Page:Women Wanted.djvu/289

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IN THE PROFESSIONS
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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 dis-