Page 44 - Stradanje i humanizam

Court, earlier of District Staff, originally planned to be a hospital, had to be converted into the seat of
Supreme Command that moved to Valjevo. Тhis decreased the planned accommodation capacities by
500 beds. The huge number of the wounded who started arriving after the bloodsheds from Ljubovija to
Obrenovac and especially from Mt. Cer area, increased with each new day. Having gained enormous
experience in the Balkan wars, the Serbian medical teams erected numerous field hospitals in the
vicinity of direct conflict so that the surgeons would be able to assist immediately. Thanks to the rapid
and effective assistance many lives were saved in this way, particularly taking into account that all the
wounded had to travel some 80 kilometers to reach Valjevo. Three days were the average time it took
from the moment of wounding to full treatment in Valjevo.
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Having received immediate medical assistance, numerous lines of carts carrying serious and less
serious casualties, moved towards Valjevo. Columns of horse and cattle carts occupied all roads leading
into the city from Loznica to Šabac and Ub, the longest and almost uninterrupted running from Donje
Crniljevo via Koceljeva and Gola Glava. On this road of suffering and hope, the wounded were most
often left to themselves and their anguish. Those who accompanied the carts could not help them much,
except with the basic needs and the medical staff that was meeting or occasionally accompanying a
transported group could not ease their suffering. The only hope was Valjevo with its hospitals and
doctors. During the Battle of Cer, there were more than 11,000 wounded. Minor injuries were not
recorded, so one may say that almost all the wounded, with an unknown number of the sick, arrived into
Valjevo hospitals.
In order to provide for all the wounded and the sick, Auxiliary hospitals were founded in Valjevo:
the first in the barracks of the Seventeenth Regiment (barracks at ”Јadar“); the second in the Artillery
Regiment barracks (Medical School today); the third in the barracks of the Fifth Regiment (demolished
at the end of the Second World War); the fourth in the building of the Grammar School. Some time later,
in September, the fifth Auxiliary hospital was founded in the building of the present Higher Court and
the sixth one in the building of the Drina Division warehouse (in the area of the garrison to Ljubostinja).
Since the most severely wounded, many barely hanging onto life, (and those with less severe wounds
who were referred to other hospitals or to evacuation train upon examination) were transported to the
warehouses of the Drina Division, it became evident that a permanent medical team was required on
that location. And so this screening centre to begin with was transformed into an auxiliary hospital. The
number of the wounded in the city increased with each day. First there were 2,000 to 5,000 and soon
7,000 irrespective of the daily train transport from the city. Following the expansion of conflict in
September 1914, the situation aggravated. In order to accommodate the wounded and the sick, the
Government approved confiscation of taverns, hotels and schools first, and then warehouses and all
other suitable structures. The initial plans providing for certain categories of the wounded and the sick
to be accommodated in separate Auxiliary hospitals had to be altered to some extent. At first, the gravest
casualties were separated and put up in the District Hospital and the surrounding, nearest buildings.
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Those with less severe conditions were put up in the permanent Drina Military Hospital, while the
others followed the received schedule. Тhe third Auxiliary hospital in the barracks of the Fifth
Regiment was adapted to receive sick soldiers and the other Auxiliary hospitals those with minor
injuries. Having received medical assistance, the majority of the casualties were transported inland by
small medical trains – to Kragujevac, Niš and other centres that had military hospitals where almost
50,000 hospital beds had been prepared.
Dedication
All the hospitals in Serbia lacked doctors and other medical staff, medications, medical supplies and
all other things required to treat the patients. Very early at the onset of war in a very well known
document, Lazar Genčić stated that the “Serbian medical supplies were insufficient even for regular
times, and totally inadequate for the war. There is no example in military history that an army of this size
[...] headed to war with such a small number of doctors“. Medical supplies were in short supply also
because the Austro-Hungarian authorities stopped and confinscated one contingent of these supplies
that transited their country on the very eve of the war. The supplies from the Turkish warehouse in
Kumanovo confiscated in 1912 were being spent very quickly. Following the arrival of the first
casualties in Valjevo everything was lacking and the other medical centres sent their spare materials to
it. What lacked the most were doctors, who were a handful anyway: initially 409 of them.
Barbaroshkin worked in the hospital in Aleksinac. The names of many volunteers who came to
Valjevo remain unknown still todaywere at the disposal of the military, and later the remaining 61
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doctor. The situation improved somewhat with the arrival of volunteers – doctors from abroad. There
were 26 of them early on in Valjevo, but only 10 worked in hospitals and the others were deployed in the
administration of the Supreme Command. The Serbian Government and the national Red Cross had
earlier sent out an appeal for medical staff and medical supplies to the International Red Cross but a
more extensive organized assistance started to arrive in the second half of September 1914 from Russia
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and Greece only. Before that, people started to arrive in answer to the appeal. One of the first among
them was Arius van Tienhoven who was deployed to the Valjevo District Hospital with the nurse De
Hrotte, before the first casualties started to arrive. He was a very experienced war surgeon who was in
the Serbian service also during the Balkan Wars. He was followed by several internists – volunteers
from Switzerland who were deployed in the Second Auxiliary Hospital in the Artillery barracks. They
assumed duty on 3 September 1914. It was a group made up of various nationalities joined also by two
Russian doctors. The name of one of them – doctor Soshinska – was preserved. Among them was also a
later renowned Swiss political Maurice Jeanneret who retreated with the Serbs in 1915 and then
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returned to Switzerland via Italy. Several other volunteers from that country arrived sometime later.
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