Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World WarDaggett, Mabel Potter
History
Women wanted: The story written in blood red letters on the horizon of the Great World War
Daggett, Mabel Potter
Women -- Employment; World War, 1914-1918 -- Women
See the latest “unit” that is leaving Paddington Station. The equipment
they are taking with them includes every appliance that will be
required, from a bed to a bandage, and numbers just 1,051 bales and
cases of freight. The entire unit, forty-five women, have had their
hair cut short. For sanitary reasons, is the euphemistic way of
explaining it. For protection against the vermin with which patients
from the trenches will be infested, if you ask for war facts as they
are. Units like this have gone out to settle wherever by army orders a
place has been made for them, in a deserted monastery in France that
they must first scrub and clean, in a refugee barracks in Russia, in a
tent in Serbia where they themselves must dig the drainage trenches.
Their surgeons have stood at the operating table a week at a stretch
with only an hour or two of sleep each night. Their doctors have
battled with epidemics of typhoid and plague. Their ambulance girls
have brought in the wounded from the battlefield under shell-fire.
Hospitals have been conducted under bombardment with all the patients
carried to the cellar. Hospitals have been captured by the enemy.
Hospitals have been evacuated at command with the patients loaded on
trains or motor cars or bullock wagons for retreat with the army. There
were forty-six British women who shared in the historic retreat of the
Serbian army three hundred miles over the Plain of Kossovo and the
mountains of Albania. Men and cattle perished by the score. But the
women doctors, freezing, starving, sleeping in the fields, struggling
against a blinding blizzard with an amazing physical endurance and a
dauntless courage, all came through to Scutari. Out on the far-flung
frontiers of civilisation, the woman in khaki who has done these things
is memorialised. At Mladanovatz, the Serbians have erected a fountain
with the inscription: “In memory of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and
their founder, Dr. Elsie Inglis.”
SUFFRAGISTS LED ALL THE REST
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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