Lady Frances Balfour

“ A smile, surely one of the clouds of glory she trailed from heaven, and carried back untarnished by the tragedies of a stricken earth; they are chiefly valuable in the signs of a steadfast, independent will. The interest of all Elsie’s early development lay in the comradeship with a father whose wide benevolence and understanding love was to be the guide and helper in his daughter’s career. ”

“ If one avenue was closed, try another. If one Principal was adamant, his day could not last for ever; prepare the way for his successor. Indomitable, unbeaten, unsoured, Dr. Inglis, with the smiling, fearless brow, trod the years till the influence of the ‘red planet Mars’ opened to her and others the gate of opportunity. She had achieved many things, and was far away from her city and its hard-earned practice when at length, in 1916, the University, under a new ‘open-minded, generous-hearted Head,’ opened its doors to women medical students. ”

“ Those who watched the gathering war clouds, and the decline of their Parliamentary hopes, did not realise that, in the overruling providence of God, the devastating war among nations was to open a new era for women. They were no longer to be held cheap, as irresponsibles—mere clogs on the machinery of the State. They were to be called on to take the place of men who were dying by the thousand for their homes, fighting against the doctrine that military force is the only true Government in a Christian world. ”

“ But Elsie, undaunted, interviewed each of the three directors herself. After every bell in Charlotte Square had been rung and all interviewed, she returned from this great expedition triumphant. [32] All had consented, so the damsels interned from nine to three were given the gardens, and the grim, dull, palisaded square must have suddenly been made to blossom like the rose. Would that some follower of Elsie Inglis even now might ring the door bells and get the gates unlocked to the rising generation. ”

“ The Scottish Committee hastened out supplies and staff.
‘For three months the epidemic raged, and all women may ever be proud of the way those women worked. It was like a long-drawn-out battle, and not one of them played the coward. Not one of them asked to come away. There were three deaths and nine cases of illness among the unit; and may we not truly claim that those three women who died gave their lives for the great cause for which our country stands to-day as much as any man in the trenches.’
Dr. ”

“ Giles’ lay in the centre of her healing mission, and her alert active figure was a familiar sight, as the little congregation gathered for the daily service. When the kirk skailed in the fading light of the short days, the westering sun on the windows would often fall on the fair hair and bright face of her whose day had been spent in ministering work. On these occasions she never talked of her work. If she was joined by a friend, Dr. Elsie waited to see what was the pressing thought in the mind of her companion, and into that she at once poured her whole sympathy. ”

“ Elsie one idea always started another, and ‘a felt want’ in any department of life always meant an instantly conceived scheme of supplying the need. Those who ‘came after’ sometimes felt a breathless wonder how ways and means could be found to establish and settle the new idea which had been evolved from the fertile brain. ”

“ The Dean of the Order of the Thistle revealed the thoughts of many hearts in his farewell words:—
‘We are assembled this day with sad but proud and grateful hearts to remember before God a very dear and noble lady, our beloved sister, Elsie Inglis, who has been called to her rest. We mourn only for ourselves, not for her. She has died as she lived, in the clear light of faith and self-forgetfulness, and now her [251] name is linked for ever with the great souls who have led the van of womanly service for God and man. ”

“ On what theory or doctrine was it just or beneficent to exclude women from University degrees?’ There came no answer, for logic cannot be altogether ignored by a University Commission, so, without opposition or blare of trumpets, the Scottish Universities opened their degrees to all students. It was of good omen that the Commission sat in high Dunedin, under that rock bastion where Margaret, saint and queen, was the most learned member of the Scottish nation in the age in which she reigned. ”

“ The date of Elsie’s birth was in the dawn of the movement which believed it possible that women could have a mind and a brain of their own, and that the freedom of the one and the cultivation of the other was not a menace to the possessive rights of the family, or the ruin of society at large. ”

“ There have been many parents who gave their daughters no reason to call them blessed, when they were left alone unprovided with gear or education. In all periods of family history, such instances as Mr. Inglis’ outlook for his daughters is uncommon. He desired for them equal opportunities, and the best and highest education. He gave them the best of his mind, not its dregs, and a comradeship which made a rare and happy entrance for them into life’s daily toil and struggle. ”

“ It is funny the stimulating effect a big school has on a hospital. The Royal here is nearly as big and quite as rich as the Edinburgh Royal, but there is no pretence that they really are in their teaching and arrangements the third hospital in the kingdom, as they are in size. The London Hospital is the biggest, and then comes Edinburgh, and this is the third. ”

“ Women linked by a common cause had learnt how to work together. The best brains in their midst were put at the service of the Suffrage, and they had watched in the political arena where to expect support, and who could be trusted among the leaders of all parties. No shrewder or more experienced body of politicians were to be found in the country than those women drawn from all classes, in all social, professional, and industrial spheres, who acknowledged Mrs. Fawcett as their leader, and trusted no one party, sect, or politician in the year 1914. ”

“ But absorbed as she was in her noble task of healing, she saw beyond it the high national ideal that inspired the Serbs to endure sufferings unexampled even in this [160] war, and became an enthusiastic convert to the cause of Southern Slav unity. To her, as to all true Europeans, the principle of nationality is not, indeed, the end of all human wisdom, but the sure foundation upon which a new and saner internationalism is to be built, and an inalienable right to which great and small alike are entitled. ”

