nurse 300 beds. There is first the surgical hospital, called Reserve No. 3. It was a school, and is in two blocks with a long courtyard between. I think we have got it really quite well equipped, with a fine X-Ray room. The theatre, and the room opposite where the dressings are done, both very well arranged, and a great credit to Sister Bozket. The one thing that troubled me was the floor – old wood and holes in it, impossible to sterilise – but yesterday, Major Protitch, our Director, said he was going to get cement laid down in it and the theatre. Then it will be perfect. He said to Dr. Chesney, “This is the best surgical hospital in Serbia.” You must not believe that quite, for they are very good at saying pleasant things here!

‘There are two other hospitals, the typhus one, No. 6 Reserve, and one for relapsing fever and general diseases, No. 7 Reserve, both barracks. We have put most of our strength in No. 6, and it is in good working order, but No. 7 has had only one doctor, and two day Sisters and one night, for over 200 beds. Still it is wonderful what those three women have done. We have Austrian prisoners as orderlies everywhere, in the hospitals and in the houses. The conglomeration of languages is too funny for words – Serbian, German, French, English. Sometimes, you have to get an orderly to translate Serbian into German, and another to translate the German into French before you can get at what is wanted. Two words we have all learnt, dotra, which means “good,” and which these grateful people use at once if they feel a little better, or are pleased about anything, and the other is boli, pain – poor men!

‘So much for what we have been doing; but the day before yesterday we got our orders for a new bit of work. They are forming a disinfecting centre at Mladanovatz, and Colonel Grustitch, who is the head of the Medical Service here, wants us to go up there at once, with our whole fever staff, under canvas. They are giving us the tents till ours come out. Typhus is decreasing so much, that No. 6 is to be turned into a surgical hospital, and there will be only one infectious diseases hospital here. I am so pleased at being asked to do this, for it is part of a big and well thought out scheme. The surgical hospital is to remain here. Alice Hutchison goes to Posheravatz also for infectious diseases. I hope she is at Salonika to-day. She left Malta last Sunday. We really began to think the Governor was going to keep her altogether! Her equipment has all come, and yesterday I sent Mrs. Haverfield and Mr. Smith up to Posheravatz to choose the site and pitch the tent.

‘They gave me an awfully exciting bit of news in Colonel G.’s office yesterday, and that was that five motor cars were in Serbia, north of Mladanovatz, for me. Of course, I had wired for six, but you have been prompt about them. How they got into the north of Serbia I cannot imagine, unless they were dropped out of aeroplanes.

‘Really, it is wonderful the work this unit has done in the most awful stress all through March and April. We ought to be awfully proud of them. The Serbian Government gave Dr. Soltau a decoration, and Patsy Hunter had two medals.

To her Niece, Amy M‘Laren‘Valjevo, August 16, 1915.

‘Darling Amy, – I wonder if you could find this place on the map. I have spelt it properly, but if you want to say it you must say Valuvo. One of the hospitals mother has been collecting so much money for is here. Such a beautiful hospital it is. It is in tents, on a bit of sloping ground looking south. There are big tents for the patients, and little tents for the staff. I pull my bed out of the tent every night, and sleep outside under the stars. Such lovely starlight nights we have here. Dr. Alice Hutchison is head of this unit, and I am here on a visit to her. My own hospital is in a town – Kragujevatz. Now, I wonder if you can find that place? The hospital there is in a girls’ school. Now – I wonder what will happen to the lessons of all those little girls as long as the war lasts? Serbia has been at war for three years, four wars in three years, and the women of the country have kept the agriculture of the country going all that time. A Serbian officer told me the other day that the country is so grateful to them, that they are going to strike a special medal for the women to show their thanks, when this war is over. This is such a beautiful country, and such nice people. Some day when the war is over, we’ll come here, and have a holiday. How are you getting on, my precious? Is school as nice as ever? God bless you, dear little girlie. – Ever your loving Aunt

Elsie.’

As the fever died out, a worse enemy came in. Serbia was overrun by the Austro-German forces, and she, with others of her units, was taken prisoner, as they had decided it was their duty to remain at their work among the sick and wounded.

