In the bells of the holy city
The chimes of eternal peace.’
Dr. Inglis’ return to England was the signal for renewed efforts on the part of the Committees managing the S.W.H. This memoir has necessarily to follow the personality of the leader, but it must never be forgotten that her strength and all her sinews of war lay in the work of those who carried on at home, week by week. Strong committees of women, ably organised and thoroughly staffed, took over the burden of finance—a matter Dr. Inglis once amusingly said, ‘did not interest her.’ They found and selected the personnel on which success so much depended, they contracted for and supervised the sending out of immense consignments of equipment and motor transport. They dealt with the Government department, and in loyal devotion smoothed every possible obstacle out of the path of those flying squadrons, the units of the S.W.H.
It was inevitable the quick brain and tenacious energy of Dr. Inglis, far away from the base of her operations, should at times have found it hard to understand why the wheels occasionally seemed to drag, and the new effort she desired to make did not move at the pace which to her eager spirit seemed possible. Two enterprises filled her mind on her return in 1916. One, by the help of the London Committee, she put through. This was the celebration of Kossovo Day in Great Britain. The flag-day of the Serbian Patriot King was under her chairmanship prepared for in six weeks. Hundreds of lectures on the history of Serbia were arranged for and delivered throughout the country, and no one failed to do her work, however remote they might think the prospect of making the British people interested in a country and patriot so far from the ken of their island isolation.
Kossovo Day was a success, and through the rush of the work Dr. Inglis was planning the last and most arduous of all the undertakings of the S.W.H., that of the unit which was to serve with the Serbian Volunteers on the Rumanian Russian front. Dr. Inglis knew from private sources the lack of hospital arrangements in Mesopotamia, and she, with the backing of the Committees, had approached the authorities for leave to take a fully equipped unit to Basra. When the story of the Scottish Women’s Hospital is written, the correspondence between the War Office, the Foreign Office, and S.W.H. will throw a tragic light on this lamentable episode, and, read with the report of the Committees, it will prove how quick and foreseeing of trouble was her outlook. As soon as Dr. Inglis brought her units back from Serbia, she again urged the War Office to send her out. Of her treatment by the War Office, Mrs. Fawcett writes: ‘She was not only refused, but refused with contumely and insult.’
True to her instinct never to pause over a set-back, she lost no time in pressing on her last enterprise for the Serbians. M. Curcin, in The Englishwoman, says:—
‘She was already acquainted with one side of the Serbian problem—Serbia; she was told that in Russia there was the best opportunity to learn about the second half—the Serbs of Austria, the Jugoslavs. In six weeks Dr. Inglis succeeded in raising a hospital unit and transport section staffed by eighty women heroes of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals to start with her on a most adventurous undertaking, via Archangel, through Russia to Odessa and the Dobrudja. Dr. Inglis succeeded also—most difficult of all—in getting permission from the British authorities for the journey. Eye-witnesses—officers and soldiers—tell everybody to-day how those women descended, practically straight from the railway carriages, after forty days’ travelling, beside the stretchers with wounded, and helped to dress the wounds of those who had had to defend the centre and also a wing of the retreating army. For fifteen months she remained with those men, whose rôle is not yet fully realised, but is certain to become one of the most wonderful and characteristic facts of the conflagration of nations.’
The Edinburgh Committee had already so many undertakings on behalf of the S.W.H. that they gladly allowed the Committee formed by the London Branch of the N.U.W.S.S. to undertake the whole work of organising this last adventure for the Serbian Army. It was as their Commissioner that Dr. Inglis and her unit sailed the wintry main, and to them she sent the voluminous and brilliant reports of her work. When the Russian revolution imperilled the safety of the Serbian Army on the Rumanian front, she sent home members of her unit, charged with important verbal messages to her Government. Through the last anxious month, when communications were cut off, short messages, unmistakably her own, came back to the London Committee, that they might order her to return. She would come with the Serbian Army and not without them. We at home had to rest on the assurances of the Foreign Office, always alive to the care and encouragement of the S.W.H., that Dr. Inglis and her unit were safe, and that their return would be expedited at the safest hour. In those assurances we learnt to rest, and the British Government did not fail that allied force—the Serbian Army and the Scottish women serving them. The following letters were those written to her family with notes from her graphic report to her Committees. The clear style and beautiful handwriting never changed even in those last days, when those who were with her knew that nothing but the spirit kept the wasted body at its work. ‘The Serbian Division is superb; we are proud to be attached to it.’ These were the last words in her last letter from Odessa in June 1917. That pride of service runs through all the correspondence. The spirit she inspired is noteworthy in a book which covers the greater part of these fifteen months, With the Scottish Nurses in Rumania, by Yvonne Fitzroy. In a daily diary a searchlight is allowed to fall on some of the experiences borne with such high-hearted nonchalance by the leader and her gallant disciples.
Mrs. Haverfield, who saw her work, writes: