to all the other hospitals in Calais, were officially attached to the Belgian Corps de Transport when the Lamarck hospital closed in Oct. 1916. This unit continued to drive for the Belgian army till after the Armistice and went with it to Bruges and Brussels. Belgian civilians who remained in the little strip of land not occupied by the enemy were in desperate plight too. King Albert's Civilian Hospital Fund was founded, by Mrs. Oliphant Murray and the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos, to help Belgian state civilian hospitals abroad; the Belgian Canal Boat Fund, with Mrs. Agar Adamson as founder and Mrs. Innes Taylor as organizer in Belgium, fed and clothed 300 families in and about Furnes till June 1919; and the Belgian Front Relief Fund, under Miss Georgie Fyfe, evacuated 1,341 Belgian children from the war area into France and Switzer- land, and repatriated them all at the end of the war, besides main- taining a maternity hospital at Vinckem for four years.
The work for the French was more extensive still. There were three Red Cross societies in France; the Societe de Secours aux Blesses Militaires, the Association des Dames Francaises, and the Union des Femmes de France. As only the last named had a com- mittee in London, a British Committee of the French Red Cross was called into being by the French ambassador towards the end of 1914, in order to allocate the services offered by British volunteers to the best advantage of all three societies. At the end of 1917 the Anglo-French Committee of the Joint War Committee, which had been formed in Jan. 1915 tc sift the credentials of British applicants for Red Cross work with the French, united with the British Com- mittee. By this date 8,537 certificates had been granted to British volunteers for work in France. As the French army bore the brunt of the fighting for the first two years of the war their hospital problem was acute, especially as the nuns had left France before a sufficient number of nurses had been trained to replace them. To help fill the need, Miss Grace Ellison founded the French Flag Nursing Corps, which organized the supply of 250 British trained nurses, paid by the French Government, to help in the improvisation of the enormous number of French hospitals needed to cope with the rush of wounded. The Urgency Cases Hospital, a unit of first-class surgeons and 20 fully trained nurses, raised on the initiative of Miss Eden, hon. sec. of the National Union of Trained Nurses, went to Revigny in March 1915 to receive the worst cases on that section of the front. In July 1917 it was taken over by the British Committee of the French Red Cross. About 30 other units for the French were equipped by voluntary effort and staffed by British nurses and V.A.D.s, including Miss Bromley Martin's hospital at Arc-en-Barrois, the Johnston-Reckett unit at Ris-Orangis, Lady Sykes' hospital at Malo-les-Bains, the Michelham Foundation in Paris, the Ulster unit supported for two years by the Ulster Women's Unionist Council, the Martouret hospital and Ceret convalescent home of Mrs. Allhusen, the Sanatorium Beausoleil of Miss Lind-af-Hageby, Lady Eva Wemyss' hospital at Compiegne, Lady Guernsey's at Fecamp, Mrs. Symons' at Rimberlieu, Lady Tangye's at Pans Plage and others. In addition a large number of V.A.D.s worked in French hospitals and held positions of considerable responsibility.
The French Wounded Emergency Fund, which had branches throughout Great Britain for the making of comforts, was founded in Nov. 1914, with Miss Evelyn Wild as hon. sec., in order to give assistance to the French military and benevole hospitals, as distin- guished from the auxiliary hospitals run under the three French Red Cross societies. In May 1916, 2,755 French hospitals were classed as military, 1,552 as benevole and 1,225 as auxiliary. By March 1918 the Fund had helped military hospitals in 1,200 different French towns, and 163,000 had been raised in money, and 75,000 in kind. Canteens were also established in many of the military hospitals. The French authorities placed a devastated sector on the Somme under the care of the Fund, and after the Armistice much work was done in the devastated areas.
On the closing of the Lamarck hospital at Calais the F.A.N.Y. transferred their personnel to staff a hospital for the French at Port a Binson, Marne, which opened in Jan. 1917. In the summer of 1917 the Corps began supplying ambulance units for the French army. There were finally three: S.S.Y.2, S.S.Y.4, and S.S.Y.5. The F.A.N.Y. officer commanding each unit held official rank in the French army as an officer. After the Armistice the S.S.Y.2 drivers were the first women to go into Germany with their ambulances to bring back prisoners of war. The Hackett-Lowther ambulance unit of women drivers under Miss Toupie-Lowther was attached to the second Army Corps of the 3rd French army in 1918 as S.S.Y.3. This was the only women!s unit allowed to do front-line work ; the cars were sent to the advanced " postes de secours," and the entire section was mentioned in despatches, which carried with it the right to have the Croix de Guerre painted on their ambulances. During 19 19 the women's convoys did civilian relief work in the devastated areas.
The Women's Emergency Canteens, an independent Society under Mrs. Wilkie, and an offshoot of the Women's Emergency Corps, started a canteen at Compiegne in Feb. 1915 with a recreation room, which was the first of its kind. Another canteen was opened for four years at the Gare du Nord, Paris, with 60 beds attached, which was used by British and Allied soldiers, and all Belgians were fed free there for two years. Other smaller canteens were run for a time as offshoots of the one at Compiegne.
Canteen work under the " Oeuvre de la Goutte de Cafe " started
by M. Duquesnoy early in the war, absorbed a very large number of British women workers, who were selected and sent out to France by the British Committee of the French Red Cross. The canteens were of four types, those at railway stations; those at foyers de cantonnement or recreation rooms attached to rest camps; those for the provision of invalid diets at depots d'ecloppes. and those at depots d'isoles for men rejoining their regiments. The earliest railway canteen was opened at Hazebrouck in Feb. 1915, and moved to Doullens, where the work was very heavy during the Somme offensive; thousands of wounded from Gommecourt came through' in a few days, and the helpers were sometimes working for 19 hours at a stretch. Many of the canteen workers had narrow escapes during the German push of 1918, when they had to evacuate suddenly with the Germans on their heels. A large number of the helpers were elderly women who worked extraordinarily hard, paid all their own expenses and faced all the hazards of war.
Work for the Serbian Army. The first British women who worked for Serbia during the war left London with Madame Grouitch, the American wife of the Serbian minister at Nish, on Aug. 12 1914, and went to the Serbian 1st reserve hospital at Kragujevatz; the hospital material was exhausted in a few months, and it was as a result of the pitiful stories that reached home from this band of women that the Serbian Relief Fund was formed. Miss Flora Sandes and Miss Emily Simmonds, who belonged to the original party, raised a private fund, took out 108 tons of hospital material to Valievp in Jan. 1915, and nursed typhus in a Serbian hospital, doing operations and dressings for 12 hours a day, till both caught the disease.
The plight of Serbia during the first winter of the war, harried first by the Austrian invasion and then by the typhus epidemic, was so terrible that hospital after hospital was sent out from Great Britain by the Serbian Relief Fund, the British Red Cross Society, the Wounded Allies Relief Committee and the Scottish Women's Hospitals. All these took out trained nurses and many had women doctors, but, with the exception of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, the only two units under women administrators were financed by the Serbian Relief Fund. The first Serbian Relief Fund surgical unit under Lady Paget, the wife of Sir Ralph Paget, who became the British Commissioner for Serbia in 1915, reached the country in Nov. 1914 before any of the others, and did heroic service at Skoplje under appalling conditions. From Nov. to Jan. there was an unend- ing stream of Austrian and Serbian wounded and in the second half of the month the typhus epidemic assumed serious proportions. Lady Paget, who had previously worked in Serbian hospitals in Belgrade during the Balkan wars of 1911 and 1912-3, organized a typhus colony in collaboration with the British Red Cross Society unit, for the isolation of. the cases, which opened on March I. Very few nurses could be spared from the surgical hospital, as over 90% of the staff were off duty for sickness between Nov. and February. Lady Paget herself, two sisters, two doctors, some Serbian voluntary assistants and Austrian prisoner orderlies coped with beds at the colony for 300 typhus patients. Between March 6 and 24 sixteen workers went down with the disease, including Lady Paget, and for a week one sister remained in charge of 300 patients. Then she was relieved by four nurses from the second Serbian Relief Fund unit (Lady Wimborne's). By May the epidemic was overcome and not a case left in the town.
Plenty of hospitals had arrived in the country by this time and, as there had been no fighting since Dec., the surgical units found themselves with little to do. Mrs. St. Clair Stobart, who com- manded thegrd Serbian Relief Fund unit, which was entirely staffed by women, landed in Serbia in April 1915, and at once began to utilize her medical personnel for the far greater needs of the civil population. She put up a wayside dispensary by the hospital camp, where 12,000 people were treated in a few weeks, and established six, others in country districts during the summer. At the end of Sept.' the Austrians, Germans and Bulgarians began massing on the frontiers and Mrs. Stobart was invited to accompany the Serbian' army to the front with a part of her unit as a flying field hospital., They moved forward for a few days, but on Oct. 17 the great retreat of the Serbian nation began, and thousands of people trekked for 1 three months over the Albanian mountains down to the sea at Scutari. Mrs. Stobart rode at the head of her column all the way< for 800 m., and brought it through intact.
Lady Paget with all her staff decided to remain with the hospital at Skoplje and allow themselves to be taken prisoners by the Bul- garians, in order to continue to care for the Serbian wounded of their own hospital and of the other hospitals abandoned by their staffs. She was allowed by the Bulgarians to distribute the hospital stores of food and clothing to all destitute refugees irrespective of na- tionality. Early in Dec. the Germans arrived, and in Feb. permission was given for the unit to leave the country. Lady Paget had accom- : plished the purpose for which she had stayed, having been able to superintend the distribution of all the stores and money.
Miss Flora Sandes, who was in England when the Bulgarians de- clared war, went back at once, and was officially attached to the ambulance of the 2nd Infantry Regiment. When the retreat began, the Commandant of the Division told her that her presence would encourage the soldiers; so, as the ambulance could not travel, she enlisted in the 2nd Infantry Regiment as a private and retreated through Albania with the Serbian army. When the army was
