by Dr M. Ćurčin
I HAVE to make a confession. Before the War I loved and esteemed women, but I did not believe in Women’s Suffrage. I am afraid I was an anti-suffragist. Even to-day I don’t believe in Women’s Suffrage—except for the women of Great Britain. This War made me see that British women must have the public privileges of men, when their work and services are accepted for the public good like those of men. British women have not, of course, changed suddenly during the War, they have not suddenly become what they were not before—able to work and suffer like men, But they have now had their chance of showing beyond a doubt capacities equal to men, so that nothing remains for us but to see them and accept the consequences.
It may not seem modest for me, an unknown Serb, to come before the British and tell them what I think now and what I thought before of Women’s Suffrage and of British women. But, in the first place, I am speaking impersonally, a representative of many whose convictions have been modified with regard to this question. Public statements of the same kind are becoming every day more frequent in this country. And I have also a special reason for my confession. I have been placed in circumstances which have given me the opportunity of following closely the work of British women in one of the most exposed areas which the War has seen, that is, in Serbia, at times and in places where courage, presence of mind, and resourcefulness were necessary to face the difficulties in which, as the Serbian proverb says, heroes prove themselves.
After all I have seen, it seems to me that I could not rest till I had done the little that depended on me to add, as prophet in a foreign country, to the knowledge which is ripening among the British, as to what an asset they possess in their women.
Every one has, of course, heard or read about the Serbian retreat through Albania and Montenegro, before the enemy that was pouring in upon us on every side. In that great calamity I had the fortune to be constantly with Englishwomen, accompanying them from Kraguevatz, the heart of Shumadia, to San Giovanni di Medua, on the Adriatic coast. We did the journey in about seven weeks, mostly on foot and under very difficult conditions. Seeing these women, and observing them in all critical moments of this journey; seeing them trudging for hours through water and mud, climbing snow-clad rocks, lying down to rest on hard ground under blue or stormy skies, eating bread composed of a little flour and much dust, sometimes with nothing to eat at all, drooping and collapsing, and getting up again and pushing on; and seeing them, above all, good-tempered in spite of everything, without a word of complaint on their lips, I admired them. I admired them with what powers of admiration still remained in me.
It is true, of course, that the Englishwomen with me were especially chosen on account of their courage and capacity. They stayed behind the others with the intention of serving our wounded to the end. Yet there is no doubt that a good many of those who retreated before would have remained with the same readiness if there had been any possibility of order and organization, Besides these, a great many members of the British missions remained in Serbia together with the Serbian wounded, and it is difficult to say which showed the greater courage, those who stayed behind with the enemy or those who went on foot to Albania.
The bearing of the women who stayed with me—of each without exception—was splendid, beyond all praise. I had ample opportunity of comparing the behaviour of all the many kinds of soldiers and civilians during the retreat, and after paying due regard to the variety of conditions which obtained, I don’t hesitate a moment in giving my opinion that the British women behaved better than anybody, better than any man. As regards powers of endurance, they were equal to the Serbian soldier, who, after having lost his unit, had to find his way where there was no way, and his bread where there was no bread. As regards morale—that power of the spirit—nobody was equal to them. Beside us passed Serbian officers on horseback, and I was sometimes rather ashamed that nobody offered a horse to one of these women who did so much for the Serbian soldier, and who now walked on the heavy road from morning till night; but I am convinced that the same thought never occurred to one of them, or at least not in the way of reproach, Once only one of them was a little annoyed when a young lieutenant on horseback made fun of her as she walked through the deep mud in open Albanian opankas (sandals). He of course did not know that she was wearing the opankas out of sheer necessity, because the only boots she had left were stolen somewhere during a night halt. He certainly thought she did it because she liked it, and because it was something that was not done in England.
