Women in the War Zone E-Book

Anne Powell

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1096

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2001

Beschreibung

In our collective memory, the First World War is dominated by men. The sailors, soldiers, airmen and politicians about whom histories are written were male, and the first half of the twentieth century was still a time when a woman's place was thought to be in the home. It was not until the Second World War that women would start to play a major role both in the armed forces and in the factories and the fields. Yet there were some women who were able to contribute to the war effort between 1914 and 1918, mostly as doctors and nurses. In Women in the War Zone, Anne Powell has selected extracts from first-hand accounts of the experiences of those female medical personnel who served abroad during the First World War. Covering both the Western and the Eastern Fronts, from Petrograd to Basra and from Antwerp to the Dardanelles, they include nursing casualties from the Battle of Ypres, a young doctor put in charge of a remote hospital in Serbia and a nurse who survived a torpedo attack, albeit with serious injuries. Filled with stories of bravery and kindliness, it is a book that honours the often unsung contribution made by the female doctors and nurses who helped to alleviate some of the suffering of the First World War.

Leseprobe

WOMEN IN THE

WAR ZONE

Other books edited by Anne Powell:

A Deep Cry: First World War Soldier Poets Killed in France and Flanders (Palladour, 1993; Sutton Publishing, 1998)

The Fierce Light: The Battle of the Somme July – November 1916 (Palladour, 1996; Sutton Publishing 2006)

Shadows of War: British Women’s Poetry of the Second World War (Sutton Publishing, 1999)

WOMEN IN THEWAR ZONE

Hospital Service in the First World War

ANNE POWELL

In memory of the women who cared for and consoled the wounded, the sick and the refugees during the First World War.

and for Jeremy; Jonathan, Sarah, Amelia and Alexander; Rupert, Clare, Molly, Jemima and Harriet; Lucinda, Andrew, Edward, Eleanor and Harry

with my love always

First published in 2009

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2011

All rights reserved

© Anne Powell, 2009, 2011

The right of Anne Powell, to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

EPUB ISBN 978 0 7524 6951 5

MOBI ISBN 978 0 7524 6952 2

Original typesetting by The History Press

Contents

Map of The Western Front 1914–18

Map of The Eastern Front 1914–18

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Relevant Dates

1914–Belgium

Sister Joan Martin-Nicholson (Hôpital Militaire, Brussels)

Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland (Duchess of Sutherland’s Ambulance Unit, Namur)

Miss Sarah Macnaughtan (Mrs Stobart’s Hospital Unit, Antwerp; Dr Hector Munro’s Flying Ambulance Corps, Furnes)

Miss May Sinclair (Dr Hector Munro’s Ambulance Unit, Ghent)

Miss Grace Ashley-Smith (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps, Antwerp and Ghent)

Mrs Elsie Knocker (Advanced Dressing Station, Pervyse)

1914–France

Dr Flora Murray (Hospital in the Hôtel Claridge, Paris)

Mrs Katharine Furse (No. 1 British Red Cross VAD Unit, Gare Centrale, Boulogne)

Miss Eleonora B. Pemberton (No. 1 British Red Cross VAD Unit, Gare Centrale, Boulogne; No. 7 Stationary Hospital, Boulogne)

Miss Kate Finzi (No. 13 Stationary Hospital, Boulogne)

Miss Bickmore (Ambulance Trains)

Sister K.E. Luard (No. 5 Ambulance Train, France and Belgium)

1914–Serbia and Poland

Miss Flora Sandes (Serbian Military Hospital, Kragujevatz, Serbia)

Sister Joan Martin-Nicholson (Military Hospital, Warsaw, Poland)

Sister Violetta Thurstan (Prince Volkonsky’s Flying Field Ambulance Surgery, Lodz and Radzivilow, Russian Poland)

1915–France and Belgium

Dr Hilda Clark (Maternity Hospital, Châlons-sur-Marne and Cottage Hospital, Sermaise les Bains)

Miss Pat Waddell (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps, Lamarck Hospital, Calais)

Miss Eleonora B. Pemberton (No. 1 British Red Cross VAD Unit Dressing Station and Canteen; No. 5 Stationary Hospital, Abbeville)

Miss Olive Dent (Race Course Hospital, Rouen)

Miss Dorothy Brook (No. 18 General Hospital, Camiers, Nr Étaples)

Mrs Elsie Fenwick (Belgian Red Cross Hospital, La Panne)

Miss Edith Cavell (l’École Belge d’Infirmières Diplômées, Brussels)

1915–Russia, Serbia, Egypt and Dardanelles

Miss Florence Farmborough (1st Letuchka (Flying Column) Red Cross Unit of the 10th Field Surgical Otryad of the Zemstvo of all the Russias)

Miss Sarah Macnaughtan (Anglo-Russian Hospital, Petrograd; Red Cross Ambulance Unit, Tiflis)

Miss Flora Sandes (Serbian Military Hospital, Valjevo)

Mrs Mabel Dearmer (Stobart Field Hospital, Kragujevatz)

Dr Elsie Inglis (Scottish Women’s Hospital, Kragujevatz; Serbian Military Hospital, Czar Lazar, Krushevatz)

Mrs Mabel Stobart (First Serbian-English Field Hospital)

Lady Paget (First Serbian Relief Fund Unit, Skoplje)

Lady Howard de Walden (Convalescent Hospital No. 6, Alexandria)

Sister E. Campbell (Hospital Ships Galeka and Caledonia, Dardanelles)

Sister Kathleen Mann (Hospital Ships Ulysses, Marathon and Devanha)

1916–France

Miss V.C.C. Collum (SS Sussex, English Channel)

Miss Dorothy Higgins (Anglo-Belgian Hospital, Rouen)

Miss V.C.C. Collum (Scottish Women’s Hospital, Royaumont Abbey)

Miss Olive Dent (Race Course Hospital, Rouen)

Miss Mildred Rees (No. 4 Ambulance Flotilla, Barge 192, The Somme)

Miss Lesley Smith (No. 129 General Hospital, Nr Camiers)

1916–Malta

Miss Vera Brittain (St George’s Hospital)

1916–Dardanelles, Persia, Romania, Russia and Mesopotamia

Sister Kathleen Mann (Hospital ship Devanah at Cape Helles, Dardanelles Peninsular and off the coast of Albania)

Miss Sarah Macnaughtan (Red Cross Ambulance Unit, Erivan and Hamadan, Persia)

Lady Kennard (Military Hospital, Bucarest)

Miss Yvonne Fitzroy (Scottish Women’s Hospital, Medjidia)

Miss Frances Eleanor Rendel (Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Medjidia and Bulbulmick, Romania and Ismaila, Russia)

Miss Florence Farmborough (1st Letuchka (Flying Column) 10th Field Surgical Otryad of the Zemstvo of all the Russias

Lady Muriel Paget (Russian Red Cross Field Hospital, Eastern Front)

Miss Dorothy Seymour (Anglo-Russian Hospital, Petrograd)

Miss Marjery Swynnerton (No. 3 British General Hospital, Basra)

Miss Ida Jefferson (Desert Hospital, inland from Basra)

1917–France and Belgium

Miss Dorothy Higgins (Anglo-Belgian Hospital, Rouen)

