Elsie Corbett: a small role in history

The women servicing their ambulances at Yelak

In my early childhood the village manor house was occupied by a spinster, Elsie Cameron Corbett. She was old, in her late sixties, so not really ‘elderly’ although from my truncated infant perspective she appeared to be ancient, an idea that was encouraged by her being very lame. As she owned much of the local property it felt rather as if her spirit hovered over the village but there was no sense of menace about that; in so far as I thought of her she seemed a benign presence, albeit one that should be, and even had to be, respected.

It was, of course, a time when far more deference was shown to the propertied gentry than is commonly the case these days, but there was good reasons for the villagers to view her with respect. Born in 1893, Elsie first visited Spelsbury in the summer of 1916, when she and her friend, Kathleen Dillon, were learning to drive. Soon after the Great War ended she and Kathleen settled permanently in the village. The inter-war years were a time of agricultural depression, rural depopulation and increased taxes; many landowners struggled to retain, let alone improve, their property. Elsie, however, was independently wealthy. She bought much of the village and surrounding land from the head of Kathleen’s family, Harold, the 17^th Viscount Dillon. She spent a deal more on the cottages and farms than the rents they bought in could justify. Her tenantry were cared for, albeit in a ‘high-minded’ way. Money did not go on beer and skittles, but roofing, plumbing and drainage. Elsie, in the words of a great-niece: ‘loved the village’.

Elsie’s father was Archibald Corbett, an immensely wealthy property developer and philanthropist. Her mother, Alice Polson, was a daughter of John Polson, a co-founder of Brown & Polson. It was apparently John himself whose inventiveness led to an enterprise that had been established to manufacture muslin branching out into cornflour production, and so Brown & Polson became a household name across the whole country.

Archibald was a social campaigner as well as a businessman. An enemy of the drink trade, he was a member of the Scottish Permissive Bill and Temperance Association, at one time serving as its president. His housing estates, which were built to the east of London, were planned as model communities. All the houses were laid out to provide their residents with their own little bit of air and space, each being allowed a small garden. There were churches and chapels, sports clubs and recreation rooms but no public houses or other licensed premises whatsoever. After the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885, when Glasgow was enlarged and divided into seven constituencies, he stood for Tradeston. He was elected as a Liberal MP in December that year. In 1886 the party split over Irish Home Rule. Aligning with the minority, oppositionist, faction, Archibald retained his seat as a Liberal Unionist in 1886 and at every subsequent General Election until 1910, when he was returned as an Independent Liberal. In 1911 he was elevated to the Lords as 1^st Baron Rowallan.

Unhappily, Alice died in 1902, when Elsie was only nine and her two younger brothers, Thomas and Arthur, seven and four respectively. Her family being wealthy and privileged she grew up in comfort with much of the kind of socialising that was typical for girls of her class: riding to hounds, country fairs and shows, shooting parties, four London ‘seasons’ and being presented at court. Unlike her brothers, who went to prep school and then Eton, she had a very limited education; after her mother’s death she was tutored at home by an uninspiring governess before spending two terms at a Finishing School in Brussels. She later wrote that she craved the kind of learning that was rarely provided for girls at the time, even the daughters of rich MPs: ‘I had been to a Cambridge May Week and had gazed with awe and reverence at Agnata Frances Ramsay, the first woman to qualify for a First Class Honours Degree, although she was not allowed to take it.’[1]

She also yearned to be a doctor. But had social convention not been, of itself, an important barrier it seems likely that when she lost her mother she also lost her likeliest ally in any endeavour to break through the glass ceiling. Additionally, as a widowed MP’s daughter it seems likely that she felt duty bound to offer her father rather more support in his constituency work than would have been the case had Alice still been alive. Nevertheless, between family duties she did a little training:

‘Already, a year before the war, I had arranged to go into the Deaconess’ Hospital in Edinburgh for one of the short nursing courses they gave to missionaries and other Church of Scotland workers; but my father was ill, and I could not leave him. . . . [in early 1914] with no special foreboding of the war, I had been going with two friends for a course of First Aid and Home Nursing classes and had got my certificates.’

On the outbreak Thomas, who had been in the Officer Training Corps at school, joined the Ayrshire Yeomanry. He served throughout the war, including in Gallipoli – where the Ayrshires were some of the last troops to be evacuated – in Palestine, and finally on the Western Front. Arthur, who was only sixteen, had set his heart on qualifying as an RNAS pilot. He was later to get his wish and, having achieved that ambition volunteered to join No 8 Squadron, the first RNAS squadron to go to the aid of the RFC on the Western Front. Naval Eight was established at the end of October 1916 and based about 20 km north of Amiens. It was to become one of the most successful British fighter squadrons of the war. Arthur did not share in that success. He was killed in action just a few weeks later, on 4 December, the second of its young pilots to lose his life.

Elsie volunteered at the Kilmarnock Infirmary and then a few miles to the north at Dunlop House, an ornate neo-Jacobean pile built in the 1830s,  which was being used as a convalescent home for wounded Belgian soldiers. Going back to London with her father early in 1915 she was still frustrated at being restricted to the odd bit of volunteering rather than having a proper job to do, and real duties to perform. Like so many patriotic young women, as well as young men, she wanted to serve.

It was the family doctor who proposed an idea that was to transform her life:

‘“If you’re interested in nursing, why not go to Serbia? My son is running a hospital there; they’ve got a typhus epidemic and need nurses desperately.” It was as if an archangel had opened the gates of heaven to me. It was also the kind of outrageous proposition that appealed very much to my father.’

They were both encouraged by the reactions of others:

‘An outraged Marchioness drove over from a considerable distance to have a stop put to the project. A very young midshipman with whom I danced described a typhus epidemic he had seen and urged me not to go; and the Daily Mail said, though not of me in particular, that no young or untrained nurses should be allowed to go to Serbia.’

At the Red Cross headquarters Elsie was faced with another obstacle:

‘. . .when the secretary asked my age there was ghastly moment. “Oh dear,” she said, “nobody under 23 is allowed to go France.” My heart stood still. “But I’m not going to France,” I said. “Oh well,” she said, “I suppose Serbia is all right if they’ll take you.” So I grabbed my papers and rushed from the room.’

There is obviously a massive irony there. At this distance, little more than a hundred years later, it is difficult to comprehend the kind of patriotic fervour that gripped so many Britons at the outbreak of the war. While Arthur Corbett was far too young when he died huge numbers were younger still, some even less than sixteen. By law no boy under eighteen could join the army as a regular soldier, no man of under nineteen could serve abroad. But immense numbers ‘lost their birth certificates’ or otherwise cheated the system; in most cases with the collusion of recruiting sergeants. It has been estimated that the British Army had more under-age soldiers serving in France in 1915 than the total size of the army that served under Wellington at Waterloo. While that may be difficult to comprehend today it is surely every bit as difficult to understand how strong were the conventions that – at least theoretically, if not in reality in far too many cases – sheltered women from life’s viciousness and cruelties. In 1915, at the age of 22, Elsie was ‘too young’ to nurse British soldiers in France. Yet with a little sleight of hand she was able to nurse in Serbia, a country whose infrastructure and – as many of would have seen it – social development, was many years behind Britain’s.

Elsie travelled to Serbia with a small party comprising one doctor, a dozen professional nurses, four volunteers and four orderlies:

‘We had a day in Paris and saw Versailles in spring sunshine on our way Marseilles, where we boarded Sir Thomas Lipton’s large steam yacht Erin, and embarked on a luxury cruise of the Mediterranean.’

A very civilised way in which to travel to a war! Once on the Erin Elsie wrote in her diary: ‘A very nice V A D [Voluntary Aid Detachment, an organisation that gave medical support to the armed forces, but unlike Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army and Royal Navy nursing services was not under military or naval discipline], Miss Dillon, came on board; I hope we shall be able to stick together.’ Kathleen Dillon had been born in Dublin in 1877 and so was some fifteen years older than Elsie. The two women were to ‘stick together’ until Kathleen died in 1958.