As one heard them singing as they sat round the camp-fire in the night, it was of course difficult not to believe that they were women in search of something out of the ordinary in the way of excitement, and that they did not come for this reason to far-distant little Serbia. In truth they sat round the fire for the simple reason that it was preferable to lying in dirty rooms or stables, and they sang because it was more prudent to sing than to hang their heads and worry about things that could not be altered. Any one who judged only by the impassive lines of their faces, and by their even temper, would not have divined the difficulties which these women would have to overcome to arrive at the next halting-place, or to go on their way to-morrow towards an uncertain goal. Only then, in Albania, did I get the true opinion of the work the British women did before in Serbia during the epidemics, about which so much was written at the time. I understood for the first time that these women whom the War brought to Serbia are neither seekers after excitement nor fanatics, but average Englishwomen. I saw that the capacity of an ordinary Englishwoman for work and suffering is greater than anything we knew before about women. It means that the level of her capacity to participate in men’s work is beyond comparison higher than the level of the average Continental woman. Now, here in England, seeing what she is doing to help to win the War, I see even more clearly what she really is, and I have to make the statement, though I am equally averse both to changing my mind and to speaking in more or less enthusiastic terms.
Our march through Albania shows so clearly what I mean that I must stop and give some particulars of it. Though I made a special effort to keep up to the mark, I must confess openly that my women fellow-travellers generally made me ashamed in all that concerns courage, endurance, and good-temper. The same is true of all the men of our company, Serbs or British. The women did exactly as we did—and more; and they were always satisfied with less, Our traditions as the stronger sex showed themselves exclusively in illegitimate desires. One man wanted to keep for himself the better place to sleep in; another one had a tendency to eat or drink more than his share ; a third objected on the way through Rugovo that he was not born to lead a packed mule he had never done it in India. On the other hand, the women always gave us of the little they had themselves, and they affirmed that they had had enough when they had had nothing. They took away their last wraps from the cart or mule to put on the exhausted Serbian soldiers, yet it was not possible to help every one on the way. They gave their last silver or nickel money to the Austrian prisoners who dragged themselves along the road. They bore silently all the hardships, and, hardly able to walk sometimes, they would stop with a joke on their lips, to say they were going on strike—when they could have little inclination to joke. The girl who went several days in opankas never complained that her boots were stolen, and I only came to know of it at Podgoritza. It was only at Brindisi, after disembarking from the ship, that I got, to know that another git] broke her arm in falling on the road in the dark. She walked for whole weeks in great pain without mentioning it, and had to stay in Brindisi for an operation. Two months later I paid her a visit in Brighton Hospital, and to-day she is again nursing the Serbian soldiers at Corfu. In England I got to know also of another nurse who the whole journey through had a bad wound on her foot. Then I remembered how she sometimes asked, when she could not go on, to be put on a horse or mule instead of the luggage. A nurse who walked with two other girls beside a bullock-cart, with her Iuggage, received a bullet in her lung and arm from a soldier’s rifle—not of course aimed at her. The wound was serious, and we thought it would prove mortal, In the field hospital where we brought her, when she returned to consciousness the first and only thing she asked was that the soldier who had unwittingly shot her should not be punished. We brought her with us as long as it was possible: at last we had to leave her with two of the nurses in the hospital at Mitrovitza, and the Austrians took them all prisoners. Now she is all right again, but, after coming home, went back again to the Front. If I once started, I might mention almost every individual for special bravery.
The leaders of this company were Dr. King May and Miss MacGlade, It was they who did most. to inspire ‘our Unit with a spirit not only of order but also of contentment, Whenever I failed in my efforts to find food or a good halting-place, they assured me that there was plenty of everything, and they were always the first to spread their blankets on the ground, just as if they had found the softest beds. Each of the members of the company tried to outdo the other in self-sacrifice, and therefore all of them will preserve none but the best memories of these difficult times. Eventually so many people traversed the same route and arrived at the same goal, but whilst every one else complained of something ‘or somebody, we were almost sorry when the journey was at an end, and we were practically only retrospectively conscious of the difficulties which we had overcome.
