LONDON-WALES UNIT.
At the time of the Austro-German invasion in the autumn of 1915, the London-Wales Unit was at Valjevo, one of the five Scottish women's hospitals working in the country. It was under the command of Dr. Alice Hutchinson and was very highly organized. Doctor Inglis had herself gone on to Servia to take general charge of the hospitals there in the spring of 1915. From the time that a typhus epidemic was overcome by women doctors early in the year to the time of the invasion all seemed to be going well. Then came three weeks of great pressure of work and of rapid moves from place to place as the enemy advanced into the country. Finally, it became a necessity for the personnel of the different units either to retreat with the Servian army over the mountains into Montenegro or to fall in the hands of the enemy.
The story of the retreat is now very generally known. The journey was one long series of forced marches. Mountains 7000 feet high had to be traversed in blinding snow, almost the whole journey had to be made on foot and it was six weeks before the little band reached the coast. Doctor Inglis meanwhile, with her group of nurses and orderlies, and Doctor Hutchinson, with the London-Wales Unit, had gallantly stayed behind and continued to attend to their Servian wounded and to organize help for them till the work was forcibly stopped by the advancing Austrian army.
UNIT TAKEN PRISONERS.
After being ordered out of Valjevo, Doctor Hutchinson made several attempts to organize hospitals in the line of retreat. She was at Vrnyachka Banja when the Austrians entered the town on November 10, 1915. She and her unit were taken prisoners and interned, first near the Servian frontier and then in Hungary for three weary months. The cheerful courage with which the members of the unit bore hardship and uncertainty and hope deferred has been related by Doctor Hutchinson in a memorable narrative. Their conditions would have been still more intolerable and their release would have been still longer delayed if Doctor Hutchinson herself had not known a great deal more about the Geneva Convention than the Austrian authorities had ever dreamed. She was thus able to assert herself on behalf of those under her in a way which taught her captors something new about British women. At the beginning of February the unit was at last allowed to cross the frontier into Switzerland. It reached England on February 12. It was only the perfection of its organization that carried this brave body of women through amazing hardships.
Abroad women chauffeurs became almost as common in the war as men; the public in Paris and London refused to regard the appearance of a woman on the streets in cap, "knickers" and puttees or heavy boots as unusual, and in need they in many instances not only drove "taxi," but guided ambulances in the hospital service.
The Red Cross in America, in the matter of preparedness, organized a class for women chauffeurs. One of these, started in Philadelphia, had among its instructors Mrs. Thomas Langdon Elwyn and Miss Letitia McKim, both of whom drove ambulances for the Allies in England.
The National League for Woman Service, working in conjunction with the Council of National Defense, canvassed the country through its Bureau of Registration and Information to provide statistics for mobilizing the entire woman-force of the Nation; all of which was done with the approval of the Secretary of Labor.
Perhaps the outstanding incident of industrial employment among women was that of several women in France as locomotive engineers. It is true that they operated only the shunting engines about the yards at the military camps, but it was noted in dispatches in every quarter of the globe that Mesdames Louis Debris and Marie Viard, whose husbands were killed in the war, were piloting the engines which their husbands had formerly driven.