Sister K.E. Luard (No. 32 Casualty Clearing Station, Warlincourt)

Miss Vera Brittain (24th General Hospital, Étaples)

Sister K.E. Luard (Abdomens and Chests Hospital (Casualty Clearing Station No. 32), Brandhoek)

Miss Mairi Chisholm (Advanced Dressing Station, Pervyse)

1917–Corsica and Italy

Dr Mary Phillips (5th Scottish Women’s Hospital, Villa Miot, Ajaccio)

Miss Freya Stark (George Trevelyan Ambulance Unit, Villa Trento, Dolegnano, Udine)

Miss Amelia (Amy) Nevill (No. 11 General Hospital, Genoa)

1917–Romania, Russia and Egypt

Miss Margaret Fawcett (Scottish Women’s Hospital, Reni)

Miss Florence Farmborough (1st Letuchka (Flying Column) 10th Field Surgical Otryad of the Zemstvo of all the Russias, Broskautsky

Miss Dorothy Seymour (Anglo-Russian Hospital, Petrograd)

Sister Burgess (Troopship Aragon, en route for Egypt)

1918–France

Miss Josephine Pennell (British Red Cross Society Ambulance Convoy, St Omer)

Miss Frances Ivens (Scottish Women’s Hospital, Advanced Clearing Station, Villers-Cotterets)

Miss Katherine Hodges (Section SanitairY3 Ambulance Unit)

Miss Lesley Smith (No. 50 General Hospital, Rouen)

1918–Russia and Serbia

Miss Margaret H. Barber (Soviet Hospital Astrakan)

Dr Isabel Emslie (Scottish Women’s Hospitals, Ostrovo and Vranja)

Biographical Notes

Select Bibliography

Glossary

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following who have kindly given permission to reproduce copyright material:

The Imperial War Museum for ‘Letter written from occupied Ghent’, October 1914, by Grace Ashley Smith, included in Five years with the Allies (1914–1919): the story of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps by Grace McDougall; extracts from Vera Brittain’s poetry and prose are included by permission of Mark Bostridge and Timothy Brittain-Catlin Literary Executors for the Vera Brittain Estate, 1970; Mrs Mair McCann for extracts from the papers of Mrs D. McCann (Miss Dorothy Brook), held in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum; the Imperial War Museum for extracts from letters held in the archive of Miss Edith Cavell; trustees of the Imperial War Museum for extracts from the papers of Miss Mairi Chisholm; Mr Peter Spiegl for extracts from Elsie Fenwick in Flanders: The Diaries of a Nurse 1915– 1918, Spiegl Press, 1980; Mr Chris Furse for extracts from Hearts and Pomegranates by Katharine Furse, Peter Davies, 1940; Lady Howard de Walden for extracts from Pages from my Life by Margherita Lady Howard de Walden, Sidgwick and Jackson, 1965; Glasgow City Archives and Special Collections, Mitchell Library, for the Report written by Dr Frances Ivens; Eric Dobby Publishing for extracts from Flanders and Other Fields, Memoirs of the Baroness de T’Serclaes, M.M., George G. Harrap & Co., Ltd., 1964; Mr Giles Pemberton for extracts from the papers of Miss E.B. Pemberton, held in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum; Mrs Rosemary Marryatt for the letter from Nurse Mildred Rees; Mrs Daphne Loch and family for extracts from the papers of Miss Dorothy Seymour, held in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum; Mrs Nina Theiss Boll for extracts from A Journal of Impressions in Belgium by May Sinclair, Hutchinson & Co., 1915; Mr John R. Murray for extracts from Freya Stark’s War Diary included in her Traveller’s Prelude, John Murray, 1950; The Countess of Sutherland for extracts from Six Weeks at the War by Millicent, Duchess of Sutherland, The Times, 1914; The Hypatia Trust for extracts from Field Hospital and Flying Column by Violetta Thurstan, Putnam’s, 1915.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders for the following whose papers are held in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum. We would be grateful for any information which might help to trace those whose identities or addresses are not currently known: Miss Bickmore; Sister E. Campbell; Miss Florence Farmborough; Miss Margaret Fawcett; Miss K. Hodges; Miss Amelia (Amy) Nevill; Miss F.E. Rendel; Miss Flora Sandes; Mrs M.A.A. Thomas (Miss Swynnerton).

I have been unable to trace a copyright holder for Lady Paget, whose book With our Serbian Allies: Second Report is held in the Department of Books at the Imperial War Museum. I thank the Imperial War Museum for permission to quote extracts and would be grateful for any information on Lady Paget.

I have been unable to trace copyright holders for the following whose archives are held in the Liddle Collection, University of Leeds: Sister Burgess; Miss Ida Jefferson (Mrs I. Cliffe); Sister Kathleen Mann.

I acknowledge the following books and periodicals from where extracts were taken. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders and we apologise to anyone who inadvertently has not been acknowledged: A British Nurse in Bolshevik Russia – The narrative of Margaret H. Barber, April 1916–December 1919, A.C. Fifield, 1920; Fanny went to War by Pat Beauchamp, George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1940; Edith Cavell by Rowland Ryder, Hamish Hamilton, 1975; War and its Aftermath: Letters from Hilda Clark, M.B., B.S., from France, Austria and the Near East 1914–1924. Edited by Edith Pye. Privately printed, 1956; Blackwood’s Magazine articles (1916, 1917, 1918) by V.C.C. Collum; Letters from a Field Hospital by Mabel Dearmer, Macmillan and Co. Limited, 1915; A VAD in France by Olive Dent, Grant Richards, 1917; With a Woman’s Unit in Serbia, Salonika and Sebastopol by I. Emslie Hutton, M.D., Williams and Norgate, 1928; Eighteen Months in the War Zone: The Record of a Woman’s Work on the Western Front by Kate John Finzi, Cassell, 1916; With the Scottish Nurses in Roumania by Yvonne Fitzroy, John Murray, 1918; Dr Elsie Inglis by Lady Frances Balfour, Hodder and Stoughton, c.1920; A Roumanian Diary 1915, 1916, 1917 by Lady Kennard, Heinemann, 1917; Diary of a Nursing Sister on the Western Front 1914–1918 by K.E. Luard, William Blackwood and Sons, 1915; Unknown Warriors: Extracts from the Letters of K.E. Luard, R.R.C., Nursing Sister in France 1914–918, Chatto and Windus, 1930; My War Experiences in Two Continents by S. Macnaughtan. Edited by her niece, Mrs Lionel Salmon (Betty Keays-Young), John Murray, 1919; My Experiences on Three Fronts by Sister Martin-Nicholson, George Allen & Unwin, 1916; Women as Army Surgeons: Being the History of the Women’s Hospital Corps in Paris, Wimereux and Endell Street, September 1914–October 1919 by Dr Flora Murray, CBE., MD., DPH., Hodder and Stoughton, c.1920; Lady Muriel by Wilfrid Blunt, Methuen, 1962; The History of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals by Mrs Eva Shaw McLaren, Hodder and Stoughton, 1919; Four Years out of Life by Lesley Smith, Philip Allan, 1931; Miracles and Adventures by Mabel St Clair Stobart, Rider & Co., 1935; Red Herrings of 1918 by R.J. Tennent. Privately printed, nd.