Only one sorrow was in their hearts all this time, that they had obeyed the order to come with me and leave their wounded in Kraguevatz. I shall never forgive myself for this all my life, I once heard Miss MacGlade say as if to herself. And I am myself not quite sure to cease ever reproaching myself for pressing them so strongly to obey the order, and separating them thus almost by force from their wounded. In any case, I shall never forget how bitter were the hours I spent at that time in Kraguevatz.
It was at the beginning of the retreat. I was left behind in Kraguevatz by Headquarters with the order to evacuate the foreign Medical Missions to the rear. There were altogether more than 200 members, mostly women. Only the minority had already left when the Commandant of the Railway Station telephoned to me that the last train was being prepared, and every one who had to leave must come to the station at once. The streets were packed with people fleeing from the town, and the organization—the weak point of Serbs and Slavs in general, even in peace times—failed completely; there was no order anywhere. When I entered the hospitals of the Missions, where I had sent word in advance telling them to prepare to start, the impression was terrible. The rooms were packed with wounded, who did not know what was going to happen to them; new wounded were arriving all the time, and the nurses and doctors were depressed by the message that they had to leave, and did not know how to finish suddenly the work into which they had put their whole heart. In the Scottish Women’s Hospital I sent a message to Dr. Inglis, the head of the Mission, who was operating at the moment, informing her of the evacuation. Soon afterwards she came to my office. Never before had I seen her in such a state; she was pale and wretched. She tried to persuade me that it was not possible to do what I was asking them to do: that they could not leave the hospital in the prevailing conditions. I knew well with whom I had to deal, and I was less willing to depress her than anybody else. I myself was deeply miserable, because I felt how, through this conflict of duties, a hostile atmosphere was developing between us. We parted with the agreement that I was to send her the Serbian doctor who was to take over her hospital, as she was anxious before leaving to show him all the more serious cases… At the last moment, when the last train was starting, Dr. Inglis arrived at the station.
I stayed behind in Kraguevatz with sixty more English women, whom it was my task to transport by road from the town. They were living in tents on the outskirts of the town, and the first evening, about nine o’clock, when I went to see what was going to happen, I found them in the barracks with the wounded—nowhere was there a sign of preparation for the start, and they had not yet dined, These two or three days, whilst the cannonade came nearer and nearer, I laboured to piece together a transport from drivers and carts taken from different military units. The only thing that could move the doctors and nurses to leave the wounded was the prospect that we could help the Serbian soldiers more by forming dressing stations close to the main army. So we were the last to leave—after all the military authorities.
In Kraljevo, where we met the others again after about a fortnight, the situation was still worse. The army was still in retreat, and we had to settle definitely what was to be done with the foreign Medical Missions. Then Dr. Inglis and Dr. Hutchison came to Kraljevo from Krushevatz and Vrnjatchka Banja to tell the chief of the Serbian Sanitary Department and the English Chief Commissioner that they could leave their wounded no longer, and they were going to stay in their hospitals whatever might happen. Some of the other English Missions joined them for this purpose, and so a weight was lifted from our hearts, because not only did we not know whom to leave with our wounded, but also we had no means of transporting the Missions. The transport that we had hardly sufficed for those who were already on the way. Our party had to continue to form dressing stations, and so to begin with we went to the Monastery of Studenitza, but the order came soon that we must go on, It was then only that the true retreat began, with all its vicissitudes. Soldiers and civilians, men, women, and children, artillery and army service corps, Red Cross units, Austrian and Bulgarian prisoners, the Metropolitan and the monks dragging the bodies of the Saints in their coffins behind them—all this straggling army of people crawled over the mountains. Motor cars, motor lorries, personal cars, bullock and horse-carts of all descriptions rushed along, dashing into each other, over the very worst of roads, in the pouring rain, hurrying on with scarce a halt through water, and snow, and mud.
