VIII
MRS. ST. CLAIR STOBART
Nowoman has seen the war at closer quarters and in more varied fields of action than Mrs. St. Clair Stobart, and no one has worked harder to help the sick and wounded—on the field, in besieged fortresses, at base hospitals, and in the stricken villages of a ravaged and invaded country. Everywhere she has sought and found her opportunity to bear her part in the actual campaign—a part such as no woman has ever taken before.
The outbreak of war found Mrs. Stobart already trained, for she had gained her experience with the Women’s Convoy Corps, which she founded, and which did such successful work in the Balkan War in 1912-1913.
Early in August, 1914, therefore, she was entrusted with the leadership of an ambulance unit, under the organisation of the St. John Ambulance Association, and proceeded at once to Brussels. Before a hospital could be established, the Germans had entered the city, and Mrs. Stobart escaped with difficulty, after having been actually a prisoner in German hands, and condemned to be shot as a spy.
MRS. ST. CLAIR STOBARTTo face page44
MRS. ST. CLAIR STOBART
To face page44
Nothing daunted by her first experience, Mrs. Stobart then established a hospital in Antwerp. After three weeks of fine work the town was besieged,and the bombardment began. The hospital was in the direct line of fire of one of the enemy’s objectives, the ammunition depôt, but under a storm of shell-fire Mrs. Stobart and her unit rescued their wounded, and were themselves the last to leave the burning city, crossing the bridge of boats just before it was blown up.
After the fall of Antwerp Mrs. Stobart accepted an invitation from the French Red Cross to establish a hospital at Cherbourg.
At first the work was very heavy and the numbers of wounded enormous, but once it was started, Mrs. Stobart was able to leave the smoothly working hospital in good hands, and to answer the call to help Serbia, then in such dire need. Accordingly, after spending some time in making her preparations, she travelled to Serbia in April, 1915, with a fresh unit.
On arrival Mrs. Stobart began by establishing a camp hospital, entirely consisting of tents, at Kragujevatz.
It was the first experiment of this kind which had been tried, but the advantages of healthy outdoor conditions, as opposed to the alternative of insanitary buildings, were soon proved, for the hospital, which had been requested by the Serbian medical authorities to undertake surgical work, entirely escaped the scourge of typhus. Unfortunately, this was not so with regard to typhoid, from which several members of the staff died in June, 1915, including the well-known author, Mrs. Percy Dearmer, who, though far from strong, had offered her services to the unit, and had already done fine work.
During the first three months the hospital undertook both civil and military cases, and Mrs. Stobartorganised a further invaluable and successful scheme in establishing roadside tent dispensaries in seven or eight remote villages. Altogether, within a few weeks, 22,000 civilians received surgical and medical assistance.
At the end of September, 1915, came a signal proof of the confidence which Mrs. Stobart had inspired in Serbia. The army was preparing its fresh resistance to the second invasion, and the Bulgarians were on the eve of declaring war. Mrs. Stobart was approached by the Serbian military authorities and asked to mobilise a portion of her unit as a flying field hospital. She was appointed commander, with the rank of major in the Serbian army (the first time in history that such an appointment has been given to a woman), and the unit, which was called the First Serbian-English Field Hospital, was attached to the Schumadia division.
After making arrangements for the continuation of the work of the Kragujevatz hospital, Mrs. Stobart chose for the ambulance column a dozen of her English women doctors and nurses, motor ambulance drivers, a cook, orderlies, interpreters, and about sixty Serbian soldiers. On October 1 the column started for the Bulgarian front, travelling by train, through Nish, to Pirot. But, after a few days of trekking in that direction, the column was ordered to move north with the division to within a few miles of Belgrade on the Danube front, to face the stronger enemy, the Germans and the Austrians. On October 14 the hospital camp was pitched within sound of the guns, and the first batches of wounded were received. But the stand of the Serbian army was destined to be a short one. Two days later, orderscame to move southwards, and the first stage began of the great retreat, which was to continue steadily for three months.
The life of the members of the field hospital during the retreat was indeed a strange one, for ever on the march, stopping for a few hours to pitch a camp and attend to the wounded brought to them from the battlefields close at hand, evacuating them by motor ambulance to the nearest railway or hospital, and then marching on again. Throughout the retreat Mrs. Stobart rode at the head of her column night and day, selecting every inch of their road, struggling for a place for them in the endless procession of the straggling host that beset the mud-soddened roads and slippery mountain paths, obtaining food for them and their horses with infinite difficulty in the deserted villages through which the column passed. Forced to snatch odd hours of sleep when and where they could, always fully dressed, and prepared for the orders to march at any moment, they often narrowly escaped capture. The sound of the enemy guns was ever in their ears, the invading armies always at their heels. Mrs. Stobart truly proved herself a leader in fact as well as in name, for no trained commander of troops could have shown a higher courage or faced emergencies with a more decided energy than this Englishwoman.
It was a cruel day for the hospital column when, at the end of a terrible forced march, during which Mrs. Stobart was eighty-one hours in the saddle, the motor ambulance and the hospital equipment had at last to be destroyed and abandoned at the foot of the Montenegrin mountains, through which Mrs. Stobart then led her skeleton column on foot. The horrorsof the retreat increased every day, but the only way to safety had to be faced, though it lay over trackless mountains 8000 feet high, through snow, ice, unbroken forests, and bridgeless rivers. It was then mid-winter. Men and animals died by the roadside in hundreds from starvation and exposure. Writing of the retreat afterwards, Mrs. Stobart said: “Continued cold, exhaustion from forced marches, and increasing lack of food made the track a shambles ... men by the hundred lay dead, dead from cold and hunger, by the roadside, and no one could stop to bury them. But worse still, men lay dying by the roadside, dying from cold and hunger, and no one could stay to tend them. The whole scene was a combination of mental and physical misery, difficult to describe in words. No one knows, nor ever will know accurately, how many people perished, but it is believed that not less than 10,000 human beings lie sepulchred in those mountains.”
At last, on December 20, Mrs. Stobart had the triumph of leading her weary but courageous column into Scutari in Albania, without the loss of a single one of its members—the only commander who succeeded in bringing a column intact through the retreat.
The chief officer of the Serbian medical staff expressed true sentiments when he wrote to Mrs. Stobart: “You have made everybody believe that a woman can overcome and endure all the war difficulties ... you can be sure, esteemed Madam, that you have won the sympathies of the whole of Serbia.”
MISS DOROTHY RAVENSCROFTTo face page49
MISS DOROTHY RAVENSCROFT
To face page49