Paris, speaking of this Hospital, said he had inspected hundreds of military Hospitals, but not one which commanded his admiration so completely as this.  Another unit was sent to Troyes and was maintained by the students of Newnham and Girton Colleges.  Dr. Elsie Inglis’s greatest work began in April, 1915, when her third unit went to Serbia, where she may he truly said to have saved the Serbian nation from despair.  The typhus epidemic had at the time of her arrival carried off one-third of the Serbian Army Medical Corps, and the epidemic threatened the very existence of the Serbian Army.  She organized four great Hospital Units, initiated every kind of needful sanitary precaution, looked into every detail, regardless of her own safety and comfort, hesitating at no task, however loathsome and terrible.  Her constant message to the Serbian Medical Headquarters Staff was “Tell me where your need is greatest without respect to difficulties, and we will do our best to help Serbia and her brave soldiers.”

Two nurses and one of the doctors died of typhus.  Miss Margaret Neil Fraser, the famous golfer, was one of those who died there, and many beds were endowed in the Second Unit in her memory.

The Third Serbian Unit when on its way out was commandeered by Lord Methuen at Malta for service among our own wounded troops, a service they were glad to render.  Later when the Germans and Austrians overran Serbia, one of the Units retreated with the Serbian Army, but the one in which Dr. Inglis was, remained at Kralijevo where she refused to leave her Serbian wounded, knowing they would die without her care.  She was captured with her staff and, after difficulties and indignities and discomforts, were released by the Austrians and returned through Switzerland to England.  On her return she urged the War Office to send her, and her Unit, to Mesopotamia.  Rumors had already reached England of the terrible state of things there from the medical point of view, which was fully revealed later by the Mesopotamian Commission.  She was refused permission to go, though it is perfectly clear their assistance would have been invaluable and ought to have been used.  Once more she returned to help the Serbians and established Units in the Balkans and South Russia.  The Serbian people have shown every token of gratitude and of honor which it was in their power to bestow upon her.  The people in 1916 put up a fountain in her honor at Mladenovatz, and the Serbian Crown Prince conferred on her the highest honor Serbia has to give, the First Order of the White Eagle.  Dr. Inglis died, on November 26th, three days after bringing her Unit safely home from South Russia.  Memorial services were held in her honor at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, and in St. Giles’s Cathedral, Edinburgh.  Those who were there speak of it not as a funeral but as a triumph.  The streets were thronged; all Edinburgh turned out to do her homage as she went to her last resting place.  The Scottish Command was represented and lent the gun-carriage on which the coffin was borne and the Union Jack which covered it.