Mission to Serbia

In July 1914 the opening shots of the First World War were fired when Austria bombarded the Serbian capital, Belgrade. In Britain, at the outset of the war, the services of trained medical women had been rejected by the War Office. But their skills did not go unmobilised. For a few women today their years with the Serbian Army are still vivid. In this film four of them - a doctor, a journalist, a welfare worker and a sanitary inspector - remember the struggle to care for the wounded in overcrowded hospitals; the typhus epidemic which swept the country; the great retreat across the Albanian mountains in winter, when one false step meant death.