The satisfactory reports on the women cooks from officers’ and men’s messes throughout the country prove how well the work has been done. But the clearest tribute of success came when in February, 1917, this branch of the Women’s Legion, which had worked hitherto as a private organisation in co-operation with the War Office, became incorporated actually in the Army as part of the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. The value of Mrs. Leach’s work was fully recognised, and she was asked to continue the management of the department under the new system. She is the first, however, to ascribe the real success of the work to the _esprit de corps_, the loyalty, and the patriotism of the women themselves, who have shown their capacity to carry on women’s most time-honoured household duty under unexpected and increasingly important conditions. [Illustration: MRS. GRAHAM JONES _Bassano_ _To face page 125_ ] XXIV MRS. GRAHAM JONES The work of Mrs. Graham Jones, in charge of a Women’s V.A.D. Motor Ambulance unit in France, is remarkable in that this unit was the first of its kind, and as a result of this successful experiment the employment of women as motor ambulance drivers for the British Army has been widely extended. Undoubtedly this success was mainly due to Mrs. Graham Jones herself, and her good organisation and control of the contingent. Her record is typical of thousands of English girls of education and refinement who have come forward and given their services for work hitherto considered men’s work, living hard lives under the strict Army discipline enforced for all workers in France. In April, 1916, the British Red Cross Society organised this motor unit to take over the entire work of a big base hospital in Northern France. Mrs. Graham Jones, who was given the command, had had over six years’ experience of motor driving, and had already driven an ambulance during the early part of the war. Working under her were thirteen girl drivers. The unit was attached to a hospital of 1300 beds, twenty miles away from the port to and from which the patients had to be conveyed. The ambulance cars were big and powerful, and the girls had entire charge of them, not only for driving but for cleaning and all except heavy repairs. Mrs. Graham Jones, writing of the work, says: “It included the unloading of hospital trains at our station, the transport of patients to the hospital ships, to convalescent camps, or to the base headquarters for return to duty; the conveyance of mails and stores, personnel, etc. It was always full of interest, but required at the same time careful driving and a steady, reliable head. The roads through the various camps were so new and so narrow, and the obstacles one met on them so varied in the way of teams of mules, Army lorries, marching platoons, or steam rollers, that there could be no relaxation of concentration.”