Extracts from the letters of Dorothy Higgins held in the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum, were first published in an article by Anne Powell in Hortus: A Gardening Journal No. 79, Autumn 2006. Edited by David Wheeler.

I would like to thank Sarah Flight and Jaqueline Mitchell at Sutton Publishing who commissioned this book in 2006; and all at The History Press who continued to have faith in the idea and who have helped and advised me over many months. My particular thanks to my editor, Simon Hamlet, and to Jo de Vries, Abigail Wood, Siubhan Macdonald and Robin Harries. I would also like to thank Martin Brown for his work on the maps.

I am very grateful to the following for their help and kindness:

Pauline Allwight, Department of Art, Imperial War Museum; Mark Amory; Judy Bevis, Portsmouth City Council Library Service; Gina Bore and Ginnene Taylor, Authors Licensing Copyright Service (ALCS); Margaret Bowen; Loreen Brown; Jane Conway; Richard Davies, Sam Gibbard, Liddle Collection, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds; Anita Desilva, The Publishers Association; Tabitha Driver, Library of the Religious Society of Friends, London; Caroline Gordon Duff; Ben and Jane Eliot; Melissa Hardie; Jo Howe; Rose Hudson, Society of Authors; Jane Hutchings; Alan Jeffreys; Shirley-Ann Kennedy; Gay Ledger; Gillian Lindsay; Richard Morgan; Lona de Moro; Hew Moseed, The Book Trust; Sybil Oldfield; Philip Oswald; Reading Room staff at the Imperial War Museum; Sara Pons; Paul Preston; Gavin Roynon; Thomas Seymour; Alan Shelley, Bow Windows Bookshop; Jane Smith; Roderick Suddaby, Keeper; Clare Sexton and Sabrina Rowlatt, Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum; David Sutton, Writers and their Copyright Holders (WATCH), University of Reading; Henry Sullivan, Glasgow City Archives and Special Collections, Mitchell Library; Sir Peter Tapsell, M.P.; Canon Michael Tristram; Jean Tsushimo; Wellcome Library staff; Mary Wilkinson, Head of Collections Development, Department of Printed Books, Imperial War Museum; Frances Woodrow, Royal College of Nursing Archives; Jen Young, Curator, Museum and Archives, British Red Cross.

My final thanks are to my beloved family for their love, encouragement and help in so many ways: Jonathan and Sarah for compiling the Glossary; Rupert for tracing biographical details; Lucinda for devoting so much time, yet again, as my ‘problem solver’ over many computer difficulties and for her ever cheerful guidance and patience; and to Jeremy for his understanding, good humour, practical help and loving care which have sustained me throughout the many stages of preparation for Women in the War Zone.

Introduction

Women’s involvement in the art of healing stretches back to pre-history. From the Bible we glimpse the well-loved image of Jesus in Bethany a few days before His crucifixion. A woman came to Him carrying an alabaster box which contained ointment made from oil extracted from the aromatic root of the small plant spikenard. The antifungal and anti-bacterial properties of spikenard were relaxing and according to the Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Mark, the woman poured them on Jesus’s head. Saint John wrote that she anointed His feet with the ointment and ‘wiped his feet with her hair and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment’.

During the Middle Ages monastries and convents were centres of healing and medical knowledge. Physic plants were grown in the gardens and then gathered, pounded into powder, and mixed with oils, vinegar and wine to produce tinctures and remedies. Diseases and cures were linked to hot, cold, dry and moist elements; and in the sixth century Alexander of Tralles wrote that the duty of a physician was ‘to cool what is hot, to warm what is cold, to dry what is moist, and to moisten what is dry.’

Hildegard of Bingen was born in 1098 and at the age of eight she entered the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg on the Rhine. By the time Hildegard took her vows when she was fourteen the monastery had extended into a convent. She became Abbess in 1136 and eleven years later she founded her own Abbey at Rupertsberg near Bingen. Already known for her sacred music her fame spread after Pope Eugene III read from her visionary work Scivas at the Synod of Trier in the winter of 1147–8. During her early years as a nun Hildegard would have helped in the gardens and the infirmary at Disibodenberg, learning how to tend the plants and the various methods of treating the elderly, infirm, blind, deaf, lame and sick. She became practised in the knowledge of herbal remedies and between 1152 and 1158, when she was abbess at Rupertsberg, she wrote two medicinal works, Causae et Cyurae, which examined the causes and cures of diseases, and Physica – consisting of nine books on healing. The medical uses and preparations for different remedies are given for plants, trees, fish, animals, reptiles, birds, stones, gems and elements.

In her lifetime Hildegard of Bingen was revered and renowned for her gifts of healing. The physicians of Myddfai, a remote hamlet in the foothills of the Black Mountains in mid-Wales, were active between the thirteenth and nineteenth centuries. They listed over 800 herbal remedies for healing the sick and wounded in body and mind, in a collection of medieval texts. Legend tells that Rhiwallon, the first physician of Myddfai, was the eldest son of a young farmer and the lady of Llyn-y‑Fan-Fach. Some years after she returned to the lake the lady appeared to Rhiwallon at Llidiad-y-Meddygon, which is still known as the Physicians’ Gate. She told him that he was destined to become a great and skilful physician, who would relieve pain and misery through his gift for healing. She gave him a bag containing herbal remedies and on another appearance took him to Pant-y-Meddygon, the Dingle of the Physicians. She showed him the many plants that grew there and explained their various medical powers. One of these may have been solidago asteraceae (golden rod) which originally came from the Middle East, and was later cultivated in Britain for its medicinal properties. It was known as woundwort – a wound-healing plant. A cold compress placed on a fresh wound was believed to be antiinflammatory. But golden rod is not listed in the Herbal compiled by the first Physicians of Myddfai which gives many remedies for wounds: ‘Take wild turnips, pound to a plaster, and apply to the wound: it will open the wound and heal it. Proven’; ‘Take the herb called centaury, powder and cast into the wound; by God’s help it will cure it.’

The descendants of Rhiwallon and his sons continued to practise medicine in Wales without a break until Dr Rice Williams died in Aberystwyth in 1842, aged eighty-five. He seems to have been the last of the Physicians of Myddfai descended from the legendary Lady of the Lake.

Hildegard of Bingen was known as one of the first women doctors, but over the following eight centuries women struggled continuously in a bitter battle to be accepted by medical schools to train as physicians. In 1865, twenty-three years after the death of the last Physician of Myddfai, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson gained a diploma from the Society of Apothecaries. She then established a dispensary for women in London and seven years later she founded the New Hospital for Women, which was to be staffed only by women. In 1908 women were granted permission to obtain diplomas and fellowships from the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons. However, they were not accepted into the teaching hospitals in London, Oxford and Cambridge and those who qualified elsewhere were only offered posts not taken up by men – either in the provinces or in some women’s hospitals.