The party landed in Salonica (now Thessaloniki) on 20 May 1915 and entrained for Serbia two days later. On the following day, 23 May, Italy joined the Entente and declared war on Austria-Hungary. Although Italy had, through the Triple Alliance, been allied with Austria-Hungary and Germany she was only committed to going to their aid if they were attacked, which was clearly not the case in 1914. Her decision to throw in her lot in with Britain and France was presaged by diplomatic discussions; by the terms of the Treaty of London, April 1915, she was promised large swathes of Austro-Hungarian territory in any subsequent peace settlement. The approach to Serbia through north-eastern Greece was also significant. At the time Greece was neutral. As the party’s mission was purely humanitarian it did not compromise that neutrality but, as time went on, Greece was compelled to allow Salonica to be used as an entrepôt for military aid to Serbia. After a military coup took place in Salonica in August 1916, and Anglo-French forces marched into Athens on 1 December, Greece too joined the Entente. Thus Britain and France ‘persuaded’ the two Mediterranean countries to become military allies through a combination of bullying and bribery.

Meanwhile Elsie and Kathleen travelled via Nish ‘a horrid little town’ and Vrntsi ‘in peacetime a fashionable Spa’ to nearby Vrnjatchka Banja, which was where a number of fever hospitals were situated. As numerous different parties and authorities were striving to alleviate the local suffering there was a deal of confusion at Vrnjatchka Banja but it seems that even if the management could be a little prickly most of the staff did what they could to pull together, and cooperated well enough. Quite a few of the men – doctors, physiotherapists and orderlies – were prisoners of war.

In October 1915 Bulgaria’s Tsar, Ferdinand I, was also bribed with promises of future territorial gains to take his country into the war, but in his case in alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary. From a strategical perspective Bulgaria’s accession was critical. It opened up a railway route from Germany, the alliance’s industrial powerhouse, to the Ottoman Empire. Military specialists and training officers, and more importantly modern weaponry and munitions, could then be moved to Constantinople to strengthen the Ottoman forces that were fighting the allied armies on the Gallipoli Peninsula. The Gallipoli campaign, on which much had been staked, never looked likely to succeed; it was Bulgaria’s entry to the war that finally sealed its fate. Not because the Turks needed Bulgarian manpower, rather because they needed German technology.

Bulgaria’s entry also spelt doom for Serbia’s resistance. The war had opened with Austria-Hungary’s assault on Belgrade but the Serbs had surprised Europe with the strength of their resistance. The Battle of Cer, fought in the mountains in the north-west of the country in August 1914, is sometimes cited as one of the most remarkable upsets in military history. When Bulgaria entered the war the German alliance was able to attack from three points of the compass, west, north and east. The Serbian Army was routed and its survivors were forced to retreat to the south-west through the Albanian mountains. It was a national trail of tears, on which thousands died of cold, hunger and disease.

In Vrnjatchka Banja the medical staff, foreigners as well as Serbians, had reason to be apprehensive about what might befall them, although they swiftly became too busy with helping the sick and wounded to do much apart from eat, wash and sleep. Perhaps that was just as well; one of the nurses melodramatically suggested that they should prepare lethal hypodermics in order to defend themselves against ‘a fate worse than death’. As the enemy forces got closer to the town it was, among the staff, the prisoners of war who were unhappiest. For them ‘liberation’ meant reabsorption in the Austro-Hungarian Army. On 1 November: ‘All our Austrian prisoner orderlies were lined up and marched away, after gathering round us to say goodbye, many of them almost in tears; a queer parting from our enemies.’ Like conscripts in any and every war they only wanted to get home and rejoin their friends and families.

In the event the worst that befell Elsie and Kathleen was finding themselves at the mercy of the enemy army’s inadequate bureaucracy, with its inevitable delays and misdirections. After a brief interlude during which they were ‘confined to barracks’ by Dr Banks, who was by then in charge of the party, the nurses were permitted to walk freely in the local countryside, where ‘the licentious soldiery always saluted our Red Crosses most courteously.’ On 10 February 1916: ‘Five of us managed to get another small room, where I  celebrated my 23rd birthday and became old enough to go as a V.A.D. to Base Hospital in France.’

