Late in the autumn of 1915 the N.U.W.S.S. resolved to send some units of women doctors and nurses to Russia to aid the civil population, more especially women and children, who had become refugees in consequence of the German advance over the western provinces of Russia. The accounts which reached us of the sufferings of these refugees were terrible. The roads by which they had travelled were marked by the graves of those who had fallen by the wayside. A maternity hospital was opened in Petrograd as well as "barak" hospitals for all kinds of infectious diseases. Our units were warmly welcomed by the suffering population and by the Zemstvos. They co-operated with the Britain to Poland Fund Committee, and also with the Moscow Union of Zemstvos. Eight hospitals were equipped and opened. Our doctors and their staffs on their arrival immediately began a fierce fight with diphtheria, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhus, and scabies; and skilled treatment saved many hundreds of lives. Over £11,000 was raised, and we were served by most able and devoted staffs, several of whom laid down their lives in the work in which they had engaged. The work was brought to a premature end by the chaos which quickly supervened upon the Russian Revolution of March, 1917. The N.U.W.S.S. did me the honour of naming the Russian units after me. The doctors and nurses of the M.F. Hospitals returned finally to England in August, 1917. The welcome our units received from the Zemstvos and the students, male and female, of the University of Kazan made us feel that they were appreciated, and we can only trust that, like other good seed, the work of our units will bring forth fruit in due season. CHAPTER VIII WOMEN'S WAR WORK AS IT AFFECTED PUBLIC OPINION "A land of settled Government, A land of just and old renown, Where Freedom slowly broadens down From precedent to precedent." The war revolutionized the industrial position of women. It found them serfs and left them free. It not only opened to them opportunities of employment in a number of skilled trades, but, more important even than this, it revolutionized men's minds and their conception of the sort of work of which the ordinary everyday woman was capable. It opened men's eyes to the national waste involved in condemning women to forms of work needing only very mediocre intelligence. It also opened their eyes to the national as well as the personal value of the ordinary domestic work of women, which has been in their hands for uncounted generations. It ploughed up the hardened soil of ancient prejudice, dissolving it and replacing it by a soil capable of fructifying the seeds of new ideas. Not even the most inveterate of antisuffragists could have ventured to say, after the experience gained by the war, what one of them quoted on a previous page had said just before the war, to the effect that, apart from breeding, women were of no national importance whatever.