Elsie Inglis qualified in medicine in Glasgow in 1892, and became a doctor in Elizabeth Garrett Anderson’s New Hospital for Women. By this time the women’s suffrage movement in Britain, which had started in 1867, was revitalised by the creation of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Dr Inglis returned to Edinburgh in 1894 and ran a practice in the city with Dr Jessie MacGregor, an old student friend. She also became honorary secretary of the Edinburgh National Society for Women’s Suffrage. In November 1899 she opened her own small hospital in George Square for patients from the poorer areas of the city. After the lease expired she found another suitable property, The Hospice, which opened in January 1904 as a surgical and gynaecological centre with a dispensary and accident department. Five years later, Dr Inglis, by now Edinburgh’s most eminent woman doctor, became honorary secretary to the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies.

When war broke out on 4 August 1914, the Women’s Hospital Corps (WHC) was formed immediately by two women doctors – Louisa Garrett Anderson and Dr Flora Murray. Within weeks, having been rebuffed by the War Office, the WHC was on its way to Paris at the request of the French Red Cross. The seventy-eight-yearold Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, ‘a dignified figure, old and rather bent’, was on Victoria Station to bid farewell to her daughter and the all-women unit. ‘Twenty years younger, I would have taken them myself,’ she said.

As there were no vacancies in the WHC for Dr Elsie Inglis she went to Edinburgh Castle and offered her services to the Royal Army Medical Corps. She was rudely rejected with the words: ‘My good lady, go home and sit still.’Although angry she remained undaunted and at the Committee meeting of the Scottish Federation of Women’s Suffrage Societies on 12 August her proposal was accepted that the Federation should ‘give organised help to Red Cross work.’ However, the British Red Cross, following the War Office example, refused to allow women doctors to serve with the army overseas. Eight days after the meeting a letter was sent to the Belgian, French, Russian and Serbian embassies offering fully equipped hospitals, staffed entirely by women, to their governments.

An appeal for donations was launched and meetings were held in ‘every sort of hall and drawing-room in every part of the United Kingdom’. Money flowed in and by 31 October the first £1,000 had been raised. On the previous day Dr Elsie Inglis formed the Scottish Women’s Hospitals (SWH) Committee when it was decided that the uniform should be a grey coat and skirt with Gordon tartan facings. Units were organised; one under Dr Alice Hutchison, and staffed with ten trained nurses, established a hospital in Calais in December 1914 where typhoid patients in the French army were nursed for three months. Also in December 1914 another unit was despatched to France and one was sent to Serbia.

Royaumont, a beautiful, medieval Cistercian abbey, some thirty miles north of Paris, was requisitioned by the French authorities for the SWH. When Elsie Inglis saw the building she wrote that it would be ‘one of the finest hospitals in France’. The unit of seven doctors, ten nurses, seven orderlies, two cooks, a clerk, an administrator, two maids and four chauffeurs, arrived at Royaumont at the beginning of December 1914. They found the abbey in a terrible condition with years of dirt and debris in all the huge rooms and realised that an enormous amount of work was needed to convert the Abbey into an efficient hospital. Cecily Hamilton, a forty-two-year-old actress, playwright, writer and suffragist, was Royaumont’s clerk and wrote:

Our only available stove – a mighty erection in the kitchen which had not been lit for a decade – was naturally short-tempered at first, and the supply of hot water was very limited. So, in consequence, was our first washing; at times very limited indeed. Our equipment, after the fashion of baggage in these times of war, was in no great hurry to arrive;until it arrived we did without sheets and blankets, wrapped ourselves in rugs and overcoats at night, and did not do much undressing.

The unit worked through bitterly cold weather, overcoming various setbacks, and on 10 January 1915 Royaumont was recognised as a military hospital. The following day the first six patients were received. The hospital was not closed until March 1919. During these years almost 11,000 patients, mainly from the French and French Colonial armies, were admitted to Royaumont and the additional hospital at Villers-Cotterets.

Over the following four years the Scottish Women’s Hospitals cared for wounded soldiers and sick civilians in Serbia, Salonika, Corsica, Russia, Romania and France. They established their hospitals and dressing-stations in disused barracks and schools, in convents, at railway stations, under canvas, on hillsides, in lonely countrysides, in shattered towns and villages, and on occasions found themselves prisoners-of-war.

At home there was an acute shortage of doctors in civilian hospitals when the men joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and women were recruited to take their place. They were also needed in military hospitals and were known as Civil Medical Practitioners (CMPs), but they were granted neither rank nor uniform and their pay was not comparable to that of a male doctor. As the war continued more women were desperately needed in the field of medicine. A circular letter was sent to headmistresses of girls’ schools emphasising that there was to be ‘a very serious need for women to replace men in Military Hospitals as all eligible men are to be removed from the Home Hospitals for other services’. In July 1915 Dr Mary Scharlieb, an ardent campaigner, spoke at the annual prize-giving ceremony at Manchester High School for Girls, encouraging them to choose a rewarding career as doctors.

By 1916, the War Office was faced with an ever increasing dearth of male doctors, and realising the continued success of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and other voluntary units overseas, reluctantly sent volunteer women doctors to serve with the Royal Army Medical Corps in Salonika, Egypt, India and Malta. They were still refused commissions and had to travel third class while all army nurses and VADs in uniform travelled first class.

In 1917 the Medical Women’s Federation (MWF) was formed and continued the struggle to improve the conditions under which women doctors served, but it was not until 1942 that women medical officers’ pay was brought into line with their male counterparts. In 1950 they were finally granted commissioned rank.

Before 1660 men joined an army raised to fight a specific war. These soldiers, and the few physicians who accompanied them, returned to civilian life when the war ended. The regular army was established at the Restoration of Charles II and each regiment had a doctor and a primitive mobile hospital staffed by male orderlies. Respectable wives, with their children, and less respectable ‘camp followers’ accompanied the men overseas and British army wives assisted in military hospitals during the Napoleonic Wars. Until the early nineteenth century the sick civilian population had been treated and nursed in their own homes or in workhouses until voluntary hospitals were set up by various Christian charitable denominations in London and some of the provinces. In 1840 Elizabeth Fry, the Quaker philanthropist, founded the Institution for Nursing Sisters – also known as the Sisters of Charity – and this was followed by other Sisterhoods in various parts of the country where young women were trained to become nurses. In 1877 Mother Mary Potter founded the first Catholic Order of Nursing Sisters in Nottingham. They were called The Little Company of Mary – also known as the Blue Sisters from the blue veils they wore.

By the time the Crimean War started in September 1854, wives still accompanied the regiments, working as cooks, needlewomen, laundresses, and giving some basic nursing. There were no trained military nurses and British soldiers continued to be nursed, for the most part, by male orderlies.

The war correspondent, W.H. Russell, sent dispatches from the Crimea to The Times giving vivid accounts of the sufferings of wounded and sick soldiers. There were no preparations for even the most straightforward operations and men were left unattended for many days and often died in agony before they received any medical help. Russell wrote that the medical arrangements made by the French were extremely good and that they ‘are greatly our superiors … their surgeons more numerous, and they have also the help of the Sisters of Charity, who have accompanied the expedition in incredible numbers.’

