Canadian Medical Missions in Serbia and the Balkan Front During WWI 1)

treat before the advancing invaders, he elected to stay and jeopardized
his own well-being to the loyalty of his patients in the occupied coun-
try. He was eventually repatriated in February 1916. The King of Serbia
decorated Dr. Aspland with the Serbian Order of St. Sava, 3 rd Class and
the Serbian Red Cross Order.
Florence Harvey, was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1878. She
started golfing around 1900 and went on to win six Hamilton Golf and
Country Club championships, the Ontario Ladies' Championship in
1904, 1906, 1913 and 1914, as well as the Canadian Ladies' Open Cham-
pion in 1903 and 1904.

During World War I, Florence Harvey, along with other women golf-
ers in Canada, raised enough money to purchase an ambulance for the
use in Serbia. Early in 1918, she traveled to Serbia as a volunteer with
the Red Cross and she was assigned a post with the Scottish Women's
Hospital unit as an ambulance driver attached to the First Serbian
Army in Macedonia.
Another stretcher-bearer and ambulance driver with the Serbian
Army at Salonika, who would in later years do much to shape the des-
tiny of Canada, was Lester Bowles Pearson. When the War broke out
Pearson was a sophomore at University of Toronto. On April 23 rd 1915
he enlisted in the University of Toronto No. 4 General Hospital unit
and became a private in the Canadian Army Medical Corps. After a
very basic training, he arrived at Salonika on November 12 th 1915. He
remained there until March 1917. He returned to Canada later in 1917
to complete his studies and became a Canadian scholar, statesman,
soldier and diplomat, who won the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1957 for
organizing the United Nations Emergency Force to resolve the Suez
Canal Crisis. He was the 14 th Prime Minister of Canada from April
22 nd 1963 to April 20th 1968, as the head of two back-to-back Liberal
minority governments following elections in 1963 and 1965.
The story of Josephine "Kiltie" Whitehead, a young Canadian en-
gineer, a rare profession in those days for a lady, spent two war years
in Serbia. In July 1915 she offered her services to the Serbian Relief
Fund in London and was recruited into No. 5 unit of the Second Brit-
ish Farmers' Ambulance as orderly, which Dr. Dorothea Clara Maude
was taking to Serbia. Their field hospital was set up in Požarevac
where they cared for the disease-stricken population for miles around
until the hospital unit was captured by the Austrians in late 1915 and
staff taken prisoners. They were eventual released and repatriated to
England. In Požarevac Josephine and Dr. Maude became the closest
of friends and remained so for the rest of their war years. When Dr.
Maude and her uncle Alwyne Maude went to Corfu and opened the
Maude Hospital to nurse the Serbian evacuees who had survived the
great exodus, Josephine lost no time in joining them. On September
14 th 1916 the Maude Hospital followed the Serbian Army to Salonika
and then in mid-October, their hospital was moved to Vodena, 60 km
north of that city. There they remained until April 30 th 1917 when their
term of duty ended. Josephine never recorded for posterity her own
impressions and experiences while serving in Serbia. Like a true pro-
fessional, she just did her "patriotic share", gave of herself to humanity,
without any pomp and circumstance.
Josephine Whitehead's modesty and humbleness was characteris-
tic of the Canadian medical service staff. They all felt it immodestly
out of character for nurses to publicize their working experience and
achievements, an attitude reinforced by the earlier representations of
nurses as discrete, self-effacing "angels of mercy".
As a token of gratitude for the magnificent work these Canadians
had done for Serbia and her people, King Peter I decorated many of
them with high State honours:
The fine service to humanity done by these valorous Canadians was
marred by several tragedies. No. 4 General Hospital lost by death three
of its staff. Captain Norman Yellowlees, its first Adjutant, drowned in
the Vardar River in May 1916. When a German Zeppelin was brought
down and fell into the marshes near Salonika, he set out with three
others of the Hospital staff to see the wreck. As he was trying to cross
the Vardar River his horse stepped into deep water and he was carried
down.
Lt.-Col. W. J. O. Malloch, died when home on leave in February
1919, and Nursing Sister Lena Aloa Davis, who after suffering from
malaria at Salonika contracted black water fever and succumbed
shortly after her return to England in 1917.
No. 5 General Hospital had its own tragedies to cope with. On
June 27 th , 1918 a German U-boat deliberately torpedoed the Hospital
Ship Llandovery Castle, 114 miles south-west of Ireland. Amongst the
casualties there were fourteen nursing sisters, four of whom had been
in service with No. 5 General Hospital at the Salonika Front. Nurs-
ing sister Christina Campbell, nursing sister Jessie Mabel McDiar-
mid, nursing sister Carola Josephine Douglas, and nursing sister Rena
McLean.
Nursing Sister Bessie Gray Sutherland took her training at the
Training School for Nurses in Winnipeg and worked for the Winni-
peg General Hospital. When the War broke out she joined the staff of
Scottish Women’s Hospitals second Serbian unit under the command
of Dr. Alice Hutchinson on the April 1 st 1915. The unit, which was com-
prised of 25 nurses, cooks and orderlies was sent to Valjevo. Valjevo
had gone that winter through a real hell, as thousands of its citizens
and soldiers had perished in a typhus epidemic that was destroying
huge parts of Serbia's population.
The entire town had been turned into one large field hospital and
many soldiers and civilians lay wounded and untreated due to the lack
of doctors and nurses. In August Bessie contracted Typhoid fever and
died on the September 26 th 1915. She was first buried in Valjevo but
her remains were later moved to the Ćele Kula international military
cemetery in Niš, were they repose to this day. Dr Alice Hutchinson and
her unit are fondly remembered in Valjevo to this day for their bravery
and sacrifice.
The foregoing is the story of but a handful of the several hundred
noble Canadian men and women who had traveled one-third of the
way around the globe, many at their own expense, to a country they
had hardly heard of and knew little about, to offer hope and salva-
tion to the fellow human beings facing extinction. In the process they
placed their own lives in harm's way, enduring hardship, deprivation
and suffering. Their magnificent and valiant contribution to the allied
efforts in defending and preserving freedom and democracy stands
them proud and does an enormous honour to Canada. A more self-
less and humanitarian act is hard to imagine. Let us not, therefore, at
the time when we commemorate the Great War, forget their sacrifices:
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, lest we forget − lest we forget!
________________________
1)Address delivered at the commemorative assembly on the occasion of the
100 th Anniversary of the Armistice of World War I organized by the Con-
sulate General of the Republic of Serbia in Toronto and The Serbian Herit-
age Academy of Canada, at the University of Toronto on November 7, 2018.