Again the Serbian Minister is quoted: —

‘When the typhus calamity was overcome, the Scottish women reorganised themselves as tent hospitals and offered to go as near as possible to the army at the front. Their camp in the town of Valjevo – which suffered most of all from the Austrian invasion – might have stood in the middle of England. In Lazarevatz, shortly before the new Austro-German offensive, they formed a surgical hospital almost out of nothing, in the devastated shops and the village inns, and they accomplished the nursing of hundreds of wounded who poured in from the battle-field. When it became obvious that the Serbian army could not resist the combined Austrians, Germans, Magyars, and Bulgarians, who were about four times their numbers, the main care of the Serbian military authorities was what to do with the hospitals full of wounded, and whom to leave with the wounded soldiers, who refused to be left to fall into the hands of the cruel enemy. Then the Scottish women declared that they were not going to leave their patients, and that they would stay with them, whatever the conditions, and whatever might be expected from the enemy. They remained with the Serbian wounded as long as they could be of use to them.

To Mrs. Simson‘Krushieevatz, Nov. 6, 1915.

‘We are in the very centre of the storm, and it just feels exactly like having the rain pouring down, and the wind beating in gusts, and not being able to see for the water in one’s eyes, and just holding on and saying, “It cannot last, it is so bad.” These poor little people, you cannot imagine anything more miserable than they are. Remember, they have been fighting for years for their independence, and now it all seems to end. The whole country is overrun. Germans, Austrians, Bulgars, and all that is left is this western Morava Valley, and the country a little south of it. And their big Allies – from here it looks as if they are never going to move. I went into Craijuvo yesterday, in the car, to see about Dr. MacGregor’s unit. The road was crowded with refugees pouring away, all their goods piled on their rickety ox-wagons, little children on the top, and then bands of soldiers, stragglers from the army. These men were forming up again, as we passed back later on. The hospitals are packed with wounded. We decided we must stand by our hospitals; it was too awful leaving badly wounded men with no proper care. Sir Ralph eventually agreed, and we gave everybody in the units the choice of going or staying. We have about 115 people in the Scottish unit, and twenty have gone. Mr. Smith brings up the rear-guard to-day, with one or two laggards and a wounded English soldier we have had charge of. Two of our units are here. Dr. MacGregor has trekked for Novi Bazaar. It is the starting-place for Montenegro. We all managed wonderfully in our first “evacuations,” and saved practically everything, but now it is hopeless. The bridges are down, and the trucks standing anyhow on sidings, and, worst of all, the people have begun looting. I don’t wonder. There’ll be famine, as well as cold, in this corner of the world soon, and then the distant prospect of 150,000 British troops at Salonika won’t help much.

‘The beloved British troops, – the thought of them always cheers. But not the thought of the idiots at the top who had not enough gumption to know this must happen. Anybody, even us women, could have told them that the Germans must try and break through to the help of the Turks.

‘We have got a nice building here for a hospital, and Dr. Holloway is helping in the military hospital. I believe there are about 1000 wounded in the place. I can’t write a very interesting letter, Amy dear, because at the bottom of my heart I don’t believe it will ever reach you. I don’t see them managing the Montenegrin passes at this time of year! There is a persistent rumour that the French have retaken Skopiro, and if that is true perhaps the Salonika route will be open soon.

‘Some day, I’ll tell you all the exciting things that have been happening, and all the funny things too! For there have been funny things, in the middle of all the sadness. The guns are booming away, and the country looking so lovely in the sunlight. I wonder if Serbia is a particularly beautiful country, or whether it looks so lovely because of the tragedy of this war, just as bed seems particularly delightful when the night bell goes!’

‘Serbian Military Hospital,‘Krushieevatz, Nov. 30, 1915.

‘We have been here about a month. It was dreadfully sad work leaving our beautiful little hospital at Krushieevatz. Here, we are working in the Serbian military hospital, and living in it also. You can imagine that we have plenty to do, when you hear we have 900 wounded. The prisoners are brought in every day, sometimes thousands, and go on to the north, leaving the sick. The Director has put the sanitation and the laundry into our hands also.

‘We have had a hard frost for four days now, and snowstorms. My warm things did not arrive – I suppose they are safe at Salonika. Fortunately last year’s uniform was still in existence, and I wear three pairs of stockings, with my high boots. We have all cut our skirts short, for Serbian mud is awful. It is a lovely land, and the views round here are very cheering. One sunset I shall never forget – a glorious sky, and the hills deep blue against it. In the foreground the camp fires, and the prisoners round them in the fading light.’

With the invasion came the question of evacuation. At one time it was possible the whole of the British unit might escape via Montenegro. Sir Ralph Paget, realising that the equipment could not be saved, allowed any of the hospital unit who wished to remain with their wounded. Two parties went with the retreating Serbs, and their story and the extraordinary hardships they endured has been told elsewhere.

