Freemen, come,

Ere your heritage be wasted, said the quick alarming drum.’

‘Abbaye de Royaumont,
‘Dec. 22, 1914.

‘Dearest Amy,—Many, many happy Christmases to you, dear, and to all the others. Everything is splendid here now, and if the General from headquarters would only come and inspect us, we could begin. The wards are perfect. I only wish you could see them with their red bedcovers, and little tables. There are four wards, and we have called them Blanche of Castille (the woman who really started the building of this place, the mother of Louis IX., the Founder, as he is called), Queen Margaret of Scotland, Joan of Arc, and Millicent Fawcett. Now, don’t you think that is rather nice! The Abbaye itself is a wonderful place. It has beautiful architecture, and is placed in delightful woods. One wants to spend hours exploring it, instead of which we have all been working like galley slaves getting the hospital in order. The equipment has come out practically all right. There are no thermometers and no sandbags. I feel they’ll turn up. Yesterday, I was told there were no tooth-brushes and no nail-brushes, but they appeared. After all the fuss, you can imagine our feelings when the “Director,” an official of the French Red Cross, who has to live here with us, told us French soldiers don’t want tooth-brushes!

‘Our first visitors were three French officers, whom we took for the inspecting general, and treated with grovelling deference, till we found they knew nothing about it, and were much more interested in the tapestry in the proprietor’s house than in our instruments. However, they were very nice, and said we were bien meublé.

‘Once we had all been on tenterhooks all day about the inspection. Suddenly, a man poked his head round the door of the doctor’s sitting-room and said, “The General.” In one flash every doctor was out of the room and into her bedroom for her uniform coat, and I was left sitting. I got up, and wandered downstairs, when an excited orderly dashed past, singing, “Nothing but two British officers!” Another time we were routed out from breakfast by the cry of “The General,” but this time it turned out to be a French regiment, whose officers had been moved by curiosity to come round by here. The General has not arrived yet.

‘We have had to get a new boiler in the kitchen, new taps and lavatories, and electric light, an absolute necessity in this huge place, and all the theatre sinks. We certainly are no longer a mobile hospital, but as we are twelve miles from the point from which the wounded are distributed (I am getting very discreet about names since a telegram of mine was censored), we shall probably be as useful here as anywhere. They even think we may get English Tommies.

‘You have no idea of the conditions to which the units came out, and they have behaved like perfect bricks. The place was like an ice hole: there were no fires, no hot water, no furniture, not even blankets, and the equipment did not arrive for five days. They have scrubbed the whole place out themselves, as if they were born housemaids; put up the beds, stuffed the mattresses, and done everything. Really, I am proud of them! They stick at absolutely nothing, and when Madame came, she said, “What it is to belong to a practical nation!”

‘We had a service in the ward on Sunday. We are going to see if they will let us use the little St. Louis Chapel. There are two other chapels, one in use, that we hope the soldiers will go to, and a beautiful chapel the same style of architecture as the chapel at Mont St. Michel. It is a perfect joy to walk through it to meals. The village curé has been to tea with us.

‘Will you believe it, that General hasn’t arrived yet!—Your loving

Elsie.’

Mr. Seton Watson has permitted his article in the December number of the New Europe (1917) to be reprinted here. His complete knowledge of Serbia enables him to describe both the work and Dr. Inglis who undertook the great task set before her.

‘Elsie Inglis was one of the heroic figures of the war, one whose memory her many friends will cherish with pride and confidence—pride at having been privileged to work with her, confidence in the race which breeds such women. This is not the place to tell the full story of her devotion to many a good cause at home, but the New Europe owes her a debt of special interest and affection. For in her own person she stood for that spirit of sympathy and comprehension upon which intercourse between the nations must be founded, if the ideal of a New Europe is ever to become a reality.

‘Though her lifework had hitherto lain in utterly different fields, she saw in a flash the needs of a tragic situation; and when war came offered all her indomitable spirit and tireless energy to a cause till recently unknown and even frowned upon in our country. Like the Douglas of old, she flung herself where the battle raged most fiercely—always claiming and at last obtaining permission to set up her hospitals where the obstacles were greatest and the dangers most acute. But absorbed as she was in her noble task of healing, she saw beyond it the high national ideal that inspired the Serbs to endure sufferings unexampled even in this war, and became an enthusiastic convert to the cause of Southern Slav unity. To her, as to all true Europeans, the principle of nationality is not, indeed, the end of all human wisdom, but the sure foundation upon which a new and saner internationalism is to be built, and an inalienable right to which great and small alike are entitled. Perhaps the fact that she herself came of a small nation which, like Serbia, has known how to celebrate its defeats, was not without its share in determining her sympathies.

‘The full political meaning of her work has not yet been brought home to her countrymen, and yet what she has done will live after her. Her achievement in Serbia itself in 1915 was sufficiently remarkable, but even that was a mere prelude to her achievement on the Eastern front. The Serbian Division in Southern Russia, which the Scottish Women’s Hospitals went out to help, was not Serbian at all in the ordinary sense of the word. Its proper name is the Jugoslav Division, for it was composed entirely of volunteers drawn from among the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes of Austria-Hungary who had been taken prisoners by the Russian army. Thousands of these men enrolled themselves on the side of the Entente and in the service of Serbia, in order to fight for the realisation of Southern Slav independence and unity under the national dynasty of Kara George. Beyond the ordinary risks of war they acted in full knowledge that capture by the enemy would mean the same fate as Austria meted out to the heroic Italian deputy, Cesare Battisti; and some of them, left wounded on the battle-field after a retreat, shot each other to avoid being taken alive. Throughout the Dobrudja campaign they fought with the most desperate gallantry against impossible odds, and, owing to inadequate support during the retreat, their main body was reduced from 15,000 to 4000. Latterly the other divisions had been withdrawn to recruit at Odessa, after sharing the defence of the Rumanian southern front.

‘To these men in the summer of 1916 Serbia had sent a certain number of higher officers, but, for equipment and medical help, they were dependent upon what the Russians could spare from their own almost unlimited needs. At the worst hour Dr. Inglis and her unit came to the help of the Jugoslavs, shared their privations and misfortunes, and spared no effort in their cause.

‘History will record the name of Elsie Inglis, like that of Lady Paget, as pre-eminent among that band of women who have redeemed for all time the honour of Britain in the Balkans. Among the Serbs it is already assuming an almost legendary quality. To us it will serve to remind us that Florence Nightingale will never be without successors among us. And in particular, every true Scotsman will cherish her memory, every believer in the cause for which she gave her life will gain fresh courage from her example.

R. W. Seton-Watson.

CHAPTER IX
SERBIA

‘Send thine hand from above; rid me, and deliver me out of great waters, from the hand of strange children.’