The records of the War Office show how real. Dr. Gerard-Mangin did her two years’ service at the front without a day off for illness and never so much as an hour’s absence from her post of duty. She is the only surgeon with the French army who has such a record. Her right to a place in the profession in which no man has been able to equal, let alone surpass, her achievement, would seem to be assured beyond question. Let us write high on the waving banners carried by the cohorts of the woman’s cause the name of Nicole Gerard-Mangin. It was not a simple or an easy thing that she has done. You would know if you heard her voice tremulous yet with the agony on which she has looked. “I shall nevair forget! I shall nevair forget!” she told me brokenly, in the gay little pink calico office. And the beautiful brown eyes of the little French major, successful army surgeon, were suddenly suffused with woman’s tears.
WHAT SCOTTISH WOMEN DOCTORS DID
Like this the woman war doctor began. Before the first year of the great conflict was concluded, there was not a battle front on which she had not arrived. And the Scottish Women’s Hospitals have appeared on five battle fronts. Organised by the Scottish Federation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies and supported by the entire body of constitutional suffragists under Mrs. Fawcett of London, they afford spectacular evidence of how completely the forces of the woman movement of yesterday have been marshalled into formation for the winning of the new woman movement of to-day. Dr. Elsie Inglis[2] the intrepid leader of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, like a general disposing her troops to the best strategic advantage, has literally followed the armies of Europe, placing her now indispensable auxiliary aid where the world’s distress at the moment seems greatest. There have been at one time as many as twelve of the Scottish hospitals in simultaneous operation. Sometimes they are forced to pick up their entire equipment and retreat with the Allies before the onslaught of the Hun hordes. Sometimes they have been captured by the enemy, only eventually to reach London and start out once more for new fields to conquer.
[2] Died 1917.
These women in the grey uniforms with Tartan trimmings and the sign of the thistle embroidered on their hats and their epaulets, have crossed the vision of the central armies with a frequency that has seemed, to the common soldier at least, to partake of the supernatural. Bulgarian prisoners brought into the Scottish Women’s Hospital operating at Mejidia on the Roumanian front looked up into the doctors’ faces in amazement to inquire: “Who are you? We thought we had done for you. There you were in the south. Now here you are in north. Are you double?” Of this work in the north, in the Dobrudja from where they were obliged to retreat into Russia, the Prefect of Constanza said in admiration: “It is extraordinary how these women endure hardship. They refuse help and carry the wounded themselves. They work like navvies.”
At the very beginning of the war, the Scottish women left their first record of efficiency at Calais. Their hospital there in the Rue Archimede, operated by Dr. Alice Hutchinson, had the lowest percentage of mortality for the epidemic of enteric fever. In France the hospital at Troyes under Dr. Louise McElroy was so good that it received an official command to pick up and proceed to Salonika to be regularly attached to the French army, this being one of the very few instances on record where a voluntary hospital has been so honoured. The Scottish Hospital under Dr. Francis Ivins, established in the deserted old Cistercian abbey at Royaumont, is one of the show hospitals of France. When the doctors first took possession of the ancient abbey they had no heat, no light but candles stuck in bottles, no water but that supplied by a tap in the holy fountain, and they themselves slept on the floor. But eventually they had transformed the great vaulted religious corridors into the comfortable wards of Hôpital Auxiliarie 301. They might, the French Government had said, have the “petite blessé.” They would be entrusted with operations on fingers and toes! And every week or so, some French general ran down from Paris to see if they were doing these right. But within two months the War Office itself had asked to have the capacity of the hospital increased from 100 to 400 beds. And the medical department of the army had been notified to send to Royaumont only the “grande blessés.” At the end of the first week’s drive on the Somme, all of the other hospitals were objecting that they could receive no more patients: their overworked staffs could not keep up with the operations already awaiting them in the crowded wards. “But,” said the French Government, “see the Dames du Royaumont! Already they have evacuated their wounded and report to us for more.”
MISS NANCY NETTLEFOLD
Leader in the campaign to admit women to the practise of law in England.
It was in Serbia that four Scottish hospitals behind the Serbian armies on the Danube and the Sava achieved a successful campaign in spite of the most insurmountable difficulties. Here under the most primitive conditions of existence, every service from bookkeeping to bacteriology, from digging ditches to drawing water was done by women’s hands. It was not only the wounded to whom they had to minister. They came into Serbia through fields of white poppies and fields of equally thick white crosses over fresh graves. They faced a country that was overcome with pestilence. All the fevers there are raged through the hospitals where patients lay three in a bed, and under the beds and in the corridors and on the steps and on the grass outside. After months of heartbreaking labour when the plague had finally abated, the enemy again overran Serbia and the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, hastily evacuating, retreated to the West Moravian Valley. Some of the doctors were taken prisoners and obliged to spend months with the German and Austrian armies before their release. Others joined in the desperate undertaking of that remarkable winter trek of the entire Serbian nation fleeing over the mountains of Montenegro. Scores perished. But the Scottish women doctors, ministering to the others, survived. Dr. Curcin, chief of the Serbian medical command, has said: “As regards powers of endurance, they were equal to the Serbian soldiers. As regards morale, nobody was equal to them. In Albania I learned that the capacity of the ordinary Englishwoman for work and suffering is greater than anything we ever knew before about women.”
Like that the record of the woman war doctor runs. Where, oh, where are all those earlier fabled disabilities of the female sex for the practice of the profession of medicine? A very celebrated English medical man, returning recently from the front, found a woman resident physician in charge of the London hospital of whose staff he was a particularly distinguished member. In hurt dignity, he promptly tendered his resignation, only to be told by the Board of Directors practically to forget it. And he had to.