After a slow and uncomfortable train journey north, on 14 February: ‘we got to Vienna, and had a welcome wash at the station, and a wonderful breakfast at the American Consulate. Here Dr Banks managed to get money for our journey home, as we were told we were now free (I don’t know why) and must pay our own fares.’ At Bludenz, near the Swiss border, there was a brief delay until the Austrian authorities were confident that they wouldn’t be taking home any recent intelligence about the fighting that might help the Entente’s war effort. In Zürich they had the opportunity to catch up with the English newspapers for the first time in many months and were horrified by the length of the casualty lists. Having been living and working in central Serbia they had been spared any conception of the scale of the war, which by the close of 1915 was demanding more men and causing more death and destruction than they had realised could be possible only eighteen months earlier.

Once in London at the end of February Elsie found that her father’s town house was being used to house Belgian refugees, while he and Arthur were living in a hotel. While the family’s main focus was on Arthur getting into the RNAS Elsie followed up her contacts in nursing to find out how she, and Kathleen, could get back to Serbia. The opportunity that came their way was to join the Scottish Women’s Hospital Motor Ambulance unit which was being prepared to aid the forces that were being assembled to attempt the re-conquest of the country from across its southern border; from ‘neutral’ Greece. So the two friends’ first task was to learn to drive, specifically to learn to drive the Ford Model T, the world’s first mass produced car, the only practical choice for a unit that was going to have to operate at the end of a long and uncertain supply chain. The Model T may not have been particularly advanced or sophisticated but it was fast becoming a commonplace in Western Europe as well as the United States. It was also, as Elsie and her colleagues were to discover and celebrate, remarkably robust.

Meanwhile, of the 400,000 Serbs, soldiers and civilians, men and women, who had fled down the Albanian mountain passes to the Adriatic coast more than half lost their lives en route. British and French ships evacuated the survivors to Corfu, where the sick and injured were nursed and the capable soldiers re-equipped and trained.

The ambulance unit made its way out to Salonica by hospital ship from Southampton, a far less comfortable way to travel than railway to Marseilles and cruising on the Erin. In charge was the general Sir John French’s sister, Katherine Harley, who Elsie remembered as: ‘. . . gifted and charming, but extremely autocratic.’

When their ship arrived in Salonica in August 1916 Elsie and Kathleen found it a very different place from the sleepy Mediterranean port they had first visited the previous year. French, British, Italian and even Russian soldiers were gathering there, as well as Serbs. Its gulf was crowded with every sort of allied shipping and the coast was a long line of camps. One small area was reserved for the Scottish Women’s Hospital.

They didn’t remain for long in the area but nevertheless did – unknowingly – witness the August coup: ‘One day as we came home some Greek soldiers cheered for the English which gratified us . . .’ It was only later, when they were able to read newspapers from home, that they learnt the reason. The Greek government had been overthrown and Macedonia declared an independent republic. There was a little bloodshed when some royalist soldiers were attacked in their barracks but it didn’t overspill into the streets. Life seemed to go on as normal, or as close to normal as possible in a city that had become the gateway to war in a neighbouring country.

The women then drove their ambulances west to Ostrovo, a railhead at the northern tip of the lake of the same name. The Scottish Women’s Hospital’s main effort in Serbia, the hospital itself, was established a few miles back to the east. It’s director was Dr Agnes Bennett, the first woman to awarded a BSc by the University of Sydney and the first to be commissioned in the British Army, an extraordinary double. From that time the unit was between the front, then quiet enough, and the hospital. It soon became clear that while the driving up to Ostrovo had been difficult enough their real work would challenge the best of them:

‘. . . the immediate problem was whether even Ford cars could possibly manage the tracks across the deep sand and the so-called roads up into the mountains where the forward dressing stations now were. Orman, our best driver, was sent out with Kathleen and me to inspect our driving, and found it pretty bad. We grunted and boiled across and through the lakeside . . . negotiating various hazards in the shape of deep ditches, . . . went a little way up the road towards the dressing stations; it was terribly steep with at least one hairpin bend only a Ford could get round, but the view back across the lake was unbelievably beautiful.’