The British public were angry and horrified. The Times immediately established a fund to provide more medical aid for those suffering in the Crimea and Florence Nightingale, a thirty-five-year-old woman who had trained with a Nursing Sisterhood in Paris, was asked in October 1854 by Sidney Herbert, the Secretary of State at War, to take a party of thirty-eight women to nurse at the four hospitals at Scutari. Here they found filthy and overcrowded conditions and men suffering more from diseases than wounds. Florence Nightingale supervised the transformation of these hospitals into places of order and cleanliness and ensured that regular supplies of comforts and medical equipment were received. Under her guidance, nourishment and various diets were introduced into hospital food.

Three years after the Crimean war ended, Henry Dunant, a Swiss businessman, was horrified at the suffering the wounded endured in the Battle of Solferino. He suggested the formation of national relief societies, staffed by trained volunteers. The International Committee of the Red Cross was established and the founding charter of the Red Cross was written in 1863. An international agreement, the original Geneva Convention, which recognised the ‘status of medical services and of the wounded on the battlefield’ was signed in 1864. Six years later the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War was formed.

Many reforms in the army medical services were gradually implemented over the following years. The military hospital at Netley, on Southampton Water had been opened in 1863, followed by more military hospitals throughout the country, and there was an ever-increasing demand for nurses who received their initial training in civilian hospitals.

At the outbreak of the South African war in October 1899 the Army Nursing Services had grown in strength and efficiency and during the following three years almost 2,000 trained nurses served in the war. The vast expanse of veldt meant that it was a long and slow journey on wagons drawn by horses or oxen from the fields of battle to the hospital trains where the wounded were received by Army nursing sisters forbidden to travel any closer to the fighting. The trains then took the patients to base hospitals where conditions had greatly improved since Florence Nightingale arrived at Scutari. Boer and British patients were regularly fed with good food, Florence Nightingale’s mantra ‘Sanitas Sanitatum’, for scrupulous standards of cleanliness, was generally accepted, and anaesthetics were used. As in the Crimea, there were many more sick than wounded men to be nursed. The soldiers were affected by flies, dust, and veldt-sores, and contaminated drinking water caused dysentry and typhoid fever. It is estimated that only one-third of casualties died of wounds.

Although military and medical authorities now realised that there was a need for a larger and more efficient army nursing service, and that ‘in a base hospital the actual nursing should always be entrusted to women’, as the twentieth century dawned, nurses still had no rank or status and they were only able to practice their professional skills in areas far from the battlefields.

When the South African war drew to a close in May 1902 high level talks were taking place and a committee was formed to plan the improvement and expansion of the Army Nursing Service. On 27 March 1902 the Service was renamed Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service (QAIMNS). A Matron-in-Chief was appointed to the War Office. In 1905 the British National Society for Aid to the Sick and Wounded in War was renamed the British Red Cross Society.

The First Aid Nursing Yeomanry Corps (FANYs) was established in 1907. The idea was originally conceived by Sergeant Edward Charles Baker who was wounded in Lord Kitchener’s Soudan Campaign and realised ‘there was a missing link somewhere in the Ambulance Department, which in spite of the changes in warfare, had not altered very materially since the days of the Crimea’. Members of the Corps were required to qualify in first aid and home nursing and pass a course of ‘Horsemanship, Veterinary Work, Signalling, and Camp Cookery’. The women had to be between 17 and 35 years of age and at least 5ft 3in in height. They had to provide their own uniforms and first aid outfit. Grace Ashley-Smith, who later commanded the FANYs, wrote that ‘it is not a Corps of shirkers, but of workers’.

In 1907 Mrs Mabel Stobart was asked to form the Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps, an off-shoot of the FANYs, which was to be used for service between Field and Base Hospitals in the event of a war. The Corps trained once a week in London and camped for a fortnight annually on the cliffs at Studland in Dorset where the enthusiastic members learned to pitch and strike tents, dig trenches, sleep on the ground without beds or mattresses and live under frugal conditions.

A Territorial Force Nursing Service was established in 1908 and the following year the Voluntary Aid Organisation was formed as part of the Territorial Army Scheme. Both men and women became members of the Voluntary Aid Detachments (VADs), drawn from the British Red Cross Society, the Ambulance Department of the Order of St John of Jerusalem and the Territorial Force Association, and were trained in first aid and nursing.

In 1912 Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece combined against the Turks in the First Balkan War. Mrs Stobart went to Sir Frederick Treves, Chairman of the British Red Cross Society, and offered to take a unit of her Women’s Sick and Wounded Convoy Corps to the desperately understaffed hospitals in Bulgaria. She was told that soldiers in the Balkans would object to being nursed by women and that a woman was incapable of operating in a hospital of war. The Bulgarian authorities greatly needed medical assistance and within a few weeks Mrs Stobart and her unit of sixteen women, which included three doctors, six qualified nurses, orderlies and a cook, were asked to set up a hospital in the town of Kirk-Kilisse, the headquarters of the Bulgarian army. After long train journeys the women trekked in rain and through mud for seven days across the Rhodope mountains and the Thracian plains. They passed through many small villages, most of which had been burnt to the ground and were deserted ruins, although occasionally they found bread and cheese. They were accompanied by two soldiers and two policemen, and travelled with all the equipment in forty uncovered ox-carts drawn by eighty oxen or buffalo driven by forty Bulgarian peasants. This was the first time that Britishants. The unit took over two empty houses in Kirk-Kilisse and were warned to expect a large convoy of wounded. This was the first time that British women had served as doctors and nurses in a hospital close to a front line. Within forty-eight hours of arriving they had scrubbed and scoured the rooms, prepared a kitchen, wards, and surgeries, and unloaded the huge cases of blankets, bed-garments, linen and stores. Over the next weeks they undertook complicated operations and nursed terrible wounds under appalling conditions. They soon realised that the Turkish and Bulgarian soldiers were not only courteous and chivalrous but heartfelt in their gratitude and appreciation of the care given by the British women. After six weeks an armistice was declared. Mrs Stobart and her unit from the Women’s Convoy Corps said farewell to their patients and returned to England.

On 4 August 1914, the day Britain declared war on Germany, Mrs Stobart was one of many distinguished women who spoke at a peace meeting at Kingsway Hall in London. The following day she founded the Women’s National Service League ‘with the aim of providing a body of women qualified to give useful service at home or abroad’. She was again repulsed by Sir Frederick Treves but received a request from the Belgian Red Cross to establish a hospital for French and Belgian soldiers in Brussels.

After war was declared the British Red Cross Society and St John’s Ambulance amalgamated and women responded immediately to the various appeals to join the Society. By then some 46,000 women, mostly from the upper and middle classes, were serving in the Voluntary Aid Detachments and were trained ‘in the art of improvisation and in coping with emergencies’. They included suffragists, feminists, married and career women, qualified doctors and nurses, and those who felt that serving their country was a release from the genteel role of a daughter destined to run the household for ageing parents. The latter viewed the future as a VAD, whether in a hospital at home or overseas, as an exciting escape from boredom and drudgery. Untrained women worked as cleaners, drivers, and orderlies but their duties became more wideranging as they grew more experienced. They supplied food and medical dressings for makeshift ambulance trains, clearing and stationary hospitals, and provided rest stations at train halts. They were also members of the trained medical staff in large hospitals, and ran small hospitals and convalescent homes. Every woman was filled with a sense of responsibility that they were ‘doing their bit’. Olive Dent, a young VAD, felt that ‘the New Army of men would need a New Army of nurses. Why not go and learn to be a nurse while the Kitchener men were learning to be soldiers’.