Those left at Krushieevatz were in Dr. Inglis’ opinion the fortunate units. For three months they tended the Serbian wounded under foreign occupation. The unit with Dr. Inglis kept to their work, and when necessary confronted the Austro-German officers with all the audacity of their leader and the Scottish thistle combined.

Their hospital accommodation was designed for 400 beds. When we went up there were 900 patients. During the greatest part of the pressure the number rose to 1200. Patients were placed in the corridors – at first one man to one bed, but later two beds together, and three men in them. Then there were no more bedsteads, and mattresses were placed on the floor. We filled up the outhouses. The magazine in full blast was a sight, once seen, never to be forgotten.

Upstairs the patients occupied the shelving. There were three tiers, the slightly wounded men in the highest tier. The magazine was under Dr. Holloway, and Dr. Inglis says the time to see the place at its best or its worst was in the gloaming, when two or three feeble oil lamps illuminated the gloom, and the tin bowls clattered and rattled as the evening ration of beans was given out, and the men swarmed up and down the poles of their shelves chattering as Serbs will chatter. The Sisters called the place ‘the Zoo.’

The dread of the renewal of the typhus scourge, amid such conditions of overcrowding, underfeeding, fatigue and depression, was great. Dr. Inglis details the appalling tasks the unit undertook in sanitation. There was no expert amongst them: —

‘When we arrived, the hospital compound was a truly terrible place – the sights and smells beyond description. We dug the rubbish into the ground, emptied the overflowing cesspool, built incinerators, and cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned. That is an Englishman’s job all over the world. Our three untrained English girl orderlies took to it like ducks to water. It was not the pleasantest or easiest work in the world; but they did it, and did it magnificently.

‘Laundry and bathing arrangements were installed and kept going. We had not a single case of typhus; we had a greater achievement than its prevention. Late of an evening, when men among the prisoners were put into the wards, straight from the march, unwashed and crawling with lice, there was great indignation among the patients already in. “Doktoritza,” they said, “if you put these dirty men in among us we shall all get typhus.” Our hearts rejoiced. If we have done nothing else, we thought, we have driven that fact home to the Serbian mind that dirt and typhus go together.’

Dr. Inglis describes the misery of the Serbian prisoners: —

‘They had seen men go out to battle, conscious of the good work they had done for the Allies in driving back the Austrians in their first punitive expedition. We are the only ones who, so far, have beaten our enemy. They came back to us broken and dispirited. They were turned into the hospital grounds, with a scanty ration of beans, with a little meat and half a loaf of bread for twenty-four hours. Their camp fires flickered fitfully through the long bitter cold nights. Every scrap of wood was torn up, the foot bridges over the drains, and the trees hacked down for firewood. We added to the rations of our sanitary workers, we gave away all the bread we could, but we could not feed that enclosure of hungry men. We used to hear them coughing and moaning all night.’

Dr. Inglis details the starving condition of the whole country, the weakness of the famine-stricken men who worked for them, the starved yoke oxen, and all the manifold miseries of a country overrun by the enemy.

‘There was,’ she says, ‘a curious exhilaration in working for those grateful patient men, and in helping the director, Major Nicolitch, so loyal to his country and so conscientious in his work, to bring order out of chaos, and yet the unhappiness in the Serbian houses, and the physical wretchedness of those cold hungry prisoners lay always like a dead weight on our spirit. Never shall we forget the beauty of the sunrises, or the glory of the sunsets, with clear, cold sunlit days between, and the wonderful starlit nights. But we shall never forget “the Zoo” either, or the groans outside the windows when we hid our heads under the blankets to shut out the sound. The unit got no news, and they made it a point of honour to believe nothing said in the German telegrams. We could not believe Serbia had been sacrificed for nothing. We were convinced it was some deep laid scheme for weakening other fronts, and so it was natural to believe rumours, such as that the English had taken Belgium, and the French were in Metz.

‘The end of the five months of service in captivity, and to captive Serbs ended. On the 11th February 1916, they were sent north under an Austrian guard with fixed bayonets, thus to Vienna, and so by slow stages they came to Zürich.

‘It was a great thing to be once more “home” and to realise how strong and straight and fearless a people inhabit these islands: to realise not so much that they mean to win the war, but rather that they consider any other issue impossible.’

