There have been changes in that Motor Field Ambulance Corps that set out for Flanders on the 25th of September, 1914.

Its Commandant has gone from it to join the Royal Army Medical Corps. A few of the original volunteers have dropped out and others have taken their places, and it is larger now than it was, and better organized.

But whoever went and whoever stayed, its four field-women have remained at the Front. Two of them are attached to the Third Division of the Belgian Army; all four have distinguished themselves by their devotion to that Army and by their valour, and they have all received the Order of Leopold II., the highest Belgian honour ever given to women.

The Commandant, being a man, has the Order of Leopold I. Mr. Ashmead-Bartlett and Mr. Philip Gibbs and Dr. Souttar have described his heroic action at the Battle of Dixmude on the 22nd of October, 1914, when he went into the cellars of the burning and toppling Town Hall to rescue the wounded. And from that day to this the whole Corps—old volunteers and new—has covered itself with glory.

On our two chauffeurs, Tom and Bert, the glory lies quite thick. "Tom" (if I may quote from my own story of the chauffeurs) "Tom was in the battle of Dixmude. At the order of his commandant he drove his car straight into the thick of it, over the ruins of a shattered house that blocked the way. He waited with his car while all the bombs that he had ever dreamed of crashed around him, and houses flamed, and tottered and fell. 'Pretty warm, ain't it?' was Tom's comment.

"Four days later he was waiting at Oudekappele with his car when he heard that the Hospital of Saint-Jean at Dixmude was being shelled and that the Belgian military man who had been sent with a motor-car to carry off the wounded had been turned back by the fragment of a shell that dropped in front of him. Tom thereupon drove into Dixmude to the Hospital of Saint-Jean and removed from it two wounded soldiers and two aged and paralysed civilians who had sheltered there, and brought them to Furnes. The military ambulance men then followed his lead, and the Hospital was emptied. That evening it was destroyed by a shell.

"And Bert—it was Bert who drove his ambulance into Kams-Kappele to the barricade by the railway. It was Bert who searched in a shell-hole to pick out three wounded from among thirteen dead; who with the help of a Belgian priest, carried the three several yards to his car, under fire, and who brought them in safety to Furnes."

And the others, the brave "Chaplain," and "Mr. Riley," and "Mr. Lambert," have also proved themselves.

But when I think of the Corps it is chiefly of the four field-women that I think—the two "women of Pervyse," and the other two who joined them at their dangerous poste.

Both at Furnes and Pervyse they worked all night, looking after their wounded; sometimes sleeping on straw in a room shared by the Belgian troops, when there was no other shelter for them in the bombarded town. One of them has driven a heavy ambulance car—in a pitch-black night, along a road raked by shell-fire, and broken here and there into great pits—to fetch a load of wounded, a performance that would have racked the nerves of any male chauffeur ever born. She has driven the same car, alone, with five German prisoners for her passengers. The four women served at Pervyse (the town nearest to the firing-line) in "Mrs. Torrence's" dressing-station—a cellar only twenty yards behind the Belgian trenches. In that cellar, eight feet square and lighted and ventilated only by a slit in the wall, two lived for three weeks, sleeping on straw, eating what they could get, drinking water that had passed through a cemetery where nine hundred Germans are buried. They had to burn candles night and day. Here the wounded were brought as they fell in the trenches, and were tended until the ambulance came to take them to the base hospital at Furnes.

Day in, day out, and all night long, with barely an interval for a wash or a change of clothing, the women stayed on, the two always, and the four often, till the engineers built them a little hut for a dressing-station; they stayed till the Germans shelled them out of their little hut.

This is only a part of what they have done. The finest part will never be known, for it was done in solitary places and in the dark, when special correspondents are asleep in their hotels. There was no limelight on the road between Dixmude and Furnes, or among the blood and straw in the cellar at Pervyse.

And Miss Ashley-Smith (who is now Mrs. McDougall)—her escape from Ghent (when she had no more to do there) was as heroic as her return.

Since then she has gone back to the Front and done splendid service in her own Corps, the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry.

M. S.
July 15th, 1915.

THE END

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA