The Women's Victory—and After: Personal Reminiscences, 1911-1918

I have already touched in an earlier chapter on the most important of all the war activities of the N.U.W.S.S. – the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service, initiated and carried through by the genius and devotion of the hon. secretary of our Scottish Federation, Dr. Elsie Inglis. Her name and her great work are now known and honoured throughout the world, and it is unnecessary here to dwell upon them at any length. In the old days before the war Dr. Inglis used to say she had two passions, "suffrage and surgery." Before the end of her honoured life came she added to these two S's yet another, "Serbia." How this came about is worth recalling, and can be studied in detail in the "Life of Dr. Elsie Inglis," by Lady Frances Balfour. It affords an example of "the soul of goodness in things evil would men observingly distil it out." Her first wish in September, 1914, was to place her services, her knowledge and skill in her profession, at the service of her country. In an interview with a high official of the R.A.M.C. at the War Office in that month, when she asked his advice as to what course she should take, his reply was: "Dear lady, go home and keep quiet" – in other words, her help was refused. The British Red Cross adopted the same attitude. She was therefore compelled to place her organization under the French Red Cross. The great hospital at Royaumont was the first to be established. The N.U.W.S.S. Scottish Women's Hospitals were complete hospital units, officered entirely by women. The physicians and surgeons, nurses, dressers, orderlies, motor drivers, and domestic staff were all women. The whole scheme was initiated by Dr. Elsie Inglis, and was enthusiastically taken up by the whole N.U.W.S.S. The work quickly grew to large proportions. I have a letter from Dr. Inglis, dated October 13th, 1914, on the financial aspect of her scheme. At that date she only had £213 in hand. At the date of writing this, August 18th, 1919, the total collected for the S.W.H. amounted to £428,905 1s. 3d. The total number of beds in France and Serbia for which the organization was responsible exceeded 1,800. Powerful committees were formed in Scotland, South Wales, and in London to support the hospitals, and their membership was not confined to the N.U.W.S.S. – indeed, especially in Scotland, several influential non-suffragists joined in promoting the great work. It must not for a moment be supposed that only suffragists were active and devoted. It was recognized by the instinctive common sense of the great majority of women throughout the whole country, suffragist and non-suffragist, militant and non-militant, that their first duty was by every practical means in their power to strengthen the resources of their country so as to aid it to issue successfully from the great struggle. Those who took a contrary view did exist, but their numbers were very small. But it is a source of pride and thankfulness that the womanhood of the whole country, quite irrespective of political party or creed, were eager to do everything in their power to help their country. The "militants" immediately abandoned militant tactics. Many of them took part in what was known as the Women's Emergency Corps, which readily undertook a large variety of patriotic activities. Several well-known antisuffragists, among them Mrs. Humphry Ward and Miss Gladys Pott, did patriotic work of a first-class kind. Among the former "militants," two, Dr. Flora Murray and Dr. Louisa Garrett Anderson, were, I believe, the very first women doctors to take out a well-equipped hospital unit, officered entirely by women, to France. The necessary funds were privately subscribed. It was of these ladies that Surgeon-General Sir Alfred Keogh, head of the R.A.M.C., afterwards said that they "were worth their weight, not in gold, but in diamonds." He had by this time had practical experience of their professional and personal work, both in Paris and, later, in another hospital at Wimereux. Sir Alfred Keogh's words were no empty compliment, for he very shortly afterwards placed Dr. F. Murray and Dr. L. G. Anderson at the head of a large military hospital of 520 beds in London, posts which carried the rank of Major in the army.

Their first hospital was established in a spacious hotel in the Champs Elysées, and was described as the best equipped in Paris. It became quite a show place, and those who visited it were full of admiration for the devotion, care, and skill with which the patients were tended. The men were most grateful and appreciative of the skill of the women surgeons, dressers, and nurses. "There was a wonderful atmosphere of sympathy and home about the wards, and the men were not slow to respond to it," wrote a visitor. Another visitor asked one of the wounded men: "Is it possible there are no men surgeons in this place?" The man, a Highlander, replied by another question: "And what would we be wanting men for?" Other hospitals officered by women were taken out to Belgium and the North of France quite independently of the N.U.W.S.S.; but the Scottish Women's Hospitals were the only ones which were originated and run, as one of their main pieces of war work, by a suffrage organization.