At 4.00 am on 12 September the Serbian bombardment started, heralding the beginning of the offensive. Elsie was ordered to go up the mountain road: ‘. . . a gloriously sunshiny day and the car running perfectly. There was a tremendous din the whole way up, and we passed three batteries firing as hard as they could, the shells whizzing over our heads with a most exciting sound.’

The following day a dressing station had to be evacuated to make room for freshly wounded men. All the ambulances were needed to help take them back to the hospital: ‘Mrs. Harley refused to let them go, for no reason that we could think of. This was what we had come for, and we had been told in the morning that we would be needed again. Orman and Stewart and I simply took our cars and went, and nothing was said, but we did realise what a drastic step this was. Thus early did mutiny break out; but when delegates of the Scottish Women came out from England to investigate what developed into a crisis, it was Mrs. Harley who had to go and not our rebellious selves.’

Katherine Harley clearly believed that she was responsible for her young charges’ safety. They, on the other hand, were fired up with the ardour of youth and willing to take risks in order to do their duty. The young women’s ‘mutiny’ was a trivial episode in itself, an obscure historical footnote, but it was in keeping with the spirit of change that transformed British society and politics in the first quarter of the twentieth century.

The same night as the mutiny, 13 September, the Serbian Army took Gornechevo, at the top of the pass back into their country. Some of the ambulances crossed the border the next morning. Elsie remembered it as a ‘. . . poor little village . . . smoking and still badly ruined. There were a few keening women and an old man grubbing about among the ruins of their homes, and I never saw a more tragic sight.’

For the Serbs the advance through Gornechevo pass was a great victory. Their army was properly back in the homeland, albeit only a slither of the homeland. By the time that the ambulances were on the way back with their wounded every kind of military and logistical support was pouring the other way ‘. . . rows of carts driven by vociferous Serbs; and British Ford vans; and French ammunition waggons; strings of pack ponies and mules; Staff officers in cars or riding; . . .’ Getting back against the flow of traffic proved to be an even greater challenge than following the infantry had been earlier in the day. One of Elsie’s ‘. . . patients was a Bulgarian, who screamed all the first part of the journey, but more from fear than pain I think, for he cheered up during a road block, and smiled broadly when a passer-by suggested we should cut his throat, giving him a cigarette at the same time.’

The lack of bitterness among the fighting men was one of her clearest recollections, which calls to mind the words that have been attributed to various sources, most commonly the socialist James Maclean: ‘A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at both ends.’ The conscripts of every nation were ‘only obeying orders’, except when it came to defending their homes and the well-being of those they loved. It was only then that they had something to fight for.

As time went on an operating method developed. The Scottish Women’s Hospital ambulances got as close as possible to the front, on a few occasions even coming under shellfire, to collect men from the dressing stations and to carry them back to the nearest hospitals – which usually meant tented field hospitals – or sometimes just to better roads where they could be transferred to larger and better equipped ambulances provided by different agencies. The only transport that got closer to the fighting, apart from stretcher bearers, were mules to which the wounded were often bundled and strapped with minimal attention to their comfort and needs.

Of all the pioneering women Elsie was to meet in Serbia the most unusual, the most worthy of special mention, was Flora Sandes. The daughter of a Yorkshire clergyman, Flora was born in 1876. In 1914 she, like many Britons, was angered by what they saw as Austria’s bullying of Serbia. She travelled out with the St John’s Ambulance in 1914 and just managed to survive a bout of typhus nursing at a fever hospital in Valjevo. Having recovered she attached herself to the army, to nurse wounded soldiers. Yet privately, she yearned to be a soldier herself. On the retreat through Albania she removed her Red Cross badge and enrolled as a private, subsequently training alongside the men in Corfu.

In November 1916, in the course of an attack on Hill 1212 Flora was: ‘hit by a grenade thrown at short range, which broke her arm in several places and severely wounded her side. A snow blizzard was raging; there was no track down from the mountain top; . . .’

