BRITISH WOMEN AT ALL THE FRONTS.

Otago Witness, Issue 3332, 23 January 1918, Page 59

BRITISH WOMEN AT ALL THE FRONTS.

By Second Lieutenant 0. Vince. " Where are the British?" said an American writer the other day, repeating the question which the German 2 Dro P a ~ gandists in America have been asking: and he answered it at once. " They are everywhere. They are holding their own line in France and Belgium, rendering aid to the French line wherever needed, helping Italy batter her way to Trieste, cleaning Germany out of Africa, furnishing the bulk of Sarrail's army in Macedonia, fighting their way through Mesopotamia, protecting Egypt, guarding that vital waterway, the Suez Canal, aid-

ing the Russians in Galicia, battling with' the Germans and Turks in Palestine, and policing all the seven seas by day and night, scouring them of mines and submarines. There is no nation whose troops are so übiquitous." That answer is true of more than, Britain's armies and her men; it is equally true of her hospitals and her women. "They are everywhere." The British women could find honourable work to do for the cause of the Allies in the security of their own uninvaded country, yet they were not content only to do that. They were not even content to serve only in their own army as thousands of women are now serving—in the base camps and \ hospitals overseas, in France, in Mace-i / donia, in Malta, in Egypt, and in the { casualty clearing stations close behind the > British lines. They were not content only 1 with this war service. They have gone I to all the fronts. They are helping C France and Belgium, Russia, and Serbia, / Italy and Rumania, and in the invaded r countries they have suffered many of the j dangers and hardships and seen the worst Y\ horrors of invasion. They did not wait f to go. They .went at once, when help, ' was most needed and most hard to give. f Before the end of the second month \. of the . war a complete hospital of 120 / beds, staffed entirely by British women, I was established in Antwerp. It was there f through the whole siege, and left only f when the last of its wounded had been' f moved to safety, and when the inhabi- [, tants had fled. It returned to/England.- i A month later that same hospital, reequipped, was at work in France. While this hospital was with the Belgians all through the siege, other British women, I working in field ambulances, were with the Belgian army during its retreat to the Yser. They were with it at Ghent, at ' Furnes, at Dixmude, and at Pervyse, where 'their dressing station was in a cellar, only 20 yards behind the trenches; and a little later, in November, when" ; the Belgians were established on their new line,- British women, doctors, and \, nurses were in charge of a Belgian typhoid f hospital at Calais. This was typical of ' the help given to the Belgian army in , v the first months of the war. Its value ' . was the greater because it was given at ' once, and at the moment of Belgium's greatest peril. She had British women working for her, before even the armies of her allies were ready to come to her support. • Early in December, 1914, the first large hospital, organised and staffed by British: ■ women, for service under the French Bed Cross, left England. 'lt was set up in the old Abbaye de Royaumont, and in those early days had ICO beds. It has since increased them to 400, and in the first V 20 months of its work treated over 2000. I patients. It was of. this hospital that the i, Chef de Laberatoire of the Pasteur Institute said that of the hundreds of military, , hospitals which he had seen none had so completely won his' admiration. Six months later another large hospital of women left Great Britain to work with the French army. It went to Troves, but . did not long remain there, for it had the honour to be invited to go with the ** French Expeditionary Force to Salonika, f and has been with that force through all [ its operations. \ At the same time that the first largo / hospital went 'to-France a unit of 30 | British women went to Serbia. It Avas ) quickly followed by others, and by the/ summer of 1915 five were at'-wtrk', with close on 2000 beds. It fell to them to fight the terrible plague of typhus, which, had been left by the retreating Austrian ; army, and swept like a fire through Serbia. The horrors and the unceasing ■>■■ labour of that time, none but those who saw them can imagine. In one town 1 nearly every house was a hospital, and )} the sick were lying close packed and nn- I tended on the floors of empty rooms and j passages. " . A few months after the plague came tha

German invasion. It carried army and hospitals before it. Some, of the British women went with the retreating Serbians over the passes; others stayed with their hospitals, fell into Austrian hands, and for three months wera kept prisoners of war. Those who went with the Serbians were seven weeks toiling across the mountains. A Serbian writer has told the story of what they suffered ; how through it all they made no complaint, sang by their camp fires at night, and in the "impassive lines of their faces, and in their even temper" showed no sign of what they suffered.

When the Serbian refugees began to arrive at Corsica yet another unit of women doctors and nurses from Great Britain look charge of the camps. When the reconstructed Serbian army took the field again there were three hospitals with it staffed by British women, though one of them. was supported by American money. One of them is with the Serbian army, which has rewon part of Serbia; the other two joined the Serbians lighting with the Rumanian army. Only a few months after Italy joined the Grand Alliance at the end of May, 1915, a small unit of British' women were at work on the Alpine front.

It was of the four British Red Cross motor ambulance units which had gone to the help of Italy, within the first eight months of war. This unit has done a special work, travelling from hospital to hospital to make X-ray examinations and photographs. It has often worked under fire, and the two British women in charge of it have both been decorated with the Italian bronze medal for military valour—an honour which has rarely, if ever, been given to a woman before. In the spring and summer of 1915 came the great German blow at Russia j- Poland was lost; town after Russian town fell into German hands, and before the slowlyretreating armies poured the inhabitants of the evacuated territory. In the following spring British women doctors and nurses went to Russia to work among these refugees. They went from place to place through a countryside crowded with homeless people. They worked in the village hospitals which already existed and opened new hospitals where there were none. Some of them were in the Kieff hospitals during Brusiloff's great advance, when 9000 wounded were arriving in a night; and some fought an epidemic of smallpox in a Galician village among scenes as terrible as those of the typhus plague in Serbia, and in a few weeks had inoculated 15,000 Russian troops. This is one part, but only-one part, of Great Britain's work to help her Allies, wherever their need has been greatest. It is one part of the immense work that Britain's women have done, seeking out the dangers of war from which their own homes were secure.—Per favour of the secretary of the Royal Colonial Institute.