"I must say a word about the nursing sisters. No braver and truer women ever lived, kind and gentle and brave in the face of disease and death. By day and night they watch and care for our comrades; many a lad's dying hours are made more comfortable by the gentle touch and loving word of these devoted women.
"I heard one day that in another hospital seven miles away one of our own men was dying. I went over and found that he was isolated; he was dying of an infectious disease. He was in great agony. A sister stood beside him, and was trying to comfort him and ease his pain, at the same time the tears flowed freely down her cheeks.
"I have been profoundly impressed by the work of this branch of the Service. We forget sometimes that it is easier to face the shell and the bullet in the excitement of battle than it is to watch hour by hour and tend to those who are suffering from some deadly infectious disease, or from some ghastly wound received in battle."
Mr. Hall's tribute is surely well earned. In this war woman has been as brave as man or braver. She has given of her best and dearest, she has worked and prayed and endured. And away out there among our wounded and dying, far from the excitement of battle, by day and by night she has given herself—all she is and all she has—to the service of her country. And in doing so she has earned the undying gratitude of those to whom she has ministered, and of the land she loves so well.
I turn now to consider another branch of Red Cross work at the front—the treatment and prevention of disease.
This has been the "healthiest" war ever undertaken by the British Army. The great problem of all armies is how to keep out infectious disease, and never before has the problem been solved. If still not completely solved, it is certainly in the fair way to solution.
In the campaigns of the forty years previous to this war the proportion of sick to wounded was twenty-five to one, and of deaths through disease to death by shot, shell, or bayonet, five to one. In the South African War the proportion of sick to wounded was over four to one. We all remember the terrible share that enteric had in the wastage of that campaign. How the soldiers dreaded it. "Better," they used to say, "three wounds then one enteric."
Now enteric has almost entirely disappeared. Speaking in February 1915 the Under Secretary of State for War said that so far during the campaign there had been only six hundred and twenty-five cases in the British Expeditionary Force and of these only forty-nine had died—a percentage of deaths less than half as great as that among the victims of typhoid in the forces still in this country.
Of typhus and cholera there had not been a single case. Strange to say, one hundred and seventy-five of the men had had measles, and among these there had been two deaths. One hundred and ninety-six men had had scarlet-fever and there had been four deaths. How far the healthiness of the climate affects these figures it is difficult to say, but it must be remembered that it has been a terribly wet winter.