Within the first weeks of the war doctors, nurses, and administrators, were already on their way to give medical aid in France and Belgium. Sister Joan Martin-Nicholson, a Red Cross Sister, arrived in Brussels on 9 August 1914; Dr Flora Murray, and her Women’s Hospital Corps, opened a hospital in the newly-built, luxurious Hotel Claridge on the Champs Elysees in Paris. Other parties had set off too. Mrs Mabel Stobart, the colourful and intrepid administrator, became a prisoner-of-war when the Germans reached Brussels. Mrs Katharine Furse, the commandant of the British Red Cross VADs, started a rest station at the Gare Centrale in Boulogne; the Duchess of Sutherland took her private ambulance unit to Namur in Belgium; Flora Sandes, accompanied by her violin, went with a St John’s Ambulance Unit to a Serbian military hospital; and every unit included young, keen and excited VADs ready to embark on ‘an adventure of a lifetime.’ It did not take long for the reality to hit them.

Over the next four years this cross-section of women endured homesickness, terrible hardships, exhaustion, and grim conditions; chaotic train journeys in Serbia and Russia; torpedo attacks at sea; life in primitive makeshift hospitals under canvas through bitter winters and sorrow when treating sick and terrified civilian refugees. But above all they felt compassion, anguish and a sense of helplessness when they nursed the appalling wounds suffered by a never-ending stream of casualties in ill-equipped ‘wards like battlefields’. K.E. Luard, an experienced Sister in the QAIMNS wrote from an ambulance train that the shrapnel-shell wounds were ‘more ghastly than anything I have ever seen or smelt; the Mauser wounds of the Boer War were pin-pricks compared with them’. However, blood transfusions were used to prevent shock and loss of blood and this newly developed expertise saved countless lives.

Yvonne Fitzroy, a young orderly, remembered that ‘the nursing conditions are something of a revelation, but what we haven’t got we invent, and what we can’t invent we do without’. The staple dressing was sometimes just tincture of iodine; anaesthetics, either in short supply or simply not available, were sometimes replaced with brandy. Gas gangrene, which developed from a septic wound, led to innumerable amputations; in the last two months of 1914 there were over 6,000 cases of frostbite on the Western Front and no one was sure of the right cure – four years later tens of thousands of men suffering from the influenza epidemic died in crowded wards; shell-shock was a complex symptom to diagnose; men went down with dysentry and other diseases; jaundice carried by rats, typhus spread by lice, and typhoid caught from impure drinking water were most prevalent on the Eastern Front. Often the sheer volume of casualties was too much to bear. ‘One lived very many times in a torrent of emotion’, confessed Olive Dent. On many occasions the wounded were so exhausted that they fell asleep as their wounds were being dressed. As one man died on a bed, or mattress on the floor, or on straw in a makeshift dressing-station, it was filled immediately with the next casualty. Almost daily K.E. Luard, by then the sister in charge of a casualty clearing station during the Battle of Arras, put her thoughts and feelings into her diary: ‘One has got so used to their dying. It’s all very like a battlefield’. She found she could not keep up with the volume of ‘Break-the-News-Letters’ she had to write late each evening. ‘This war is the crucifixion of the youth of the world’, wrote Sarah Macnaughtan. Not long before she died of typhoid in Serbia, Mabel Dearmer recorded in a letter that ‘the only way to see war is from a hospital’.

In Russia British nurses served alongside Russian Red Cross nurses. Many of these were members of the Russian royal family and aristocracy who were allowed much nearer the firing line than the British and French nurses. Every Russian Regiment had its own doctor and sanitaires (equivalent to RAMC orderlies).

Some of those who served in Russia wrote of their impressions before and after the Revolution. Margaret Fawcett recognised the change in manner of soldiers to their officers; Dorothy Seymour gave a short but graphic account of the circumstances surrounding Rasputin’s murder. Those taking part in the various Retreats – in Russia, Romania and Serbia – were devastated at having to leave wounded men and homeless refugees in abandoned hospitals or dying and starving on roadsides.

There was humour and fun and good times too. Dorothy Brook recalled: ‘we were all young and so very enthusiastic about our work and there was always a new adventure’. Regardless of status, but dependent upon where they were stationed, concert parties, visits to theatres, operas, cinemas, boat trips, picnics, tennis tournaments, walking, excursions in cars, and for one young woman, a visit to a harem, provided recreation from the gruelling routine of hospital work. Dorothy Higgins spent peaceful hours creating a garden at the hospital in Rouen. Parties and dances, deemed ‘topping’ and ‘ripping’, were enjoyed, although Josephine Pennell, a young ambulance driver in St Omer, soon discovered that dancing in public was not permitted. The girls were, however, allowed to dance in their own ante-room, and a few men from the main dance in the YMCA joined them for a ‘very jolly time’. In the instructions handed out to each VAD they were strictly told to ‘avoid all intimacy’ with patients and officers, but cautious flirtations developed. Pat Waddell, a young FANY, remembered that the girls she knew ‘were extremely innocent about the most ordinary sex matters. A kiss was as far as anyone went.’ This stage sometimes ripened into more serious romances, which was daring behaviour, especially for VADs who soon found ways round the stringent rules. Vera Brittain on board a hospital ship on the way to Malta wrote with amusement of the couples who were even forbidden to talk to each other on deck, but ‘were found in compromising positions beneath the gangways’. Katharine Furse had trouble too amongst her VADs when her ambulance driver became engaged. She was sent home in disgrace. Katherine Hodges wisely refused a bizarre offer of marriage. The Very Adorable Darlings, as they soon became known, were not always found out. Lesley Smith, her VAD friend, and an army major spent an hilarious off-duty afternoon in Camiers avoiding the matron-in-chief. Elsie Fenwick, although a VAD, was a forty-two-year-old married woman and it was accepted that she spent most of her off-duty time in the company of the senior officers from the British Mission in La Panne in Belgium.

Problems and difficulties had to be endured at all levels. There are occasional references to callous treatment from exhausted and overwhelmed surgeons when performing operations. Dr Elsie Inglis, struggling under appalling conditions, and frustrated with the ill-equipped hospitals in Russia and Serbia, succumbed to the occasional bouts of rage. The qualified nurses often resented the younger, untrained VADs, which inevitably led to criticism and jealousy. For a few weeks the nursing staff on board a hospital ship in the Dardanelles had to contend with an alcoholic Senior Medical Officer. Squabbles inevitably developed between women forced to live closely together for months on end under such extraordinary conditions.

Many years ago I vaguely remember my Great Aunt Madge Oswald reminiscing on her experiences as a First World War VAD when nursing with her pre-war friend the Princess Marie de Cröy. She implied that she was also involved in something else at the time, but I was young and busy with my own life and did not question her or even take more than a passing interest. I now greatly regret such a missed opportunity. With help from other members of the family I have pieced together what may have happened – that Aunt Madge went specifically to help nurse wounded soldiers with the Princess at her home at the Château de Bellignies, outside Mons in Belgium. Possibly the explanation for her hints is that she was aware of, and perhaps assisted with, the underground movement that linked Bellignies with Nurse Edith Cavell in Brussels. I know that Aunt Madge was in England by the time the Germans suspected the connection between Bellignies and Nurse Cavell. I also know that her friendship with Princess Marie de Cröy continued after the war and that she stayed with the Princess in France shortly before her death in April 1967.