“ He was in command at Krushinjevatz when we were taken prisoners. Every one says how anxiously they are looking out for us, and, indeed, we shall have our work cut out for us. We are two little field hospitals for a whole Division. Think if that was the provision for our own men. They are such a magnificent body of men. We saw the 2nd Division preparing in Odessa. Only from the point of view of the war, they ought to be looked after, but when one remembers that they are men, every one of them with somebody who cares for them, it is dreadful. ”

“ The misfortune of such a controversy as that of the ‘Rights of Women’ is that it necessarily means the opposition has to prove a negative proposition—a most sterilising process. Political parties were so anxious to prove that women were incapable of citizenship, that the whole community got into a pernicious habit of mind. Women were underrated in every sphere of industry or scientific knowledge. ”

“ Women pioneers mounted platforms and asserted ‘Rights,’ and qualified for jealously closed professions—always, from the first, upheld and companied by ‘Greathearts,’ men few but chosen, who, like John Inglis, recognised that no community was the stronger for keeping its people, be they black or white, male or female, in any form of ignorance or bonded serfdom.
As Elsie grew up, she found herself walking in the new age. ”

“ Within sight of the grave, it was granted to her grateful brethren, the representatives of the Serbian nation, to carry her coffin, and lower it to the place where the mortal in her was to lie in its last rest. Her life’s story was grouped around her—the Serbian officers, the military of her own nation at war, the women comrades [253] of the common cause, the poor and suffering—to one and all she had been the inspiring succourer. ”

“ The truce made no difference to any section of the Suffrage party. It was accepted by the whole people. War found both men and women unprepared, but the path of glory was clear for the men. A great army must be formed in defence of national liberty. The army was mobilised. It would have been well had the strength of the women been mobilised in the same hour. Their long claim for the rights of citizenship made them keenly alive and responsive to the call of national service. ”

“ When the war caused a truce to be pronounced in all questions of acute political difference, the unenfranchised people realised that this might mean the failure of their hopes for an indefinite time. They never foresaw that, for the second time within a century, emancipation was to be bought by the life blood of a generation. ”

“ Jex Blake, and it was successful, proving in its course that the treatment of the students had been without justification.
Looking back on this period of the difficult task of opening the higher education to women, it is easy to see the defects of many of those engaged in the struggle. The attitude towards women was so intolerably unjust that many of the pioneers became embittered in soul, and had in their bearing to friends or opponents an air which was often provocative of misunderstanding. ”

“ It seems to me Elsie’s whole life was full of championship of the weak, and she was so strong in maintaining what was right. I feel sure she has inspired many. I remember once saying in connection with some work I was going to begin, ‘I wonder if I shall be able,’ and Elsie saying in her bright way, ‘What man has done man can do.’ I am so glad that she had the opportunity of showing her great administrative capacity, and that her power is known and acknowledged. She is a great woman. ”

“ Inglis and her unit came to the help of the Jugoslavs, shared their privations and misfortunes, and spared no effort in their cause.
‘History will record the name of Elsie Inglis, like that of Lady Paget, as pre-eminent among that band of women who have redeemed for all time the honour of Britain in the Balkans. Among the Serbs it is already assuming an almost legendary quality. To us it will serve to remind us that Florence Nightingale will never be without successors among us. ”

“ We had not a single case of typhus; we had a greater achievement than its prevention. Late of an evening, when men among the prisoners were put into the wards, straight from the march, unwashed and crawling with lice, there was great indignation among the patients already in. “Doktoritza,” they said, “if you put these dirty men in among us we shall all get typhus.” Our hearts rejoiced. If we have done nothing else, we thought, we have driven [186] that fact home to the Serbian mind that dirt and typhus go together.’ ”

“ It is most interesting to see how everybody is on the side of the change, from Russian officers, who come to tea and beam at us, and say, “Heresho” (good) to the men in the wards. In any case they say we shall find the difference all over the war area. One Russian officer, who was here before the news came, was talking about the Revolution in England two hundred years ago, and said it was the most interesting period of European history. “They say all these ideas began with the French Revolution, but they didn’t—they began long before in England,” he thought. ”

“ When it became obvious that the Serbian army could not resist the combined Austrians, Germans, Magyars, and Bulgarians, who were about four times their numbers, the main care of the Serbian military authorities was what to do with the hospitals full of wounded, and whom to leave with the wounded soldiers, who refused to be left to fall into the hands of the cruel enemy. Then the Scottish women declared that they were not going to leave their patients, and that they would stay with them, whatever the conditions, and whatever might be expected from the enemy. ”

“ That is the opinion of the Russian soldier! If you were here you would recognise the new tone of the Russian soldier in these days,—but I am glad he approves of our hospital.’
‘Odessa, June 24, 1917.
‘I wish you could realise how the little nations, Serbs and Rumanians and Poles, count on us. What a comfort it is to them to think we are “the most tenacious” nation in Europe. In their eyes it all hangs on us. It is all terrible and awful. I don’t believe we can disentangle it all in our minds just now. [230] The only thing is just to go on doing one’s bit. ”

“ If we have a thoroughly good organisation here, we can send out more and more units, or strengthen those already out. We can add motor ambulances, organise rest stations on the lines of communication, and so on. It will all depend on how well we are supplied with funds and brains at our base. Each unit ought to be carefully chosen, and the very best women doctors must go out with them. I wrote this morning to the Registered Medical Women’s Association in London, and asked them to help us, and offered to address a meeting when I come up for your meeting. ”