The ambulance women extricated her, somewhat against her will, from the army’s inadequate dressing station and took her to a British hospital at Sorovitch. After recovering from her injuries she was unfit to return to the front line. Nevertheless, she continued in the Serbian Army through the remainder of the war, managing a hospital and raising funds for wounded soldiers. In 1919, a special Act of Parliament allowed her to be commissioned as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s only female army officer. She resigned her commission in 1922 but only left her adopted country after the Nazi invasion in 1941. Flora died in Suffolk in 1956.

For about two years fighting was intermittent and the front scarcely moved. The Serbs and their Entente allies made a little progress, winning more than they lost, but just like the Western the Serbian Front scarcely seemed to shift. Everything was on a smaller scale and many less men were killed, the terrain was mountainous rather than low lying but otherwise the suffering was much the same. The weather – both the bitter winters and the scorching heat of summer – caused day to day discomforts for the soldiers and their support staff that were very different, but no less real, than the sea of mud that was Passchendaele. For Elsie Christmas 1916 was an especially tragic feast as it was that night that ‘a garbled cable’ told her of her brother Arthur’s death in France.

1917 was largely spent based in the mountains at Yelak, although Elsie and Kathleen were able to return to England for several weeks in the summer. They returned to Salonica on 31 August, just a fortnight after a terrible fire had swept through the city: ‘. . . we had heard rumours . . . but nobody imagined anything like this. From a mile or two away the place looked all right, but as we came closer we realised that there was nothing at all left except the skeletons of buildings.’ Of the city’s population of 150,000, greatly swollen by the war, about half were left homeless. It was pure good fortune that the damage wasn’t even greater, as only by a fluke of the wind did the most dilapidated and crowded quarter escape the flames.

Elsie came to love Yelak. The countryside about was harsh and demanding but beautiful and healthy. In their free time she and her colleagues were able to go on long rambles across the hills, occasionally borrowing horses to go riding too. The immediate area was developed into a support base for the army, and became a command and control as well as a medical centre. Katherine Harley duly lost her job as the unit’s leader, having fallen out with Agnes Bennett, and was tactfully moved into a job at Monastir, a town a little further to the west that was closer to the front line and thus effectively under siege. She and her daughter worked there at keeping the civilian population supplied with food and other basic necessities. By the kind of random chance that could happen to anybody living in a war zone she was killed by a fragment of shrapnel when a shell burst in the street outside her window. In her stead Kathleen was promoted to be commander of the unit, which was likely enough because she was the oldest of the drivers.

In the autumn of 1918 the enemy’s resistance collapsed and the Serbian Army began a rapid advance. They outpaced their supply train and marched for most of the night as well as the day. Bulgaria signed an armistice on 30 September and its Tsar, Ferdinand, abdicated. As the army advanced the Scottish Women’s ambulances went with them. Their drivers became celebrities. Elsie recorded how a soldier made an impromptu speech to a group of townswomen at Leskovatz, about half way from Ostrovo, Yelak and Monastir to Belgrade:

‘. . . the Charge of the Light Brigade was simple and tame compared to what we were claimed to have done . . . a soldier took up the tale of Our Sisters. “Shells were falling here, boom, and there boom. You women would have been squealing ‘Aie, Aie, Aie.’ All the soldiers were running into their holes but our Sisters didn’t even look round!” . . . we were instantly simply smothered in flowers and fallen upon by women, all anxious to embrace us. We took refuge in a café, the crowd surging after us, . . .’

To their embarrassment they were plied with the choicest food by people who had barely enough to eat themselves, and found refusal to be impossible.

The first Serbian soldiers entered Belgrade on 1 November. Due to Elsie suffering one of her recurrent bouts of Malaria – a disease which all the women were afflicted by – she and Kathleen didn’t get there until the 11^th, Armistice Day on the Western Front. By that time the Serbian Army had crossed the frontier and was advancing towards the Austrian heartland. The Austro-Hungarian Empire was shattered by the war.

