The Empress also organised the famous “Dog Detachment,” by which, with the help of dogs especially trained in Germany, the overlooked wounded were sought out after the tides of battle had swept the Manchurian plains and hills. Unfortunately this detachment was never given proper opportunity for activity, as the fields of battle almost invariably remained in the hands of the enemy.
Besides the Red Cross work, the most important public undertaking of the Tsaritsa has been the establishment of Labour Aid Institutions. This is really an incipient charity enterprise and is being gradually extended to different parts of the Empire.
Viewed as the charity organisation of a great nation the whole scheme is a ridiculous farce, but viewed as the work of an individual its proportions seem substantial. A complete list of these institutions practically means a complete list of the charities of the Empire, and includes temporary nurseries for babies, homes and asylums for children, lodging-houses for workless men, old people’s homes, lying-in hospitals, institutions for the insane, libraries and reading-rooms and various depots where simple work is provided for those who are able.
I visited a number of these institutions and satisfied myself that, however satisfactory a catalogue of this work might be, that the work itself had small value. It is the crudest and most careless organisation of charity I have seen anywhere in the world, and carried on on such a trifling scale as to be practically valueless. If the time ever comes when the Russian Government can take up the work thus begun it will be given a value--the value that ultimately accrues to all pioneer work.
There are more starving peasants in Russia every year than in any country of the western world. The numbers annually mount up into the millions--in 1906 there were twenty-seven millions in the famine belt. The beggars and workless, the maimed and the crippled victims of the war fill the streets of all the large cities. A lodging-house for fifty or a hundred men in a city where fifty thousand are in want is the merest drop in the bucket. The schools for girls are better equipped and better endowed than any of the other institutions embraced in this work, and this is owing to the personal interest of the Empress in girls.