Read Online Lorimers at War by Anne Melville - Free Book Online

were not wanted in the town. Women in the medical world were so often under-valued that it was easy to see slights even perhaps where none was intended; but to Kate, tired after the journey and still disappointed that she had not been sent to France, the impression that they were being turned away came as a last straw. To keep her temper under control she supervised the unloading of the expedition’s stores while the senior doctor, Dr Muriel Forbes, established that she and the Serbs could converse, after a fashion, in German.
    â€˜The reason why they’re suggesting we should establish ourselves away from the town is that the arsenal is here in Kragujevatz and there are regular bombing raids by Taube aircraft,’ Dr Forbes reported when the situation had been explained to her. ‘It doesn’t mean that they don’t need or want us. Far from it! Twenty-one of their own doctors have died in the past five weeks.’
    â€˜From the bombs?’ asked Kate incredulously.
    â€˜No. From typhus. There’s an epidemic raging. They’ve had four thousand civilian deaths in this town alone and nobody knows how many are dying in the villages. As well as the regular military hospital here, there’s an emergency building filled with men wounded in the campaign. That’s where they’d expected us to work, but the typhus is spreading through there as well.’
    â€˜If we split into two teams, could they give us orderlies?’ Kate asked.
    Muriel’s smile showed that she had been thinking along the same lines. ‘Yes. I asked that question, and the answer was that with the greatest of ease and pleasure we could be provided with as many Austrian prisoners of war as we needed.’
    â€˜Is that safe? I mean, would they have to be under military guard all the time?’
    â€˜I gather that they’re only Austrians in the sense that they were conscripted into the Austrian Army because they lived in land under Austrian occupation. They’re Serbs by race – Bosnians – and delighted to have been captured – in fact, it sounds as though most of them deserted. They’d work as volunteers.’
    â€˜Then we ought to establish a separate hospital for the typhus victims,’ said Kate. ‘Under tents, if possible, and a little way out of town.’
    The two women were so closely in agreement that there was not even any need to discuss where each of them should go. Muriel, the elder, was a surgeon and volunteered at once to care for the wounded soldiers who could not be housed in the main military hospital.
    Three days later Kate’s tented hospital received its first patients. Those of the British team who stayed with her had been allocated their own spheres of responsibility – for nursing, the kitchen, the dispensary and the stores – and had set to work at once to train the Serbo-Austrian orderlies allotted to them. Kate herself had grasped the greatest nettle of all, that of sanitation and disinfestation. She was only twenty-four years old and all her training had been done in teaching hospitals run with an almost military discipline along lines laid down many years earlier – establishments whose methods of organization could not even be queried by a junior doctor, much less completely re-thought. But her recent work at Blaize had provided useful experience of organizing a hospital almost from scratch, and from her father she had inherited the ability to be definite, taking responsibility and giving firm orders even when she lacked the experience to be sure that the effects would be as she hoped. From her mother, too, she had from childhood absorbed the principles of community hygiene. Lydia’s battle in Jamaica had been against the mosquitoes which carried malaria and yellow fever and against the the insanitary habits which made dysentery endemic. With the same singlemindedness Kate declared war on the lice which carried typhus and on the