Our first unit arrived at the Abbaye de Royaumont in December, 1914. The building had then been uninhabited for about ten years, and was a bare shell, without water, light, or heating; magnificent indeed architecturally, but almost incredibly forbidding, icy cold, dark, and comfortless.

The forerunners will not easily forget the first few weeks in the Abbaye, when they had to cope with the difficulties of converting this dark ice-house into warm and comfortable wards for sick and wounded soldiers. But it was done cheerfully, and even gaily. Outside labour was practically impossible to get, and the whole staff turned to and did the work themselves: charing and scrubbing went on; electric light and electric stoves were procured; the equipment arrived; the pioneers after a time had the pleasure of sleeping in beds instead of on the floors, and by the middle of January, 1915, the huge vaulted halls were all white and spotless, and were transformed into comfortable wards, with rows of cosy beds covered with cheery red blankets. There were 100 beds to begin with, but this number quickly grew to 200; then to 400; and eventually, in the very last months of the war, to 600.

The Medical Department of the French Army, probably a little sceptical at first, visited the hospital, examined it thoroughly, and expressed their warm approval, especially of the X-ray apparatus which was the only one for many miles round, and of the very practical character of the whole equipment.

Gradually the most difficult and serious cases among French soldiers gravitated to this hospital. General Joffre showed a very kindly interest in it, and on one occasion sent an aide-de-camp with a gift of money for distribution among the patients as they left. The medical and surgical work done has been of the very highest excellence, and was warmly appreciated by the patients. The women surgeons made a great study of conservative surgery, and many a wounded man left Royaumont with limbs intact, saved by the skill and patience of the Scottish Women's unit.

The second hospital to be opened in France was at Troyes. It was financed by the students of Newnham and Girton, a fact which is said to have made a deep impression on the French soldiers. This hospital was directly under the French military authorities, and when the complications in the Balkans became acute it was ordered to Salonica. An enlargement of this hospital, financed by our Manchester society, was under the medical direction of Dr. Mary Blair. When Serbia was overrun by the Austrians her unit was transferred to Corsica, where she had control of a hospital for Serbian refugees at Ajaccio.

The N.U.W.S.S. eventually had five units in Serbia. One of the most magnificent pieces of work they did was the successful grappling, under Dr. Inglis's guidance, with the typhus epidemic in 1915, which threatened the very existence of the Serbian Army. It may be said that twice Dr. Inglis saved the Serbian nation from despair – once when she stamped out the typhus epidemic, and once when the country was overrun by the then victorious Germans and Austrians. This compelled the withdrawal of most of our units. The papers told of their wonderful tramp of 300 miles across ice-bound mountains. Dr. Elsie Inglis and Dr. Alice Hutchinson, with their respective staffs, did not leave Serbia when the other units left. They stayed on and continued their work until they were taken prisoners by the Austrians. They were prisoners for three months. Dr. Alice Hutchinson told how she and her unit kept Christmas, 1915:

"In the evening we sang carols and drank toasts. We even ventured to sing 'God save the King' under our breath… It cheered us wonderfully. We had our British flag with us, too. I wound it round my body under my clothes when we evacuated our hospital, so that it should not be trampled on and insulted." (The Common Cause, February 18th, 1916).

She refused to give up her hospital equipment without a receipt, and on being ordered to send her unit to a cholera hospital, she refused, except on condition that her nurses were first inoculated, and also paid for their work, and their proper rank accorded to the doctors. "At this," she said, "there was a terrible scene. I was sworn at and cursed, and told I was a coward; but I would not give in." She was willing to work herself for cholera patients, but would not allow her nurses to do so without inoculation.

Dr. Elsie Inglis also showed the same fine spirit. They both said that the Germans, officers and men alike, behaved like brutes, the latter using disgusting and insulting language. The Austrians, officers and men, were kind and polite. But the hardships of the imprisonment were shortage of food and gross overcrowding. Our doctors were enthusiastic in all they said of the courage and devotion of the Serbians. They reached home safe and sound, and made an appeal for additional subscriptions to continue their splendid work.

The scientific work done by the women doctors at Royaumont received an unsolicited testimonial in 1916 from a leading French man of science, Dr. Weinberg, who held the office of Chef de Laboratoire at the Pasteur Institute, Paris.

Lecturing to members of the medical profession in Glasgow on gas gangrene, he paid a splendid tribute to the work of the Scottish Women's Hospital at Royaumont. He had, he said, seen hundreds and hundreds of military hospitals, but none the organization and direction of which won his admiration so completely. Every duty in the hospital, from those of the chief surgeon to the chauffeur of the motor ambulance, was performed by women. He was impelled to express his admiration of the manner in which cases were treated. The military authorities had such confidence in the hospital that they were ready to trust to its care the most severe class of cases. Of the bacteriological department of the hospital, which was arranged by Dr. Elizabeth Butler, Dr. Weinberg was equally enthusiastic. He was struck with the most perfect order which prevailed, notwithstanding the apparent entire absence of anything in the form of rigid disciplinary measures. He attributed this order to the fact that the patients recognized how devoted were the staff to their care and interests. It was the soldier's natural recognition of the excellent services and attention given by all the staff, and particularly by the chief surgeon, Miss Ivens, who was ably assisted by numerous colleagues all inspired by the same devotion. Incidentally, Dr. Weinberg expressed the opinion that he could not imagine any activity on the part of women that would more effectively further the cause of the women's movement than the institutions carried on by the Scottish Women's Hospitals.

The work of the hospital at Royaumont was particularly heavy in the spring of 1918. The place was frequently exposed to bombardment. The three operating theatres were kept busy night and day, the surgeons having frequently to work by candle-light and under shell-fire. In July the hospital was taken over by the French military authorities, when the number of beds was brought up to 600. Down to the very end of the war the work of the Scottish Women's Hospitals was continued in France and Serbia undiminished in vigour and extent. In October and November, 1918, the organization was maintaining 1,885 beds. Many of the doctors and nurses have received decorations and other honours from the French and Serbian nations; but, so far as I know, no national honour has been conferred on them by the country of their birth. In recognition of her splendid work, the chief medical officer at Royaumont, Dr. Frances Ivens, received the Croix de Guerre avec Palme, and twenty-three of her staff the Croix de Guerre avec Étoiles from the French Army. In February, 1919, the hospital was closed; but the organization of the Scottish Women's Hospitals still exists. The committee at headquarters in Edinburgh are raising a fund to establish a training school for Serbian nurses in Belgrade as a memorial to Dr. Elsie Inglis; while the London committee, with the same object in view, are in process of endowing a chair of medicine in the University of Belgrade. The name of Elsie Inglis will live for ever in Serbian history. Her works do follow her, and her memory will be cherished by the gallant nation to which she devoted her great powers.

Late in the autumn of 1915 the N.U.W.S.S. resolved to send some units of women doctors and nurses to Russia to aid the civil population, more especially women and children, who had become refugees in consequence of the German advance over the western provinces of Russia. The accounts which reached us of the sufferings of these refugees were terrible. The roads by which they had travelled were marked by the graves of those who had fallen by the wayside. A maternity hospital was opened in Petrograd as well as "barak" hospitals for all kinds of infectious diseases. Our units were warmly welcomed by the suffering population and by the Zemstvos. They co-operated with the Britain to Poland Fund Committee, and also with the Moscow Union of Zemstvos. Eight hospitals were equipped and opened. Our doctors and their staffs on their arrival immediately began a fierce fight with diphtheria, scarlet fever, smallpox, typhus, and scabies; and skilled treatment saved many hundreds of lives. Over £11,000 was raised, and we were served by most able and devoted staffs, several of whom laid down their lives in the work in which they had engaged. The work was brought to a premature end by the chaos which quickly supervened upon the Russian Revolution of March, 1917. The N.U.W.S.S. did me the honour of naming the Russian units after me. The doctors and nurses of the M.F. Hospitals returned finally to England in August, 1917. The welcome our units received from the Zemstvos and the students, male and female, of the University of Kazan made us feel that they were appreciated, and we can only trust that, like other good seed, the work of our units will bring forth fruit in due season.

CHAPTER VIII

WOMEN'S WAR WORK AS IT AFFECTED PUBLIC OPINION

"A land of settled Government,A land of just and old renown,Where Freedom slowly broadens downFrom precedent to precedent."

The war revolutionized the industrial position of women. It found them serfs and left them free. It not only opened to them opportunities of employment in a number of skilled trades, but, more important even than this, it revolutionized men's minds and their conception of the sort of work of which the ordinary everyday woman was capable. It opened men's eyes to the national waste involved in condemning women to forms of work needing only very mediocre intelligence. It also opened their eyes to the national as well as the personal value of the ordinary domestic work of women, which has been in their hands for uncounted generations. It ploughed up the hardened soil of ancient prejudice, dissolving it and replacing it by a soil capable of fructifying the seeds of new ideas. Not even the most inveterate of antisuffragists could have ventured to say, after the experience gained by the war, what one of them quoted on a previous page had said just before the war, to the effect that, apart from breeding, women were of no national importance whatever.

It made women themselves, as well as men, realize the great national importance of women's ordinary domestic work. One example which went the round of the Press will illustrate this. In a convalescent camp of 2,820 men in the South of England the employment of women cooks in the place of men caused a saving in one month of £900, and at the same time the men were better and not worse fed. The saving was not effected by cutting down the wages bill or by stinting the supplies, but by the more skilful use of food-stuffs and the sensible expedient of employing those who knew their job in the place of those who did not. As an example, it may be mentioned that in many soldiers' camps, employing men cooks, the tea, served out in ample quantities and of excellent quality, was thrown away in consequence of the adoption of the odious and filthy trick of boiling the water for it in the same vessels, uncleansed, in which the meat for the mid-day dinner had been boiled. The result was illustrative of bad work in general; the tea was wasted, the men were disgruntled, and a general impression created that Government property could be thrown away without doing any harm to anyone.

John Bright used to say that the one good thing about war was that it taught people geography. If he were living now he might very truly say that it taught people political economy; that a nation grows rich by producing, and not by destroying; that all waste is creative of poverty. War even illuminates the abstruse and difficult subject of foreign exchanges, and shows that no nation grows rich by printing promises to pay on pieces of paper. War also teaches the supreme national value of life, and illuminates Ruskin's saying, "There is no wealth but life." It is a realization of this which has fundamentally raised the position of women in every country which has come within the radius of its great searchlights.

The actual steps by which the war raised the industrial status of women from serfdom to freedom are not difficult to trace. In the first eighteen months of the war more than five million young men from every class, but mainly from the flower of the industrial population, volunteered for military service. Before the end of the war Great Britain was maintaining in the war more than eight and a half million men.6 This naturally left a shortage of labour in nearly all industries, including agriculture. Naturally also there was, simultaneously with this reduction in numbers of the men in industry, a huge increase in the demand of our own Government and the Governments of our Allies for arms and ammunition, cloth for uniforms, boots, ships, hutments, food for the armies, optical glass, and every sort of military equipment. Every man and woman who could work in the fields or factories producing these things could get continuous employment at wages higher than had ever before been paid. In September, 1915, after fourteen months of war, the rate of unemployment registered at Labour Exchanges was only ½ per cent., the lowest on record. The weekly sum paid in wages had gone up by the end of October by £519,484. In March of the same year what is known as the Treasury agreement with the Trade Unionists came into existence, by which the trade unions consented, in face of the national emergency, to suspend for the duration of the war their rules and customs which prevented the employment of women in most of the skilled trades. The Treasury, on its part, gave a solemn promise not to use women as a reservoir of cheap labour, and agreed to give the same wages for the same output, and, moreover, to restore by Act of Parliament when the war was over the pre-war practices of trade unions, which had severely limited the employment of women. Women themselves were not in any way consulted when this agreement was arrived at. They were, therefore, not parties to it; and suffragists generally, while welcoming the breaking down of the barriers which prevented women having a free choice in industry, even if this were only temporary, felt that the restoration of pre-war practices by Act of Parliament when the war was concluded would make the industrial position of women, in a sense, worse than ever; for formerly, as they pointed out, women were excluded from nearly all the best paid trades simply by the rules of private societies: it was a different and a worse position to be excluded from them by statute.

