Kelly Miller's History of the World War for Human Rights Part 38

It is only by carefully systematized organization that great work of this kind can be carried on. The slapdash, haphazard of hysterical excitement can have no legitimate place in a movement that provides stepping stones toward the salvation of the civilized world.

One of the things which will live long in the history of womankind was the wonderful work done by the magnificently courageous units of Lady Paget's nursing force, which went out to Servia, when that country was laid waste not only by the German beasts, but also by disease.

It was not the fault of those brave women and men that things happened at Uskub and in other Servian towns that do not bear repeating.

It was just the lack of thorough preparedness for a war which was much worse than humanity had thought possible that deepened the tragedy of their situation. In Servia, in fact, the career of the hospitals was quite checkered and the service rendered proportionately more vital.

LONDON-WALES UNIT.

At the time of the Austro-German invasion in the autumn of 1915, the London-Wales Unit was at Valjevo, one of the five Scottish women's hospitals working in the country. It was under the command of Dr. Alice Hutchinson and was very highly organized. Doctor Inglis had herself gone on to Servia to take general charge of the hospitals there in the spring of 1915. From the time that a typhus epidemic was overcome by women doctors early in the year to the time of the invasion all seemed to be going well. Then came three weeks of great pressure of work and of rapid moves from place to place as the enemy advanced into the country.

Finally, it became a necessity for the personnel of the different units either to retreat with the Servian army over the mountains into Montenegro or to fall in the hands of the enemy.

The story of the retreat is now very generally known. The journey was one long series of forced marches. Mountains 7000 feet high had to be traversed in blinding snow, almost the whole journey had to be made on foot and it was six weeks before the little band reached the coast.

Doctor Inglis meanwhile, with her group of nurses and orderlies, and Doctor Hutchinson, with the London-Wales Unit, had gallantly stayed behind and continued to attend to their Servian wounded and to organize help for them till the work was forcibly stopped by the advancing Austrian army.

UNIT TAKEN PRISONERS.

After being ordered out of Valjevo, Doctor Hutchinson made several attempts to organize hospitals in the line of retreat. She was at Vrnyachka Banja when the Austrians entered the town on November 10, 1915. She and her unit were taken prisoners and interned, first near the Servian frontier and then in Hungary for three weary months. The cheerful courage with which the members of the unit bore hards.h.i.+p and uncertainty and hope deferred has been related by Doctor Hutchinson in a memorable narrative. Their conditions would have been still more intolerable and their release would have been still longer delayed if Doctor Hutchinson herself had not known a great deal more about the Geneva Convention than the Austrian authorities had ever dreamed. She was thus able to a.s.sert herself on behalf of those under her in a way which taught her captors something new about British women. At the beginning of February the unit was at last allowed to cross the frontier into Switzerland. It reached England on February 12. It was only the perfection of its organization that carried this brave body of women through amazing hards.h.i.+ps.

Abroad women chauffeurs became almost as common in the war as men; the public in Paris and London refused to regard the appearance of a woman on the streets in cap, "knickers" and puttees or heavy boots as unusual, and in need they in many instances not only drove "taxi," but guided ambulances in the hospital service.

The Red Cross in America, in the matter of preparedness, organized a cla.s.s for women chauffeurs. One of these, started in Philadelphia, had among its instructors Mrs. Thomas Langdon Elwyn and Miss Let.i.tia McKim, both of whom drove ambulances for the Allies in England.

The National League for Woman Service, working in conjunction with the Council of National Defense, canva.s.sed the country through its Bureau of Registration and Information to provide statistics for mobilizing the entire woman-force of the Nation; all of which was done with the approval of the Secretary of Labor.

Perhaps the outstanding incident of industrial employment among women was that of several women in France as locomotive engineers. It is true that they operated only the shunting engines about the yards at the military camps, but it was noted in dispatches in every quarter of the globe that Mesdames Louis Debris and Marie Viard, whose husbands were killed in the war, were piloting the engines which their husbands had formerly driven.