After spending Christmas in the city the ambulance unit was shipped up the Danube to Novi Sad in the middle of January. The weather was bitterly cold and the bargees ‘both drunk and incompetent’. The White Ensign was already flying there, on a solitary motor launch that had made its way up the river from the Black Sea. Like many towns and cities in the Balkans Novi Sad’s sovereignty was changed several times in the twentieth century. It was within the empire at the outbreak of war, after which the Kingdom of Serbia briefly claimed it before the whole country was absorbed into the Kingdom of Yugoslavia in 1918. Hitler gave the city, although not the rump of Serbia, to Hungary in 1941 but from the end of World War II Yugoslavia was resurrected as the Socialist Federal Republic. Following its break-up in 1992 Novi Sad has been in Serbia, although for a single decade, before Slobodan Milošević’s fall, Serbia was politically combined with Montenegro. The border – and frequently name – changes of the region afford multiple pitfalls that can trip the unwary chronicler.

Soon after arriving in Novi Sad five of the drivers entrained for Fiume (now Rijeka, Croatia) on the Adriatic coast to collect some new vehicles that were being donated to the Serbian Red Cross. They only found out several hours later that train they had boarded was bound for Budapest, 260 miles to the north-east of Fiume as the crow flies. Despite Hungary not having formally surrendered they were treated generously there, put up – free of charge – in one of the best hotels and when ‘a woman professor from the University heard us asking our way to the Art Gallery she escorted us there and had it opened specially for us.’ One of the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s oddities was that its shambolic political structure meant that there were great differences in how its component nations fared in the war. At its end Austria was tragically broken, her people on the verge of starvation, Hungary however, was at least relatively prosperous. Elsie noted that food was ‘plentiful and not very dear’. After that excursion the women managed to find their way to Fiume where they parted again, three of them spending several days living in a railway carriage in the goods yard, trying to ensure that the vehicles were loaded properly onto wagons, after which all they needed was a locomotive to actually pull their train to Novi Sad.

For small parties of civilians, such as Elsie and her friends, the chaos that ensued in the midst of defeat could be as dangerous as war itself. Their involuntary journey to Budapest was the sort of accident that must have befallen many refugees: without the happy outcome. Defeated armies, whose officers have lost most of their authority, can easily degenerate into criminal gangs. Early in 1919 Fiume was swarming with defeated soldiers. ‘The Bulgars . . . were being sent home again by an incredibly involved route. Some of them were crying and some of them chatting, but most of them had the patient look of dumb, driven cattle . . .’ Thankfully there were also small British and French parties doing what they could to impose order: ‘a harassed French station-master could only deal with his subordinates through a dictionary; pointing, I suppose, to such words as “These ladies want an engine.”’

After a ceremony in Belgrade where they, and the other ambulance women who hadn’t already left were honoured by their hosts, Elsie and Kathleen returned to England in the spring of 1919. Her account of her time in Serbia which, with interludes, lasted for nearly four years, does not dwell on the shortages and hardships that the women had to overcome or the physical dangers that they occasionally had to face but rather the small courtesies that were frequently extended to them by friends and enemies alike. While she saw far too much of the tragedy and suffering of war there were two tremendous pluses. One was her growing love for Kathleen Dillon – she was never happy when duty called on the two of them to part – the other the sense that she was, at long last, doing something that was really positive and useful, that she was serving others. I believe that it was the happiest time of her life.

Elsie was certainly a suffragist if not actually a suffragette. In 1918 Parliament passed the Representation of the People Act. The vote was given to all men of at least 21 years, and all propertied women of 30 or more. Women were given the same voting rights as men in 1928. At school I was taught that it was the work done by women in munitions factories that convinced politicians that they should be given the vote. Doubtless there is truth in that, but the contribution made by women such as Elsie must have been important. She was not allowed to go to France because, at 22, she was ‘too young’. Had she gone there she couldn’t have played so active a role. There was little chance of her being permitted to drive an ambulance at all, and certainly not so close to the fighting. Going to Serbia gave the women of the ambulance unit a chance to display their initiative and for that, as much as anything else, their story is surely an important one.

[1] All the quotations in this article are from the same book: Elsie Cameron Corbet. Red Cross in Serbia 1915-1919. Cheney & Sons Ltd, Banbury, Oxon, 1964.