their outstanding characteristic was their imagination, which, turned
into the proper channels and given a chance to develop, should produce
for the world not only famous painters and poets, but also great
inventors. This vivid imagination is found in the highest and lowest of
the land. To illustrate it, I told my neighbour at table a tale related
to me by my good friend Dr. Popovic. "Two weary, ragged Serbian soldiers
were sitting huddled together waiting to be ordered forward to fight.
One asked the other, 'Do you know how this war started, Milan? You
don't?--well then, I'll tell you. The Sultan of Turkey sent our King
Peter a sack of rice. King Peter looked at the sack, smiled, then took a
very small bag and went into his garden and filled it with red pepper.
He sent the bag of red pepper to the Sultan of Turkey. Now, Milan, you
can see what that meant. The Sultan of Turkey said to our Peter, 'My
army is as numerous as the grains of rice in this sack,' and by sending
a small bag of red pepper to the Sultan our Peter replied, 'My army is
not very numerous, but it is mighty hot stuff.'"

Many members of the units of the Scottish Women's Hospitals who had been
driven out of Serbia at the time of the great invasion had asked to be
allowed to return to work for the Serbians, and we were now equipping
fresh units entirely staffed by women to serve with the Serbian Army,
besides having at the present time the medical care of 6,000 Serbian
refugees on the island of Corsica.

General Pétain said, smiling, that before the war he had sometimes
thought of women "as those who inspired the most beautiful ideas in men
and prevented them from carrying them out," but the war, he added, had
certainly proved conclusively the value of women's work.

M. Forain expressed the desire to visit the chief French hospital of the