WOMAN'S INGENUITY.

And woman has proved her ingenuity. In the damp trenches of the battlefields abroad the men need protection from the dampness and cold, which ordinary clothing will not provide. It was found that the leather-lined huntsmen's coats, and the sort of garments worn by the chauffeur, the aviator and the mountaineer served the men in the trenches well, and particularly along the Russian frontier and in the cold mountainous regions.

But the price of leather soared, with the demand for millions of pairs of shoes, saddles, harness, headgear, and whatnot, and leather-lined coats were at a premium. The women were not to be denied, and through the Suffrage organizations which turned in to prepare America for the struggle and to render a.s.sistance to the Allies, the unique plan was adopted of making linings for the airmen and soldier's coats of old kid gloves.

One group of women in a single section of Philadelphia gathered a thousand pairs of old gloves in a canva.s.s. The seams were ripped and the gloves cut down one side and laid open. The fingers of one glove so treated were dovetailed between the fingers of another glove so cut, and st.i.tched together. Thus one glove was sewed to another until a section of leather was formed sufficient to make a lining for a coat. And many such were devised and incorporated in the garments sent to the front by the various agencies dominated by the women of the land.

WOMEN AS POLICEMEN.

While women to a limited degree were rendering service as "policemen" in certain sections of the United States and on Continental Europe the war was responsible for the development of an organized force in London, which will probably remain a permanent organization to the end of time.

Miss Darner Dawson is chief of the London woman "bobbies," and M.S.

Allen is chief superintendent.

The force was organized in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the war and has relieved the men of a large amount of responsibility. The force is uniformed, the women wearing military costumes with visored caps.

They operate under the supervision, or with the authority of Sir Edward Henry, Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan police, and serve for duty at the munition plants where women workers are employed, besides doing regular patrol duty and welfare work.

The service in London is in the nature of a training for special service and the women after sufficient experience are sent to suburbs and small towns to do police duty. They are highly spoken of and declared to be very efficient, rendering service in the barrooms and looking after women in a manner that the regular "bobbies" cannot approximate.

It was declared in England, by way of closing the comment on this phase of the war that no one thing so stimulated the enlistments for service as the execution of Miss Edith Cavell, the English nurse who was shot as a spy by Germany. That her name will go down in history as a martyr to the cause of liberty and humanity goes without saying.

Miss Cavell had been a nurse in Brussels, and after the occupation of the Belgian capital by the Germans, she remained where she used her private hospital for the nursing of wounded soldiers; not excluding the Germans. It had been intimated that she had better cross the border, but she insisted on remaining at her post. Ultimately she was accused of being one of the instigators of a plot to smuggle English, French and Belgian soldiers across the lines, and of serving the enemies of Germany.

To the German mind she was more than a spy; Her conduct was reprehensible, because in the capacity of nurse she had won a degree of confidence. She was therefore held as a spy and traitor. And though Brand Whitlock, America's Minister to Belgium, and other diplomats sought to save her, she was shot by the ruthless Germans.

CHAPTER XVII.

THE TERRIBLE PRICE.

A NATION OF MEN DESTROYED--MILLIONS IN s.h.i.+PPING AND COMMERCE DESTROYED--WORLD'S MAPS CHANGED--BILLIONS IN MONEY--IMMENSE DEBTS--NATION'S WEALTH--THE UNITED STATES A GREAT PROVIDER.

The human tongue seems almost devoid of power to convey to the human mind what the war has actually cost the world in lives, money, property, ideals and all that is dear to humanity. In all the world there is not a human being who has not contributed something to the awful cost and the loss due to the destruction of property, the stopping of industry, the waste of energy and the curtailment of human endeavor in the interest of civilization, and the effects which the struggle has had upon the world cannot even be approximated in dollars and cents.