The time which they spent in Serbia during the War is now nothing but a memory to these women, who followed one another back to England—some from the retreat, some from captivity. But, besides the souvenirs, nearly every one of them brought home the wish to return to Serbia. These women, who had passed such anxious days, want to return to the Serbs to help them once more. This is the best result of their stay in Serbia, and the best testimony both to themselves and to Serbia.
I must confess that I was agreeably surprised with this result. It was, of course, clear to every onlooker that the English nurses and doctors liked the Serbian wounded soldiers and got on well with them. But the English nurse likes every patient—even a negro—and she nurses him to the best of her ability. I was afraid that these women from the West, from prosperous and well-organized Britain, once they had done their duty and finished their work, could not possibly wish to return to a country of such restricted conditions and undeveloped material culture; to a country where there were flies but no butter, where the pavements were even rougher than the rough high roads, and where two of the three words of the language which they learnt to pronounce were ‘nema’ (there is nothing) and ‘sutra’ (to-morrow). But the British woman came to Serbia to help, and, devoting herself with fervour, she put her whole heart into her work, and she felt and realised the nature of the people with whom she came in contact. Work is always the best intermediary, and teaches better than any book. She began to love the Serbian soldier—that is to say, the Serbian peasant—not only because he was wounded, but also because of himself. She realised his good-nature and she tried to meet him half-way, and thus it was the third word of her vocabulary which she used the most often, and apparently not only in speaking to him, but also in her own heart for everything that concerned him. The word was ‘dobro’1 (good—well—all right).
Where there’s a will there’s a way. And as it was with the language, so it was also with other things. The English nurses saw that the Serbian peasant was willing to do anything she asked if she spoke nicely to him, and that he would learn to open the windows of his own home just as he had learnt to use soap and to change his shirt. She realised his readiness to improve himself and his appreciation of progress, and she felt instinctively his devotion to her as the personification of this progress.
‘Thence came her wish that their acquaintance might ripen into something more, and not remain merely an episode of this great War. Can anything show more clearly the greatness and goodness of a truly cultured people? And is there a greater consolation for the Serbs in this War?
Before allowing myself to be convinced that this attitude of theirs was not due to mere friendliness or amiable politeness, I tried to examine it carefully. But to-day it is easy to prove their sincerity by the mere fact that many of the English women who had been in Serbia have already returned to the Serbs, or are on their way back to them. There they are again with the soldiers and refugees in Corfu and in Corsica, and in fact everywhere where there are Serbian soldiers, and they want to go back to Serbia to help the people in their distress. There were more than 600 British women with the medical missions in Serbia. There will soon be the same number, or even more, working for the Serbs dispersed everywhere over Europe.
In this wish of the British women to help the Serbs there are certainly reasons immediately connected with the war, reasons of a military and political nature—they want to enable the Serbian army to go on fighting, they want to correct the mistakes that have been made in regard to this army, &c. And commiseration with suffering plays a large part also, But the most consoling fact of all is that the main reasons lie deeper still: there were people in Great Britain who came to the Serbs and felt sympathy with them, and wanted to get to know them better, and to make them known in this country.
I should like to mention how the British women found out immediately one of the main characteristics of the Serbian people, and thus made a discovery which contradicted nearly all that was known in England about the Serbs, and was so contrary to the traditional British opinion, that none other save a British authority on the subject could have convinced his fellow-countrymen that their opinion was wrong. The English doctors and nurses, who knew their patients well, are unanimous in declaring that the Serbs are a peace-loving people. They had witnessed in their hospital wards the tragic fate of the Serbian soldier, who though forced to live with his rifle in his hand yet never thinks of anything else but his family and his fields, where he wants to live quietly and work, just like his fellow-peasants in Western Europe.
Situated as he is midway between East and West, he has to guard the main highway, he has to prevent the Asiatic hordes from overflowing Europe, and he has to prevent the European invaders from overflowing the East—and so he can never rest and work, although he is born for that and asks for nothing better.
