Upstairs the patients occupied the shelving. There were three tiers, the slightly wounded men in the highest tier. The magazine was under Dr. Holloway, and Dr. Inglis says the time to see the place at its best or its worst was in the gloaming, when two or three feeble oil lamps illuminated the gloom, and the tin bowls clattered and rattled as the evening ration of beans was given out, and the men swarmed up and down the poles of their shelves chattering as Serbs will chatter. The Sisters called the place ‘the Zoo.’
The dread of the renewal of the typhus scourge, amid such conditions of overcrowding, underfeeding, fatigue and depression, was great. Dr. Inglis details the appalling tasks the unit undertook in sanitation. There was no expert amongst them:—
‘When we arrived, the hospital compound was a truly terrible place—the sights and smells beyond description. We dug the rubbish into the ground, emptied the overflowing cesspool, built incinerators, and cleaned, and cleaned, and cleaned. That is an Englishman’s job all over the world. Our three untrained English girl orderlies took to it like ducks to water. It was not the pleasantest or easiest work in the world; but they did it, and did it magnificently.
‘Laundry and bathing arrangements were installed and kept going. We had not a single case of typhus; we had a greater achievement than its prevention. Late of an evening, when men among the prisoners were put into the wards, straight from the march, unwashed and crawling with lice, there was great indignation among the patients already in. “Doktoritza,” they said, “if you put these dirty men in among us we shall all get typhus.” Our hearts rejoiced. If we have done nothing else, we thought, we have driven that fact home to the Serbian mind that dirt and typhus go together.’
Dr. Inglis describes the misery of the Serbian prisoners:—
‘They had seen men go out to battle, conscious of the good work they had done for the Allies in driving back the Austrians in their first punitive expedition. We are the only ones who, so far, have beaten our enemy. They came back to us broken and dispirited. They were turned into the hospital grounds, with a scanty ration of beans, with a little meat and half a loaf of bread for twenty-four hours. Their camp fires flickered fitfully through the long bitter cold nights. Every scrap of wood was torn up, the foot bridges over the drains, and the trees hacked down for firewood. We added to the rations of our sanitary workers, we gave away all the bread we could, but we could not feed that enclosure of hungry men. We used to hear them coughing and moaning all night.’
Dr. Inglis details the starving condition of the whole country, the weakness of the famine-stricken men who worked for them, the starved yoke oxen, and all the manifold miseries of a country overrun by the enemy.
‘There was,’ she says, ‘a curious exhilaration in working for those grateful patient men, and in helping the director, Major Nicolitch, so loyal to his country and so conscientious in his work, to bring order out of chaos, and yet the unhappiness in the Serbian houses, and the physical wretchedness of those cold hungry prisoners lay always like a dead weight on our spirit. Never shall we forget the beauty of the sunrises, or the glory of the sunsets, with clear, cold sunlit days between, and the wonderful starlit nights. But we shall never forget “the Zoo” either, or the groans outside the windows when we hid our heads under the blankets to shut out the sound. The unit got no news, and they made it a point of honour to believe nothing said in the German telegrams. We could not believe Serbia had been sacrificed for nothing. We were convinced it was some deep laid scheme for weakening other fronts, and so it was natural to believe rumours, such as that the English had taken Belgium, and the French were in Metz.
‘The end of the five months of service in captivity, and to captive Serbs ended. On the 11th February 1916, they were sent north under an Austrian guard with fixed bayonets, thus to Vienna, and so by slow stages they came to Zürich.
‘It was a great thing to be once more “home” and to realise how strong and straight and fearless a people inhabit these islands: to realise not so much that they mean to win the war, but rather that they consider any other issue impossible.’
So Dr. Inglis came back to plan new campaigns for the help of the Serbian people, who lay night and day upon her heart. She knew she had the backing of the Suffrage societies, and she intended to get the ear of the English public for the cause of the Allies in the Balkans. ‘We,’ who had sent her out, found her changed in many ways. Physically she had altered much, and if we could ever have thought of the body in the presence of that dauntless spirit, we might have seen that the Angel of Shadows was not far away. The privations and sufferings she described so well when she had to speak of her beloved Serbs had been fully shared by the unit. Their comfort was always her thought; she never would have anything that could not be shared and shared alike, but there was little but hardship to share, and one and all scorned to speak of privations which were a light affliction compared to those of a whole nation groaning and waiting to be redeemed from its great tribulation.
There was a look in her face of one whose spirit had been pierced by the sword. The brightness of her eyes was dimmed, for she had seen the days when His judgments were abroad upon the earth:—
‘Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;