done and we have initiated great pieces of work ourselves. The hardest
time was in the beginning when we waited for our tasks, feeling as
if we beat stone walls, reading our casualty lists, receiving our
wounded, caring for the refugees, doing everything we could for the
sailor and soldier and his dependants, helping the women out of work,
but feeling there was so much more to do behind the men--so very much
more--for which we had to wait. We did all the other things faithfully
and, so far as we could, prepared ourselves and when the tasks came,
we volunteered in tens of thousands, every kind of woman, young, old,
middle-aged, rich and poor, trained and untrained, and today we have
1,250,000 women in industry directly replacing men, 1,000,000 in
munitions, 83,000 additional women in Government Departments, 258,300
whole and part-time women workers on the land. We are recruiting women
for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps at the rate of 10,000 a month and
we have initiated a Women's Royal Naval Service. We have had the help
of about 60,000 V.A.D.'s (Voluntary Aid Detachment of Red Cross) in
Hospitals in England and France, and on our other fronts, in addition
to our thousands of trained nurses.

The women in our homes carry on--no easy task in these days of
shortages in food and coal and all the other difficulties, saving,
conserving, working, caring for the children, with so many babies
whose fathers have never seen them, though they are one to two years
old, and so many babies who will never see their fathers.

Some of our women have died on active service, doctors, nurses and
orderlies. Our most recent and greatest loss is in the death of Dr.
Elsie Inglis, the initiator of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, who
died on November 26th, three days after she had safely brought back
her Unit from South Russia, which had been nursing the Serbians