In 1915, however, it was from every point of view of the first importance to get the trade union embargo on women's labour removed; and when it was removed, instantly evidence began to pour in of the high productivity of women's work. It was almost ridiculous to watch the amazement of the ordinary man when he saw how rapidly women learned men's jobs, and how, by their patriotic zeal and entire innocence of the trade union practice of ca' canny, their output frequently exceeded, and exceeded largely, the output of men working the same machinery for the same number of hours. The first evidence which reached the public of the high efficiency of women's labour was contained in an article in the trade journal The Engineer of August 20th, 1915, the following passage from which is here quoted:

"There is a widespread idea that the only machines which women can work are automatic or semi-automatic tools with which it is impossible to make mistakes. This idea is being daily disproved in the factory to which we have referred above, where some most delicate operations, necessitating the exercise of great skill and high intelligence, are being performed. We need only mention one case, but it will appeal to every mechanical engineer. In a certain screwing operation it was customary before the employment of women to rough the thread out with the tool, and then to finish it off with taps. Some trouble having arisen owing to the wearing of the taps, the women of their own initiative did away with the second operation, and are now accurately chasing out the threads to gauge with the tool alone. This is work of which any mechanic might feel proud… In fact, it may be stated with absolute truth that women have shown themselves perfectly capable of performing operations which have hitherto been exclusively carried out by men."

Sir William Beardmore, then President of the Iron and Steel Institute, and Chairman of the Parkhead Ironworks, Glasgow, spoke in his presidential address of the high productivity of women's labour. He quoted the case of a new machine introduced by his firm, of which it was desired to test the utility. A good workman was induced with some difficulty to try it and to lay aside, for the sake of the experiment, the traditional restriction of output. The machine did well, but not so well as the firm had been led to expect. Then another experiment was made, that of putting women on the job. "Using the same machines, and working the same number of hours, their output was more than double that of the thoroughly trained mechanic." The newspapers about this time began to be full of articles praising up to the skies the "wonderful," "amazing," "extraordinary" mechanical capability of women. The case was quoted of a woman, formerly a charwoman, who had been put on to do gun breech work. Her job was to bore a hole ⅛ inch in diameter dead true through 12 inches of solid steel. The test was the tally of broken tools, and at the time of writing this woman, the former "char," had a clean slate. Every successive Minister of Munitions, and almost every other Minister, spoke enthusiastically of the extraordinary value to the nation of women's work. Mr. Lloyd George said: "Their work is absolutely indispensable, and they themselves are extraordinarily adaptable." And again: "I am anxious to bear testimony to the tremendous part played by the women of England in this vital epoch of human history." Mr. Montagu said in the House of Commons in his first speech after becoming Minister of Munitions: "Women of every station, with or without previous experience … have proved themselves able to undertake work which before the war was regarded solely as the province of men, and often of skilled men alone. Indeed, it is not too much to say that our armies have been saved and victory assured by the women in the munition factories." Mr. Churchill confessed that without the work of women it would have been impossible to win the war; and also referred to the excellence of its quality, as well as the enormous character of its volume.