BFI

This Topical Budget newsreel looks at the work of a detachment of British nurses in Serbia towards the end of 1915. The opening title refers to a "heroic band of Englishwomen" and the design of their armbands suggest that they represent the First British Red Cross Serbian Mission.

This was one of three similar detachments that had been sent to the small Balkan country following a typhus epidemic that its own primitive medical facilities were quite unable to cope with (especially after the country had been invaded by the Austrian army following the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by a Serbian student). The others were the Scottish Women's Hospital organisation, led by Dr. Elsie Inglis, and an independent unit run by Lady Paget.

One nurse working in the region at the time vividly recalled conditions there for the local population:

"These poor little people, you cannot imagine anything more miserable than they are. They have been fighting for years for their independence, and now, it all seems to end. (...) The road was crowded with refugees, all their goods piled on their rickety ox-wagons, little children on the top. (...) There'll be famine soon, as well as cold in this corner of the world."

Topical's film shows a number of nurses attending to a group of refugees similar to those described above, paying particular attention to the health of the children and babies.

Michael Brooke

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