We have no letters or papers which could verify these old memories. Many women, however, kept records of their wartime experiences and over the last seven years I have read through at least 200 books and archives of diaries, memoirs and letters. From these powerful and moving personal testimonies the unique stories written by fifty-one remarkable women are included in Women in the War Zone. All these are British except for one New Zealander and one Australian. I am sad that I have not been able to include many more.

With a few exceptions, the First World War is seen and written about from a male perspective and women’s part in the suffering has not been fully recognised, although many women understood the horrors of the battlefields as they cared for mutilated bodies and tormented minds.

Of all the many thousands of women who served in hospitals during the First World War, a number died before the war ended. Some became disillusioned and went home early. Post 1918 the journey between the two worlds was not easy as the women had to adapt to a new way of life or re-adapt to the one they had known before. Some married men they met while serving; others spent the remaining years with a woman friend who had shared responsibilities and hardships over the four years; many renewed or embarked on various professions and careers. There were those who returned to care for elderly or infirm parents and who settled down to a lonely life at home to ‘buy clothes and do the flowers for mother’. All over the world women, who had always known the anxieties and anguish of war, grieved for sons, husbands, lovers and brothers.

The memories of their experiences remained with them for the rest of their lives. They had often been frightened, exhausted, cold, wet, dishevelled and dirty, but through all their adversities they remained resourceful, cheerful, spirited and courageous. They all deserve to be remembered and honoured for their sacrifice and their humanity.

Relevant Dates

1914

28 June

Assassination of the Hapsburg Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir apparent to Franz Josef, Emperor of Austria-Hungary. During a state visit to Sarajevo in Serbia the archduke and his wife were shot by Gavrilo Princip, a young Bosnian Serb. This was particularly ill-timed as it was a day of national mourning commemorating the anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo when Serbia was defeated by the Turks in 1349.

28 July

After a month of negotiations and ultimatums, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia.

30 July

Tsar Nicholas II ordered the mobilisation of the Russian armed forces.

1 August

Germany declared war on Russia.

2 August

Germany demanded that her troops be allowed to march through Belgium (Belgium’s neutrality had been guaranteed by Britain in 1839).

3 August

Germany declared war on France.

4 August

British Government’s ultimatum that the German Army would not cross into Belgium expired. Britain declared war on Germany. At 4pm German troops marched into Belgium and by midnight five empires were at war – each believed it would be victorious within a few months. Some six million men were mobilised.

12 August

Austrian troops invaded Serbia. They met with strong resistance and retreated within a few days.

15 August

Russian Army advanced into East Prussia.

16 August

British Expeditionary Force landed in France.

20 August

Brussels occupied by the German army.

22 August

At 7am a squadron from the 4th Royal Irish Dragoon Guards fired the opening British shots of the First World War outside the small town of Mons in Belgium.

23 August

Battle of Mons. The British Expeditionary Force confronted the far superior German army. It inflicted, and suffered, heavy casualties, lost ground, and was forced to retreat south towards Paris. Austrian troops crossed border into Russian Poland.

24–25 August

BEF retreated south from Mons towards the French frontier.

27–30 August

Battle of Tanneberg, East Prussia. Germans halted Russian advance with 50,000 Russians killed or wounded and 90,000 taken prisoner.

5–9 September

First Battle of the Marne. German advance on Paris halted.

13–18 September

Battle of the Aisne.

4 October

Newly formed Royal Naval Division arrived in Antwerp to strengthen resistance.

10 October

Antwerp surrendered to Germans.

15 October

Germans entered Ostend.

19 October

Start of the First Battle of Ypres, which continued until the end of November.

4 November

Turkey declared war on the Allies.

18 November

German and Russian forces fought each other at Battle of Lodz, which was inconclusive although each side lost some 100,000 men.

1 December

Austrian troops invaded and occupied Belgrade, Serbia. The capital was regained by the Serbian army two weeks later and over 40,000 Austrian prisoners were taken.

24–25 December

On Christmas Eve, after five months of ferocious fighting, British and German soldiers called a truce on sections of the front line of the Western Front. They exchanged gifts, food and cigarettes – and in some areas arranged for bodies lying in no-man’s-land to be collected and buried.

1915

26 January

Turkish advance on Egypt.

10–13 March

Battle of Neuve Chapelle.

18 March

Naval attack at Dardanelles against Turkish positions.

8 April

On the Eastern Front the Armenian population are blamed by Turkey for co-operating with Russians. Mass murder of Armenian men and deportation of old men, women and children. By September a million had died.

22 April

Second Battle of Ypres. Germans used chlorine poison gas at Langemarck along a four-mile front.

25 April

Allied troops landed on Gallipoli peninsula. The strong Turkish defences prevented the hoped-for swift victory and enormous casualties build up on the beaches over the next months.

1 May

Combined Austro-German offensive to attack Russians in Galicia. Russians driven out of Gorlitse and Tarnow. Gradually Carpathian mountain passes are regained by Austro-German troops.

7 May

Cunard liner Lusitania torpedoed and sunk by German U-Boat off southern coast of Ireland; 1,198 of the 2,000 passengers were drowned.

9 May

French troops attacked German positions on Vimy Ridge. British attacked opposite Fromelles and La Bassée in an abortive attempt to capture Aubers Ridge.

15–25 May

Battle of Festubert.

23 May

Italy declared war on Austria-Hungary.

5 August

German troops entered Warsaw.

6 August

British forces landed at Suvla Bay on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Two attacks – one by Australians at Anzac Cove – one by British, Australian, New Zealand, Indian and Gurkha troops at Cape Helles. After a four-day battle for Suvla Bay the British and Anzac troops were beaten back, with 2,000 killed and 1,000 wounded.

13 August

Troop transport ship the Royal Edward sunk by German U-boat off the island of Kos in the Aegean. Over 1,000 soldiers drowned.

19 August

Continuing Russian losses on Eastern Front culminated with 90,000 officers and men surrendering at the fort of Novo-Georgievsk in Poland.

25 September

Two Allied offensives started on Western Front – British in the Battle of Loos and the French in the Champagne region.

26 September

British advanced in Mesopotamia and took Kut from the Turks

5 October

Austro/German army invaded Serbia. British and French troops landed in Salonika en route to Serbia’s aid.

12 October

Bulgaria attacked Serbia. The Retreat of Serbian army and civilians began. Edith Cavell was executed in Brussels.

5 Decemebr

Turks besieged British troops at Kut. Relief force continued to meet fierce opposition.

19 December

Sir Douglas Haig replaced Sir John French as Commander-in-Chief of the British Army in France.

1916

5 January

First conscription bill in Britain.

8 January

Last British troops left Cape Helles, Gallipoli Peninsula after eleven-day evacuation completed with no casualties. During eight-and-a-half-month campaign some 66,000 Turkish, 28,000 British, over 7,000 Australian, over 2,000 New Zealand and 10,000 French soldiers had been killed. Austrian, Bosnian, Muslim and Italian troops attacked Serbia’s ally and neighbour, Montenegro. Montenegro surrendered six days later.

13 January

Battle of Wadi, Mesopotamia.

21 January

Battle of Hanna, Mesopotamia. Heavy casualties in both battles and the men trapped at Kut not rescued.

21 February

On Western Front the Germans attacked the French fortress of Verdun. Battle of Verdun continued with attacks and counterattacks until mid December with appalling loss of life on both sides.

25 February

Germans captured Fort Douaumont, a main fortress at Verdun.

27 February

On Eastern Front Austrian forces attacked Albania.

22 March

Steamer Sussex torpedoed and sunk in English Channel.

24 April (Easter Monday)

Easter Rising in Dublin.

29 April

More than 9,000 British and Indian troops surrendered to the Turks at Kut.

31 May–1 June

Naval battle off Jutland.

4 June

On Eastern Front a massive Russian offensive against Austrian Army.

5 June

Lord Kitchener, Secretary of State for War, drowned in North Sea after HMS Hampshire sunk by German U-boat off Scapa Flow. Arab Revolt against Turks began outside city of Medina.

7 June

On Western Front the Germans captured Fort Vaux from the French at Verdun.

13 June

Mecca fell to the Arabs.

16 June

Jeddah taken by Arabs.

1 July

First day of the Battle of the Somme. By evening 60,000 British troops were casualties – one third of which had been killed. Offensive finally halted in mid-November when winter weather had set in and battleground was a sea of mud. British and French armies had advanced six miles in the four months. Combined Allied and German losses over a million – 420,000 were British. On Eastern Front the Russian advance against Austrian army continued over the next few weeks.

28 July

On Eastern Front the East Galician town of Brody taken by Russian troops. Heavy losses on both sides.

7 August

General Brusilov’s Russian army captured Stanislau in East Galicia with heavy casualties.

27 August

Romania declared war on Germany and Austria-Hungary.

1 September

Bulgaria declared war on Romania.

3 September

Bulgarian aircraft bombed Bucharest.

12 September

French, British, Russian, Serbian and Italian forces attacked on Salonika Front but were driven back.

24 October

On Western Front the French recaptured Fort Douaumont at Verdun.

3 November

French recaptured Fort Vaux at Verdun.

5 December

On the Eastern Front oil from Romanian oil-fields blown up to prevent use by the Germans.

6 December

German troops occupied Bucharest. David Lloyd George replaced H.H. Asquith as Prime Minister.

30 December

Rasputin murdered in Petrograd.

1917

17 February

Revolutionary unrest in some sections of Russian army.

3 March

Riots in streets of Petrograd.

10 March

Authority of the Duma, Russia’s Parliament, challenged.

11 March

British troops entered Baghdad shortly after Turkish soldiers left the city.

12 March

Soldiers and civilians demonstrate against Tsar Nicholas II in Petrograd. Start of Russian Revolution – Russia gradually sinks into political turmoil.

15 March

Tsar abdicated. Russia on brink of anarchy.

6 April

United States of America declared war on Germany.

9 April (Easter Monday)

Western Front. First day of Battle of Arras.

14 April

On Western Front Canadian troops took Vimy Ridge.

16 May

In Petrograd Alexander Kerensky became minister of War. His aim was a new Russian offensive against the Austrian army.

22 May

General Brusilov appointed Commander-in-Chief of Russian Army

26 May

First contingent of American troops arrived in France.

27 May

On Western Front sections of the French army mutinied.

7 June

Battle of Messines on Western Front.

10 June

On Eastern Front Italian army fought the Austrians at Trentino, Mounts Ortigaro and Camigolatti.

1 July

General Brusilov launched second offensive against Austrian army on Eastern Front.

2 July

Greece declared war on Germany.

12 July

On Western Front first mustard gas attack by Germans on British troops near Ypres.

16 July

In Petrograd Leon Trotsky supported demands to end war.

19 July

Severe setback in Russian offensive on Eastern Front. Many Russian prisoners taken and thousands of soldiers deserted from battlefields. Russian army in retreat and Austrian army continued to advance. Alexander Kerensky became Prime Minister of Russia.

28 July

General Brusilov replaced by General Kornilov.

31 July

On Western Front Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) opened. Russian retreat continued on Eastern Front.

15 September

Alexander Kerensky declared Russia a republic.

25 October

German troops entered town of Caporetto in Italy after the Italians were defeated at the twelfth battle on the Isonzo front.

26 October

Final British offensive to take the village of Passchendaele began.

31 October

British captured Beersheba and Gaza in Palestine.

7 November

Thousands of Bolsheviks surrounded the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace, Petrograd.

8 November

Bolsheviks took over Winter Palace. Lenin elected Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Trotsky Commissar for Foreign Affairs. Red Guards occupied the Kremlin in Moscow and Kerensky fled from Petrograd.

10 November

Battle for Passchendaele ended after Canadian troops advanced 500 yards against huge German bombardment.

19 November

Bolshevik Government in Petrograd asked for immediate armistice on all fronts.

20 November

On Western Front the Battle of Cambrai started and continued until 9 December when it ended in stalemate with heavy casualties on both sides.

9 December

General Allenby entered Jerusalem after the Turkish army left and the city surrendered.

15 December

Bolshevik, German, Austrian, Bulgarian and Turkish Governments announced ceasefire on Eastern Front.

24 December

On Eastern Front an Italian counter-attack succeeded against Austrians.

30 December

Troopship Aragon torpedoed and sunk ten miles from Alexandria harbour. The destroyer HMS Attack struck a mine and sank as she rescued survivors from the Aragon.

1918

31 January

Lenin established Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).

17 February

Peace negotiations between Germans and Bolsheviks broke down. War started again on Eastern Front.

3 March

On the Eastern Front the Bolsheviks and Germany signed Peace Treaty at Brest-Litovsk.

12 March

Capital of USSR moved from Petrograd to Moscow.

21 March

First day of the German Spring Offensive on the Western Front which continued with fierce fighting until 5 April.

9 April

Battle of the Lys on the Western Front.

16 April

Belgian town of St Omer bombed by German aircraft.

23 April

British naval force stormed the fortified harbour at Zeebrugge, Belgium and sank block-ships.

7 May

Romanian Government signed Peace of Bucharest with Germany and Austria-Hungary.

26 May

Turkish army defeated Armenians. Two days later Armenia declared her independence but within two weeks Armenians were massacred by Tatars south of Tiflis. Over 400,000 Armenian civilians murdered three months later when Turkish troops advanced into the Caucasus.

27 May

On the Western Front the Third Battle of the Aisne started. On the following day an American Brigade was in action at the village of Cantigny which they took and held.

1 June

Start of an influenza pandemic which swept through Europe, Africa and Asia. It affected civilian populations and men in all the opposing armies. It was said that more people died in the world epidemic than died in the entire war.

3 June

On the Western Front the Second Battle of the Marne started. American Marine Brigade in action at Belleau Wood.

29 August

Germans started to withdraw on Western Front as Allies continued fierce and sustained attacks against them.

31 August

In Petrograd British naval attache murdered inside embassy by Bolsheviks.

2 September

Bolsheviks announced the Red Terror and many opponents of their regime were executed.