So Dr. Inglis came back to plan new campaigns for the help of the Serbian people, who lay night and day upon her heart. She knew she had the backing of the Suffrage societies, and she intended to get the ear of the English public for the cause of the Allies in the Balkans. ‘We,’ who had sent her out, found her changed in many ways. Physically she had altered much, and if we could ever have thought of the body in the presence of that dauntless spirit, we might have seen that the Angel of Shadows was not far away. The privations and sufferings she described so well when she had to speak of her beloved Serbs had been fully shared by the unit. Their comfort was always her thought; she never would have anything that could not be shared and shared alike, but there was little but hardship to share, and one and all scorned to speak of privations which were a light affliction compared to those of a whole nation groaning and waiting to be redeemed from its great tribulation.

There was a look in her face of one whose spirit had been pierced by the sword. The brightness of her eyes was dimmed, for she had seen the days when His judgments were abroad upon the earth: —

‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;He has loosed the fatal lightning of His terrible swift sword:I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.’

She could never forget the tragedy of Serbia, and she came home, not to rest, but vowed to yet greater endeavours for their welfare. The attitude of the Allies she did not pretend to understand. She had something of the spirit of Oliver Cromwell, when he threatened to send his fleet across the Alps to help the Waldensians. In her public speeches, when she set forth what in her outlook could have been done, no censor cut out the sentences which were touched by the live coals from off her altar of service. Dr. Elsie never recognised the word ‘impossible’ for herself, and for her work that was well. As to her political and military outlook, the story of the nations will find it a place in the history of the war.

For a few months she worked from the bases of her two loyal Committees in London and Edinburgh. She spoke at many a public meeting, and filled many a drawing-room. The Church of Scotland knew her presence in London. ‘One of our most treasured memories will be that keen, clever face of hers in St. Columba’s of a Sunday – with the far, wistful melancholy in it, added to its firm determination.’ So writes the minister. ‘We’ knew what lay behind the wistful brave eyes, a yet more complete dedication to the service of her Serbian brethren.

CHAPTER X

RUSSIA

1917

‘Even so in our mortal journey,The bitter north winds blow,And thus upon life’s red river,Our hearts as oarsmen row.And when the Angel of ShadowRests his feet on wave and shore,And our eyes grow dim with watching,And our hearts faint at the oar,Happy is he who hearethThe signal of his releaseIn the bells of the holy cityThe chimes of eternal peace.’

Dr. Inglis’ return to England was the signal for renewed efforts on the part of the Committees managing the S.W.H. This memoir has necessarily to follow the personality of the leader, but it must never be forgotten that her strength and all her sinews of war lay in the work of those who carried on at home, week by week. Strong committees of women, ably organised and thoroughly staffed, took over the burden of finance – a matter Dr. Inglis once amusingly said, ‘did not interest her.’ They found and selected the personnel on which success so much depended, they contracted for and supervised the sending out of immense consignments of equipment and motor transport. They dealt with the Government department, and in loyal devotion smoothed every possible obstacle out of the path of those flying squadrons, the units of the S.W.H.

It was inevitable the quick brain and tenacious energy of Dr. Inglis, far away from the base of her operations, should at times have found it hard to understand why the wheels occasionally seemed to drag, and the new effort she desired to make did not move at the pace which to her eager spirit seemed possible. Two enterprises filled her mind on her return in 1916. One, by the help of the London Committee, she put through. This was the celebration of Kossovo Day in Great Britain. The flag-day of the Serbian Patriot King was under her chairmanship prepared for in six weeks. Hundreds of lectures on the history of Serbia were arranged for and delivered throughout the country, and no one failed to do her work, however remote they might think the prospect of making the British people interested in a country and patriot so far from the ken of their island isolation.

Kossovo Day was a success, and through the rush of the work Dr. Inglis was planning the last and most arduous of all the undertakings of the S.W.H., that of the unit which was to serve with the Serbian Volunteers on the Rumanian Russian front. Dr. Inglis knew from private sources the lack of hospital arrangements in Mesopotamia, and she, with the backing of the Committees, had approached the authorities for leave to take a fully equipped unit to Basra. When the story of the Scottish Women’s Hospital is written, the correspondence between the War Office, the Foreign Office, and S.W.H. will throw a tragic light on this lamentable episode, and, read with the report of the Committees, it will prove how quick and foreseeing of trouble was her outlook. As soon as Dr. Inglis brought her units back from Serbia, she again urged the War Office to send her out. Of her treatment by the War Office, Mrs. Fawcett writes: ‘She was not only refused, but refused with contumely and insult.’