Somebody may ask how it was possible in this age of newspapers and travel for, such an elementary truth to remain hidden, until the Englishwoman—while dressing his wound—discovered the soul of the Serbian peasant and told the world what she had seen and heard?
Two main factors have been up till now the chief impediments to closer relations between Britons and Serbs, namely, distance and diplomacy. Obviously there is no reason why diplomats—all good European diplomats —should know anything more about the Serbs than about all the other nations whom they were supposed to understand and interpret in their respective countries. So we can find no fault with them. If perhaps this terrible War is the result of their ignorance, yet they are not to blame, and it was the fault of those who sent them, and who left them in their posts. Because of the distance and the geographical position, news from Serbia came to England —when it came at all—through the unclean medium of the Vienna and Budapest papers, and, as may easily be understood now, it had of necessity to be rather one-sided. Besides this, the whole question was complicated enough, and it did not seem to be of immediate interest to England,
There is now a prospect that many things will be improved. The Vienna and Budapest papers—whatever may be their fate—will certainly not follow their old policy after the war. And what is more certain, they will no longer be the main source of the Near-Eastern and Serbian question for Western statesmen. The ignorance of the diplomats, even supposing it remains the same as before the War, will not be able in this country to do so much harm to the Serbs, owing to the fact that the task of informing the people has been placed in stronger hands—in the hands of British women.
They came and got to know the Serb—his good and bad qualities—in his own home, and they want to continue to help him even now when they are back in their own .
country. They are also going to get to know and to love the second and the greater part of the Serbian people, those who have been Austrian subjects until now, about whom the Vienna and Budapest papers used to give false information to the rest of Europe, and on account of whom, as a matter of fact, this War is being fought. These women will give all the necessary information at home; they are giving it already. This is what is wanted.
The last phase of warfare has come for the Serbian nation. If it cannot be liberated and united now, then it can never be. An incomplete decision would be no decision at all. Absurd political formations, like the Austrian State, that ordinary common-sense ought never to have sanctioned, must now be annihilated by the sword. But common-sense has now to rebuild a new order of things, and more than half of common-sense is a correct knowledge of facts.
The British women who adopted as one item of their programme the Serbian question, will have to be consulted when the final decision is made in regard to this subject. The work which they have done in the War will certainly give them the vote after the War. In any case it will solve their question in a radical way. The Serbian people, whom they helped so devotedly during the War, will be happy if they are going to help them also in time of peace. Moreover, at the risk of a charge of heresy, let me say that the Serbian people will certainly not object if their policy in this country will be led by women.
- It is not only amusing but also characteristic how the English women were able to hold an entire conversation with the Serbian Soldiers, and—so to speak—with this one word alone, pronouncing it according to the occasion quickly or slowly, sharply or gently, with a different accentuation, drawling it or repeating it, Dr. Helen Hanson, in her address read before the Royal Society of Arts on February 23rd, 1016, says (and this is only one of her many true remarks): ‘It was remarkable what satisfactory conversations the least intelligent of us could hold. If one knew the word “dobro,” for instance, one proceeded thus: one entered the ward and addressed the patient in an inquiring and sympathetic tone, asking, “Dobro?” To this he would answer, “Dobro, doctor, dobro.” One would then respond genially, “Dobro, dobro,” and a conversation pleasing to all parties terminated. . . . Very often the reply to one’s first “dobro” was given in a long rambling speech. This enabled one to shine far more, because one listened with care and then repeated it again in a sympathetic tone, which sounded as if one had understood the whole.’ I remember myself, one day, in Kraguevatz a nurse coming to tell us about her long talk with a wounded soldier, and the different things which he had told her. ‘Does he speak English?’ some one asked her. ‘No: but we spoke Serbian,’ the nurse answered, very pleased with herself for having understood nearly everything. And yet the word ‘dobro’ composed practically also her whole vocabulary. ↩︎