We have been taught to regard war as a terrible thing and to realize that thousands must be slain, but in no war in the history of the world has there been as many troops engaged as have been killed in the European war on the battlefields of Belgium and France.

At the beginning of the year 1917 it was estimated that the total casualties of the war were 22,500,000. In a report based on figures compiled in Was.h.i.+ngton it was stated: The human estimated waste and financial outlay are staggering. The combined casualties of the war, partly estimated because all belligerents do not publish lists, are 22,500,000. The figures included killed, permanently injured, prisoners and wounded returned to the front. Of this number the Central Powers were estimated to have suffered permanent losses in excess of 4,000,000, and the entente perhaps twice that number, Russia being by far the heaviest loser.

The financial outlay, based in part on official reports and statements and in part on estimates, was placed at approximately $80,000,000,000, divided $50,000,000,000 to the entente and $30,000,000,000 to the Central Powers. The entente lost more than 3,500,000 tons of merchant s.h.i.+pping and approximately 800,000 tons of naval vessels. On the other side the loss of naval tonnage was approximately 250,000 tons, and merchant s.h.i.+ps aggregating 211,000 tons were reported captured or destroyed.

IMMENSE LOSS TO COMMERCE.

Of the foreign commerce the Central Powers had lost $10,000,000,000 in the two and a half years of war, including imports and exports. The loss of commerce of Great Britain and her allies with the Central Powers probably was in the neighborhood of $7,000,000. This was largely made up at least on the import side by increased trade with the United States and other neutral countries and enlarged trade with the colonies.

Germany lost virtually all her African colonies and all her possessions in the Pacific Ocean, an aggregate of more than 1,000,000 square miles.

Turkey also lost a large area of territory held at the outbreak of the war, while Austria lost most of Bukowina and Galicia. To offset the territory losses of the Central Powers, the entente have lost in Europe approximately 300,000 square miles. Of this large area, all of it thickly populated in normal times, 175,000 square miles were wrested from Russia on the eastern battlefield.

The staggering losses in men include the vast number on both sides wounded in such a way as to permanently cripple them and render them unfit for military service. The figures are based on official reports and estimates by military experts.

Germany's permanent losses were placed at 1,500,000 men, including about 1,000,000 in killed. The permanent losses of Austria-Hungary were placed at about 1,000,000 more than those of Germany, owing to the fact that so much of the hard fighting on the eastern front was in the Austro-Hungarian theater. The losses of the Austro-Hungarians during the drive of General Brusiloff in 1916 were frightful. Large numbers of Austrians were taken prisoner by Brusiloff.

Russia's casualties for the first year of the war were estimated by military experts at more than 3,500,000 men, and these were doubled in the succeeding year, according to estimates by American military experts. Russia returned to the fighting line a smaller percentage of wounded than any of the other great Powers.

GREAT BRITAIN'S CASUALTIES.

Great Britain's casualties were placed in excess of 1,250,000 despite the limited front of British operations in France in the early stages.

The aggregate of Italy's casualties was estimated at 1,500,000, while Belgium's were placed at 200,000, Servians at 400,000, Montenegro's at 150,000 and Rumania's at more than 300,000.

While the area of the territorial losses of the Central Powers was nearly four times as great as that of the entente group, with the exception of the occupied portions of Bukowina and Galicia, the value of the territory included in them is comparatively small. For example, Germany's African colonies were spa.r.s.ely settled, largely by natives, with virtually all development in the future. Despite this fact, their loss was a severe blow to Germany.

The territorial losses of the entente covered all but a small corner of Belgium, a highly developed, thickly populated industrial country; a large slice of northern France, virtually all of Servia, all of Montenegro, more than three-fourths of Rumania and 175,000 square miles of Russia, the major part of it in the grain-growing section.

According to military experts on the "war map" of Europe as it stood at that time, the Central Powers had won the war. But when their enormous loss of foreign commerce and territory is considered, their "victory"