It was a heart-breaking story that reached Nancy Cowder from an English official summoned home by the war. Her decision was immediate: "I'll go, there is need there. All the world will care for Belgium," and for a month she worked with her English friend, Betty Barstow, to get together a unit of a half-dozen women. The result was two physicians, two nurses, one chauffeur and one "general utility man," as Nancy called herself. They moved heaven and earth to raise money, collect supplies and secure such recognition from the English and French governments as would give their unofficial and volunteer caravan a standing before the Serbian authorities. They had little need of passports. A woman with surgical dressings in one hand and food in the other was welcomed as an angel from heaven by Serbians in those stricken days. Nancy's party had gone into the country by Salonika, a city overflowing with the excited travelers of half the world. From there they had made their way to Valievo, a little town north of the center of Serbia, the terminus of a narrow gauge railroad which runs eastward connecting with the main line between Salonika and Belgrade. It was over this single track, with its dwarf engine and cars, that the soldiery of all Central Serbia was traveling--with their supplies, their wounded and their sick. Since the terrific fighting along the Save and the Dwina, wounded Serbs and Austrians had been pouring into Valievo. Refugees had followed them. The little narrow-gauge railroad could not cope with this mass of misery. It had carried away what it could but numbers had been left behind. Late in 1914 these six young and intrepid Samaritans arrived with bags, boxes of bandages, cordials and medicines--and more to follow. They had planned to find a little house on one of the green hillsides, to make it a home, and from there to go day by day among the people; and thus they started. The little house was not hard to find. It looked out over the valley with its red-tiled roof and its suggestion of a distant time when the Turks were in the country as conquerors and built houses with overhanging eaves and trellised windows. It was from this little house that they started out for their work in what was then one of the most pitiable spots of all the many--oh, so many--on an earth which lifts a friendly face to man and begs of him to take of its fruits in peace and in content.