‘Not I, but my Unit.’
‘My dear Unit, good-bye.’—Nov. 26, 1917.
E. M. I.
‘Into the wide deep seas which we call God
You plunged.
This is not death,
You seemed to say, but fuller life.’
The reports of Dr. Inglis as chief medical officer to the London Committee were as detailed and foreseeing in the very last one that she wrote as in the first from on board the transport that took her and her unit out. She writes:—‘In view of the fact that we are in the middle of big happenings I should like Dr. Laird to bring ½ ton cotton wool, six bales moss dressings, 100 lb. chloroform, 50 lb. ether, 20 gallons rectified spirits. I wonder what news of the river boat for Mesopotamia?’ After they had landed and were at work:—‘I have wired asking for another hospital for the base. I know you have your hands full, but I also know that if the people at home realise what their help would mean out here just now, we would not have to ask twice. And again:—’Keep the home fires burning and let us feel their warmth.’ She soon encountered the usual obstacles:—‘I saw that there was no good in the world talking about regular field hospitals to them until they had tried our mettle. The ordinary male disbelief in our capacity cannot be argued away. It can only be worked away.’ So she acted. Russia created disbelief, but the men at arms of all nations saw and believed. In November she wrote back incredulously:—‘Rumours of falling back. Things look serious. Anxious about the equipment.’ In bombardments, in retreat, and evacuations the equipment was her one thought. ‘Stand by the equipment’ became a joke in her unit. On one occasion one of the orderlies had a heavy fall from a lorry on which she was in charge of the precious stuff. Dusty and shaken, she was gathering herself up, when the voice of the chief rang out imperatively urgent, ‘Stand by the equipment.’ On the rail certain trucks, bearing all the equipment, got on a wrong line, and were carried away:—‘The blue ribbon belongs to Miss Borrowman and Miss Brown. They saw our wagons disappearing with a refugee train, whereupon these two ran after it and jumped on, and finally brought the equipment safely to Galatz. They invented a General Popovitch who would be very angry if it did not get through. Without those two girls and their ingenuity, the equipment would not have got through.’
She details all the difficulties of packing up and evacuating after the despatch rider came with the order that the hospitals were to fall back to Galatz. The only method their own, all else chaotic and helpless, working night and day, the unit accomplished everything. At the station, packed with a country and army in flight, Dr. Inglis had a talk with a Rumanian officer. He told her that he had been in Glasgow, and had there been invited out to dinner, and had seen ‘English customs.’ ‘It was good to feel those English customs were still going on quietly, whatever was happening here, breakfast coming regularly and hot water for baths, and everything as it should be. It was probably absurd, but it came like a great wave of comfort to feel that England was there quiet and strong and invincible behind everything and everybody.’
As we read these natural vivid diary reports, we too can feel it was good of England that Dr. Inglis was to the last on that front—